Searching for "Why Is Minkowski Spacetime Non-Euclidean" by Cronkhite

[Trysse]

TL;DR Summary

Cannot find a paper

I cannot find the paper that is referenced here

https://www.nist.gov/publications/why-minkowski-spacetime-non-euclidean

Why Is Minkowski Spacetime Non-Euclidean?
Author(s)
J M. Cronkhite

I have looked here https://aapt.scitation.org/action/doSearch?SeriesKey=ajp&AllField=Cronkhite&ConceptID= by title and author and didn't find it.

Also could not find it on my university's library.

Any ideas where to look? Alternatively, recommendations on similar papers?

 

[dextercioby]

It says American Journal of Physics (behind paywall), 1970. So if a library has a paid subscription, you can read it off the internet.

 

[Trysse]

The problem is, that I am not able to find it in the first place.

 

[dextercioby]

I am sorry. Can some editor at NIST make the mistake to quote something that does not exist?

 

[robphy]

It could be that it was a preprint that was submitted to AJP, but was not accepted.

 

[Trysse]

It looks like a paper from 1970.

I think I do something unusual: I will go to the libray (real world) and check for the 1970 issue of "American Journal of Physics"

In the meantime: What is your answer to the question:
[Moved to its own thread, as that's a different question than how to locate the paper]

 

[robphy]

It looks like a paper from 1970.

I think I do something unusual: I will go to the libray (real world) and check for the 1970 issue of "American Journal of Physics"

One can go here to read the titles and authors
https://aapt.scitation.org/toc/ajp/38/1 (Volume 38, Issue 1, January 1970)
...[next]
...
https://aapt.scitation.org/toc/ajp/38/12 (Volume 38, Issue 12, December 1970)
...
maybe 1971 and 1969 to be sure.
(But don't let me stop you from going into the real world!)

I looked through 1970 and didn't see anything like the claimed article.

Scholar.google didn't find anything up to 1975.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cronkhite+(minkowski+OR+euclidean)&hl=en&as_sdt=0,24&as_ylo=&as_yhi=1975
(change the upper limit to 2016 to see the first claimed reference to it)

You could contact NIST (publications? or library?)
https://www.nist.gov/about-nist/contact-us

 

[robphy]

Any ideas where to look? Alternatively, recommendations on similar papers?

It's not clear what would count as "similar" since the abstract isn't specific enough.
It's not clear what "truly Euclidean approach" means...
and, depending on what that might mean, I might be skeptical.

This might be of interest:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/q...ids-5-postulates-false-in-minkowski-spacetime
( I have an answer posted there. )

My own attempts at visualizations are at https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/author/robphy/ [in my signature]

 

[Mister T]

You could contact NIST (publications? or library?)

AJP is published by AAPT. Calling them would be a good idea

 

[robphy]

AJP is published by AAPT. Calling them would be a good idea

Since NIST is the only source of this reference, I would start at NIST.
AJP doesn't list it. Google Scholar couldn't find anything but the NIST reference.

As I wrote above, if it exists, it's probably a preprint
that may have been submitted to AJP but never published (maybe because it got rejected or was sent back for revisions that were never done, etc..).

As a grad student, as the internet was just getting more organized and before arxiv.org,
I found file cabinets of preprints of articles... some of which got published in peer-reviewed journals.
Some articles were just notes (typewritten or handwritten) that were copied and sent to other physics departments, and many were articles sent here by other departments around the world.
Most of them had a code used to catalogue them... it is a measure of work done (internally by that department).
Surely, many of these documents never made it to print in a journal.
I suspect this Cronkhite article is one such document.
It could be part of a set of "collected documents by [(say) NIST researcher]".

 

[vanhees71]

It looks like a paper from 1970.

I think I do something unusual: I will go to the libray (real world) and check for the 1970 issue of "American Journal of Physics"

In the meantime: What is your answer to the question:
[Moved to its own thread, as that's a different question than how to locate the paper]

Well, this paper obviously does not exist. All AJP papers are available online:

https://aapt.scitation.org/

 

[berkeman]

Well, this paper obviously does not exist. All AJP papers are available online:

https://aapt.scitation.org/

Link is to AJPT, not AJP, I believe?

 

[PAllen]

Link is to AJPT, not AJP, I believe?

no, just navigate from "browse". direct link:

https://aapt.scitation.org/toc/ajp/current

goes all the way back to 1933 (at least for table of contents).

 

[vanhees71]

Link is to AJPT, not AJP, I believe?

Yes sorry, I meant the American Journal of Physics, where this false citation is pointing to:

https://aapt.scitation.org/journal/ajp

 

[ohwilleke]

My guess, if the citation makes sense in context, is that someone used the wrong journal abbreviation and that it was actually in another journal (the Armenian Journal of Physic, e.g.) or in a department newsletter that someone mis-transcribed as AJP, the U.S. physics journal. I have seen that happen before.