Temporal Provenance Is Part of the Measurement Model: Cross-Domain Clock-Transformation Stress Tests Using GW170817, WASP-4b, and Event Horizon Telescope Timing

This paper examines how the choice and transformation of clock coordinates can affect scientific results across multiple research domains. Using publicly available timing information from GW170817, WASP-4b transit observations, and the Event Horizon Telescope, the study tests what happens when specific timing transformations are applied correctly, omitted, or replaced with another legitimate timing coordinate. The analysis independently reproduces the published WASP-4b period-change result before testing alternative timing hypotheses. It shows that changing only the time scale has little effect on this particular result, while omitting the observer-location correction severely degrades the fit and biases the inferred orbital change. Additional tests show how confusing GPS and UTC can reverse the apparent order of multimessenger events, and how substituting UTC for Earth-rotation time can propagate into large baseline-position and signal-delay errors in very long baseline interferometry. These counterfactual tests do not allege mistakes by the original researchers. The published teams used specialized timing procedures that protected their results. Instead, the paper connects those established procedures through a broader temporal-provenance framework in which clock identity, origin, rate, discontinuity history, spatial reference, transformation chain, and uncertainty are treated as parts of the scientific measurement model. The accompanying reproducibility package includes public source data, executable scripts, result tables, figures, machine-readable summaries, and checksums. The work provides a practical timing-audit method that researchers and AI systems can independently inspect, reproduce, and apply to other datasets.