I’ve been pointed to an article (Measuring time and other spatio-temporal quantities) that was published in Apeiron, an on-line journal. I can only make a tiny bit of sense out of it, not being a physics person, but I get an eerie impression that this is wackadola babble and not mainstream physics speculation. However, since most of it is in language that I’m not conversant with, maybe it’s right on. I guess I’m asking someone to glance at a few of those articles and see if they seem legitimate, or are woooooooowooooooo out there.
There’s amagazine called Ape Iron?
Yes. And a newspaper called the Newy Orktimes. Come on, Cal - a little help, please. :dubious:
It’s listed in Ulrich’s Periodical Directory as scholarly and refereed.
While this is no means a guarantee, it’s often a decent indicator that the journal is solid.
Squink, I think that’s the wrong Apeiron. I’m pretty sure that’s a print journal. The one he’s talking about is here
:smack: Of course! Common name like Apeiron, there could be ten such magazines. Why didn’t I check first? 
IANA practicing physicist. It doesn’t appear completely woo-woo to me. It claims to be peer-reviewed, has an editorial board listed from real academic institutions, and the papers I quickly looked at seemed to be coherent, have real references in real academic journals, and didn’t seem to be making incredible claims. On the other hand, the papers didn’t seem to be making very interesting claims, either, and all the board seems to be primarily from less-presitigious institutions.
As I said, I don’t know the academic physics culture, but this almost seems like a place to submit papers that are real and academically sound, but just not interesting or original enough to get into a top-line journal. Which means it may not have as rigorous a review as a top-line journal, and so sketchier papers may slip through a little easier.
OK, I found the paper you referenced. I took a quick glance at the intro and conclusion. If I understand what they are saying they will do, and they do indeed prove it, it’s a clever, but not at all surprising idea, that doesn’t say as much about relativity and the laws of physics as they hint it might.
Maybe Chronos (who better?) will give a deeper insight soon.
I’ve found the article that you are refering to, (from CapnPitt’s link) and after reading the introduction it seems to be an attemp to show that the idea of time being relative is wrong. I’ll post again after reading some of the other articles but I haver a sneaking suspition that the whole thing’s just an “anti-modern physics” thing.
Okay, I’ve looked at the archives more thoroughly now.
There are some names in there that are fairly well known for crack-pottery. IFRC Peter G. Bass is an antirelativist. Some of the articles seem to be a bit off-the-wall as well. Trying to “hide in the shade of protective ‘classical mechanics,’” as one of my friends (who is also a physics student) said.
Add to this the fact that it’s only online, and I would advise you to not to trust anything that you see there (unless of course it happens to also appear in better known, peer reviewed journal).
BTW, I am a physics undergraduate student, so while I don’t claim to be infallible, I have some Idea of what I’m talking about.
I’ll split my comments into two halves: those on the journal in general and those on the paper itself.
While I think I vaguely recognise a few of the other names on the editorial board, it rings all sorts of alarm bells that the only three that leap out are Halton Arp, Victor Clube and Tom von Flandern. All three have track records for pushing, well, “marginal” ideas that are intended to overthrow well-established orthodoxes.
Arp’s an observational astronomer (now retired, I believe) who’s best known for claiming that quasars are actually relatively close by and small, rather than being large objects from the early days of the universe which are very far away. If true, that would screw up all conventional notions of redshifts and measurements of cosmological distances. His evidence is that he can point to many, many cases where quasars appear connected to nearby galaxies. The conventional response is that these are chance alignments between a distant quasar and a foreground galaxy and that Arp found no more instances than would be expected of this happening by chance. For various reasons, Arp wound up very bitter with the “astronomical establishment” and is quite prepared to argue that they’ve got everything wrong.
Along with his colleague Bill Napier, in the eighties Clube proposed that there was evidence of ancient cataclysms involving comets recorded in myths and legends from around the world. Basically: Velikovsky might have been on to something. While this was a period when interest in cometary catastropies was increasing, but still relatively controversial, and Clube and Napier’s ideas and books got a fair amount of popular attention, their fellow professionals more or less just politely ignored them. (I met Napier at the time and he’s perfectly rational, but I wasn’t convinced by their case.)
IIRC, von Flandern’s big idea was to resurrect the old idea that the asteroid belt was formed by a planet exploding with, I recall, the new twist that this had happened on historic timescales. Doesn’t believe in relativity and I seem to remember him getting embroiled in the Face on Mars stuff.
All told, I think we can gather from the composition of the editorial board that the journal is likely to take a more than sympathetic line on “out there” papers. And that does certainly seem to be what they mainly publish based on my skimming through the contents of their past issues. Even amongst the author names, the only ones I recognise are people who already have a reputation for being outside the mainstream, if not downright cranky.
The paper? A rather weak attack on special relativity, somewhat reminiscent of the old ones by Herbert Dingle. Traunmüller’s argument basically boils down to saying that if clocks slow down as predicted by Einstein, then they’re not correctly measuring time. And proposes a way of getting them to do so correctly: divide the time measured by your clock by the slowing down factor predicted by Einstein!
His argument is that this then defines an absolute time and hence physics can progress as if relativity had never been proposed. The problem is that different clocks running faster and slower isn’t the only reason why relativity has no absolute time: moving observers can not only disagree about times measured on clocks, they can also disagree about whether events are simultaneous or not, even without having to look at any clocks. Traunmüller’s paper simply doesn’t address that aspect.
So basically an attack on special relativity by someone with only a superficial understanding of the theory. You can safely ignore it.
Sorry, nothing useful to contribute and I’m not going to yell ‘band name!’, but I think this is a great phrase and it deserves wider currency.