Update on Devasia Santosh's Lorentz Violation Research

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Discussion Overview

The discussion centers around the research of Santosh Devasia on Lorentz violation, particularly his paper published in the European Physical Journal. Participants explore the implications of his work, the reception it has received, and critiques from other researchers.

Discussion Character

  • Debate/contested
  • Technical explanation
  • Exploratory

Main Points Raised

  • One participant criticizes Devasia's paper for allegedly misinterpreting previous experiments that were thought to confirm Lorentz invariance, suggesting that the paper is flawed and indicative of a broader issue with peer review in reputable journals.
  • Another participant provides a link to a rebuttal of Devasia's work published in a refereed journal, indicating ongoing academic discourse regarding the validity of his claims.
  • A participant discusses the relevance of the transverse Doppler effect in the context of Devasia's research, suggesting that the motion of ions relative to laser beams affects the interpretation of resonance and Doppler shifts.
  • One participant expresses appreciation for the clarity of the latest update on the topic, indicating that it has helped them understand the issues better.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants express differing views on the validity of Devasia's interpretations and the implications of his research. There is no consensus on the correctness of his claims or the critiques presented.

Contextual Notes

Some participants reference specific experiments and theoretical implications without fully resolving the mathematical or conceptual details involved in the discussions.

bcrowell
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Santosh Devasia managed to get a kook paper past the referees at Eur Phys J: "Lorentz violation in high-energy ions," 2010 http://www.springerlink.com/content/b55166258582206j/fulltext.pdf Eur.Phys.J.C69:343-346,2010. I guess this shows that even a reputable journal can mess up horribly once in a while. Devasia is a professor of mechanical engineering at UW. He has links to the same tribe of kooks as Assis. Devasia has posted in various online forums under user names such as weber2 and weber3:

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=453966

http://www.bautforum.com/showthread...contradiction-of-relativity?highlight=devasia

http://www.natscience.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/relativity/16572/Experimental-Evidence-of-Lorentz-Violation

Devasia's paper reinterprets previous experiments of the Ives-Stilwell type as showing Lorentz violation, even though the people who did those experiments interpreted them as confirming Lorentz invariance. A good, detailed anlysis is available here:

http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath090/kmath090.htm

The reason I'm posting this now is that I came across a rebuttal published in a refereed journal:

A. Sfarti, Eur Phys J C 71 (2011) 1540.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/l5802634606m0245/
 
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Now I understand why the transverse Doppler effect is irrelevant - because the motion of the ions is in the same ( or opposite) directions of the laser beams, therefore only the primary Doppler shift affects the resonance between the absorption frequency of the atoms and the beam frequencies. The diagram in the refutation says it all.
 
I like the update on the update. It was very clear.