Papers · William Alexander Aldred

The Clock-Ratio Census: Every Factor Hunted in the Clock Sector, Graded Against the Floor Its Own Inputs Set

Published October 29, 2026 · Zenodo · DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23782166

About this paper

A frequency ratio between two optical atomic clocks is a pure number with an error bar, and the best of them now carry error bars at a few parts in 10¹⁸. No other laboratory in physics hands you a dimensionless factor that clean. This paper spends the discipline of the factor census (paper D1, The Factor and the Floor) on that laboratory. The candidate set was closed before grading: six hunts that the clock literature itself runs — the drift of the fine-structure constant α in time, the coupling of α to place and to gravitational potential, the drift of the proton-to-electron mass ratio μ, Lorentz-violation coefficients in the clock sector, departures from the gravitational redshift clocks are built to expect, and fifth-force couplings of clock transitions to an ultralight scalar field. Each hunt gets its producing test and the ratio that carries it. Each ratio gets its floor printed as a number: the total stated uncertainty of the measurement that carries the hunt, with the systematic budget read for coherence, not just size. The look-elsewhere count is the published ratio population itself, and it is counted in the open. The result is a ledger. Every hunted factor in the sector is null inside its floor, graded clean, at dated values printed in the paper. One entry stands above its floor, and it is not a factor: the strontium ratios measured in Boulder in 2021 and again in 2025 disagree by about 14σ, roughly 1 × 10⁻¹⁶, which means at least one campaign's stated floor was wrong about itself. A floor that fails is a laboratory result, not new physics, and this census grades it as one. The paper claims no anomaly and no new physics. Several entries are null results, and a census that cannot print a null has printed nothing.

Paper 53 of 95 in the published register. The full text is published on Zenodo under a permanent DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23782166.

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