Literature review — the anisotropic synchrony convention

Assembled August 2026 for index.md.  Every source below was read as bytes on disk — PDF extraction, column-cropped where the journal is two-column, or locally de-tagged HTML.  Nothing here was established through a summarising fetch tool.  Sources marked not obtained are named with the route that failed and with the second-hand account actually relied on.

1. The primary literature on the convention itself

Key Source Used?
lisle-2010 Lisle, "Anisotropic Synchrony Convention — A Solution to the Distant Starlight Problem," ARJ 3 (2010): 191–207 Used heavily — the convention/model distinction, the three stipulations, the exegetical argument, the objections section, the predictions.
lisle-2020g Lisle, "Refuting the Critics: Distant Starlight and ASC," 8 May 2020 Used — the SN 1987A ring calculation, the perpendicular round-trip objection, the galaxy-morphology concession.
lisle-2024c Lisle, "A Refutation of Phillip Dennis's Claims…," 13 July 2024 Used — the synchrony-independent interval, the petitio charge, the ASC one-way speed law, the reply to Dennis's Appendix B. Downloaded and added to the library this session.
lisle-2025 Lisle, "…Reply to Barnes," ARJ 18 (2025): 441–447 Used — the p. 446 concession that ASC is a coordinate change, and p. 447 on ASC's independence from any metric.
— Newton [Lisle], "Distant starlight and Genesis," TJ 15(1) (2001): 80–85 Not obtained. No copy located. Cited only for date and priority, on Lisle's own acknowledgement of the pseudonym in his 2010 footnote.
— Lisle, The Physics of Einstein (2018) Not obtained. Absent from archive.org and from the library and hoopla routes this project uses. Two short quotations are used as reproduced in Dennis 2024a, with the route stated in the footnote; Lisle's published reply confirms their wording while disputing Dennis's reading.
— Lisle's eleven-part "Refuting Phillip Dennis's Errors in Physics, ASC, and Philosophy" (2024–25) Located, not used. Parts 1, 2 and the index were fetched. They restate the July 2024 reply and move into metaphysics of time; nothing in them changes a verdict, and the article already cites the substantive reply.

2. The internal creationist critique

Key Source Used?
dennis-2024 Dennis, "An Internal Contradiction of Lisle's ASC Model," ARJ 17 (2024): 427–433 Used — the abstract, the equivocation charge, the conclusion, the Appendix A R′ result, the Appendix B metric.
dennis-2024b Dennis, "A Refutation of Lisle's 'Refutation' of Dennis (2024)," ARJ 17 (2024): 709–738 Used — the femtosecond photography argument, the transverse-speed concession, the New Horizons slow-transport argument, the FLRW cosmic-time argument, the heresy framing.
dennis-2018 Dennis, "Consistent Young Earth Relativistic Cosmology," ICC 8 (2018): 14–35 Used lightly — only for the point that his own model chooses a creation hypersurface by fiat, which undercuts his cosmic-time objection.
repp-2022l Repp, CRSQ 59 (2022): 81–91 Used — the coordinate-versus-physical-anisotropy distinction and its footnote 9.
faulkner-2013b Faulkner, ARJ 6 (2013): 279–284 Used for one line — that ASC "has not received more attention, particularly of the negative type."
faulkner-2017b Faulkner, ARJ 10 (2017): 245–258 Used — the abstract and the seventeen-remnant table, as the cleanest young-earth-published age evidence that no synchrony convention touches.
— Faulkner, "Solving the Light Travel Time Problem," AiG, 23 Feb 2021 Used — the "this is deceptive" verdict on created light, and the contrast he draws between created light and models in which the events really happened.
tenev-2018 Tenev, Baumgardner & Horstemeyer, ICC 8 (2018): 82–94 Considered, not used. Their creation-time-coordinate variant is a different proposal, already treated in the parent article. Adding it here would duplicate that section without deepening the ASC case.
upton-2011 Upton, "Beyond Distant Starlight: Next Steps For Creationist Cosmology" Considered, not used. Programmatic rather than technical; nothing bearing on ASC's physics or exegesis.

