Does indirect diagonalization a relativize technique?
Buss and Williams codified the technique in their paper Limits on alternation-trading proofs for time-space lower bounds, and showed that the best bound that it can give is that SAT cannot be solved in time $n^{2\cos(\pi/7)}$ and space $n^{o(1)}$. This bound had been achieved earlier by Williams in his paper Alternation-Trading Proofs, Linear Programming,
and Lower Bounds.