  Besides the purely digital or analog interpretation of reality there is a
third possibility which incorporates important aspects of both. This is the
cyclic formulation of elementary systems, in which elementary particles are
represented as classical strings vibrating in compact space-time dimensions
with periodic boundary conditions. We will address these cyclic solutions as
"de Broglie internal clocks". They constitute the deterministic gears of a
consistent semi-classical description of quantum relativistic physics,
providing in addition an appealing formulation of the notion of time.