3. The physics and philosophy of synchrony conventions

Key Source Used?
einstein-1905 Einstein 1905 §1, Perrett–Jeffery translation Used — both the "by definition" stipulation and the observer-centred alternative he rejects. Verified in two independent copies (Fourmilab transcription; archive.org scan of the 1923 Methuen printing, leaf 49). Added to the library this session.
einstein-1920 Einstein 1920, ch. VIII Used — the "stipulation which I can make of my own freewill" passage, with the dialogue structure stated in the footnote.
janis-2018 Janis, "Conventionality of Simultaneity," SEP Used — the ε-notation and its open range, Malament's theorem as stated, the Torretti/Norton versus Grünbaum/Redhead split, and the note that one-way-speed papers keep appearing with hidden assumptions.
janis-2018b Janis, "Further Discussion of Malament's Theorem," SEP supplement Used — the Sarkar–Stachel result, the Ben-Yami extension of ε to 0 and 1, and the note that Reichenbach and Grünbaum would themselves reject the half-cone relations. Downloaded this session.
janis-2018c Janis, "Transport of Clocks," SEP supplement Used — Winnie 1970b and Redhead 1993 against the slow-transport argument. Downloaded this session.
besnard-2011 Besnard, Found. Phys. 42 (2012): 1115–1134 (arXiv:1104.1263) Used — Theorem 5.1, including its limiting third clause. Downloaded this session.
giulini-2000 Giulini, BJPS 52 (2001): 651–670 (arXiv:gr-qc/0011050) Used — his agreement that time-reflection invariance is physically unwarranted, and his specific complaints about Sarkar and Stachel's proof. Downloaded this session.
vanderwalt-2010 van der Walt & Bishop, PRD 82 (2010): 084001 Used — the definition of observational coordinates, whose constant-time hypersurfaces are past light cones. Downloaded this session.
— Malament, "Causal Theories of Time and the Conventionality of Simultaneity," Noûs 11 (1977): 293–300 Not obtained (paywalled). Its statement is taken from the SEP and from Besnard, who both work from the paper.
— Sarkar & Stachel, Phil. Sci. 66 (1999): 208–220 Not obtained (paywalled). Reported from two independent secondary accounts that agree — the SEP supplement and Giulini's critique. Flagged as such in the footnote.
— Ben-Yami, BJPS 57 (2006): 459–479 Not obtained (paywalled at Oxford Academic). Reported from the SEP supplement.
— Rynasiewicz, "Definition, Convention, and Simultaneity…," Phil. Sci. 68 (2001): S345–S357 Not obtained. The PhilSci-Archive PDF at philsci-archive.pitt.edu/350/1/psa00.pdf returned a non-PDF body. Named in the Sarkar–Stachel footnote as a published dissent so that readers know one exists; no claim is drawn from it.
— Ellis, Nel, Maartens, Stoeger & Whitman, "Ideal Observational Cosmology," Phys. Reports 124 (1985): 315–417 Not obtained (Elsevier paywall). Named in a footnote as the origin of observational coordinates; the definition quoted is van der Walt & Bishop's.

4. Age evidence that no synchrony convention touches

Key Source Used?
hansen-2013 Hansen et al., Nature 500 (2013): 51–53 Used — the 47 Tuc white-dwarf cooling age 9.9 ± 0.7 Gyr and the distance modulus. Chosen because the cluster is inside the Milky Way, so the ASC/ESC difference is at most 15,000 years against a 9.9-billion-year measurement.
chaboyer-1998 Chaboyer et al., ApJ 494 (1998): 96 Used — the main-sequence turnoff age 11.5 ± 1.3 Gyr, as an independent clock from a different physical mechanism.
krauss-2001 Krauss & Chaboyer 2001 Considered, not used. A later refinement of the same method; the article needs one turnoff number, not a history of the estimate.

5. Deliberately out of scope

These were checked and left to other articles rather than duplicated here.

  • Humphreys' white hole, Hartnett's Carmelian cosmology, c decay, created light, Faulkner's dāšā', the non-Euclidean shortcut. All in the parent article. This article mentions Humphreys only to note that his model makes the distant universe old while Lisle's makes it young.
  • Lisle's Doppler model of redshifts. A separate proposal with its own article, The Doppler Model of Galaxy Redshifts. Lisle himself says the two are independent.
  • Lisle's January 2022 JWST predictions and their scoring. Fully treated in the parent, including the finding that the prediction does not come from ASC. Repeating it here would inflate ASC's credit for something the young-age stipulation does.
  • The distance ladder, SN 1987A geometry, supernova time dilation. ASC leaves the distance scale alone by Lisle's own stipulation, so the ladder is not in dispute in this article.
  • The cosmic microwave background. A real and unanswered gap in young-earth cosmology, but not an ASC-specific one.

6. Verification notes and traps hit

  • Two-column PDFs. ARJ and CRSQ interleave under naive pdftotext. Every printed page number in the article was read off the running head of the same PDF page as the quotation, after re-extracting that page alone.
  • The ARJ page-header convention. Page numbers sit at the top of the page in ARJ, not the bottom. Confirming this fixed what would otherwise have been a systematic off-by-one page error across the Lisle 2010 citations; the exegetical quotations are all on p. 202, not spread across 202–203 as a first pass suggested.
  • Reichenbach's range is open. 0 < ε < 1 in the SEP. ASC sits at the excluded endpoint. This is not mentioned in any creationist treatment found and it changes how the Sarkar–Stachel and Ben-Yami results should be weighted.
  • Besnard's Theorem 5.1 has three clauses and the third is a limitation. Quoting only the light-cone uniqueness result would overstate it.
  • Giulini criticises Sarkar and Stachel and agrees with their key premise. Reporting only the criticism, or only the agreement, would misrepresent the state of the argument.
  • Dennis's femtosecond argument is refuted by a concession on his own next page. He states that ASC requires the transverse one-way speed to be exactly c, which is why a light-in-flight camera cannot discriminate.
  • The Einstein 1905 passage exists in two translations with different wording. Lisle quotes the Princeton translation via Sarkar and Stachel; this article quotes Perrett and Jeffery. Both are given so that a reader comparing sources is not confused.