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What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
- PaulHoule 12y agoFor a paper like that I'd expect to see Haruhi Suzumiya as a co-author.
- andyzweb 12y agoare you an alien, time-traveler, or esper?
- R_Edward 12y agoOr at least Dr. Emmet Brown.
- gyc 12y agoI was thinking Dr. Ronald Mallett.
- kappaloris 12y agoThat and the complete lack of John Titor references were the real reason why it was considered unpublishable.
- madaxe_again 12y agoIt could be worse. You could have published a paper on gravity shielding, and be shunned for the rest of time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Podkletnov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Podkletnov
- rthomas6 12y agoAs unlikely as these findings are, has anyone actually replicated the experiment?
- opendais 12y agoThere was a half hearted attempt http://pdf.aiaa.org/preview/2001/PV2001_3363.pdf http://pdf.aiaa.org/preview/2001/PV2001_3363.pdf However, it wasn't an identical attempt in terms of materials, process, etc...so I'm not sure it really counts.
- madaxe_again 12y agoYeah, JPL, about 15 years ago. He measured something, and was conservative with the paper, but a journo got his hands on it from a leak at nature, the papers ran with "Flying cars!!!!", and the rest, like his reputation, is history.
- themgt 12y agoThis might make for some interesting reading: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.0958.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.0958.pdf
- mcherm 12y agoThere is, in my mind, a big difference between a scientist publishing a paper in which they investigate some outlandish science-fiction-like concept (such as time travel or anti-gravity) and find evidence AGAINST it, and one where they find evidence FOR it. The former is a reasonable result, and although expected the research provides evidence to support the hypothesis. The latter is an extraordinary result and wise scientific practice would require extraordinary evidence. (It also helps if you don't get disavowed by your own co-author and by other labs you say confirmed your results.)
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- im3w1l 12y agoI see nothing wrong with publishing ordinary evidence for extraordinary things. I mean, I still wouldn't beleieve the extraordinary thing, but it could still be useful.
- stcredzero 12y agoHow about the hit to reputation? Many would level the criticism that publication was too early.
- maaku 12y agoThat's a problem that needs to be fixed.
- sbd 12y agoIs this what the technology in the movie "Primer" was based on?
- jacquesm 12y agoNo, primer is about time travel, not anti-gravity or gravity shielding.
- maaku 12y agoOr in the process accidentally invent limited time travel and find that you have better things to do. [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384/
- kator 12y agoBest Quote: "Possibly publication could be coupled with a small amount of Kickstarter-like funding. Cain and I have not discussed the idea further -- we are both too busy -- but if anyone out there on the Internet wants to explore this idea further, consider me a supporter."
- gambiting 12y agoI disagree. This is the best quote: " On the money-wasted angle, when doing a Reddit interview about the manuscript, I respond to a question about how this research was funded with the fake answer that we used money left over from our study "Does Tax Payer Money Burn Any Better Than Regular Money?" (Nemiroff & Wilson 2014). In reality, this was an unfunded project."
- unreal37 12y agoI liked the fact that someone paid him $100 to option the movie rights.
- xtrumanx 12y agoHere's another bit from the reddit interview[0]: > Do you believe in time travel? What future knowledge was posted? > Fake answer: Yes, I believe in time travel. I myself like to travel forward in time by one second every second. I live in fear, however, of colliding with non-time travelers who stay fixed at one moment of time. [0] https://pay.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1va4vq/we_searched_for_time_travelers_who_inadvertently/ https://pay.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1va4vq/we_searched_fo...
- gb 12y agoPerhaps no evidence was found because people from the future have seen this paper and therefore know not to reveal themselves this way!
- madaxe_again 12y agoIf there are time travellers from a future, it isn't our future, and this isn't their past - otherwise causality doesn't work. Instead if you travel back in time you travel to a point, which immediately bifurcates into a new reality. I like to think that we're all time travellers, collectively collapsing the universe's wavefunction through will alone... And now I'm onto determinism so I'll shut up.
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- bentcorner 12y agoWhat's to say that we're not existing in a reality created by a time traveler? A new-reality model of time travel only affects the viewpoint of the time traveler.
- Chronic28 12y agoWho cares if our present was altered by a time traveler. We can't tell.
- dllthomas 12y agoCausality could be a generalization that breaks down in extreme cases, like Newtonian mechanics.
- bentoner 12y agoIt's not surprising to me that no physics journals would accept it. Physics journals are, sadly, extremely wary of accepting anything that seems philosophical. For example, serious people writing serious papers on the foundations of quantum mechanics used to have a hell of a time getting them published. To give a particular example (and I hope I'm not mis-remembering), I don't think Lucien Hardy was able to get this paper [1] accepted. (It now has 215 citations.) [1] Lucien Hardy, Quantum Theory From Five Reasonable Axioms [quant-ph/0101012], https://scirate.com/arxiv/quant-ph/0101012 https://scirate.com/arxiv/quant-ph/0101012
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- mjn 12y agoI wonder if he tried one of the philosophy-of-science, foundations-of-physics, or philosophy-of-physics journals? For example, one of the earlier follow-ups to Hardy's paper was published in Foundations of Physics: http://philpapers.org/rec/SCHQTF-2 http://philpapers.org/rec/SCHQTF-2
- chrisdevereux 12y agoMost philosophy journals wouldn't regard this paper as philosophical either. While nobody agrees exactly what the philosophical method is, being a priori is more or less required.
- jimmaswell 12y ago>Physics journals are, sadly, extremely wary of accepting anything that seems philosophical. What's so sad about this?
- SoftwareMaven 12y agoIt's sad because the interpretation of quantum physics is important scientific work. What does a dual slit experiment tell us about our world? Trying to answer that question is where the Many Worlds Interpretation came from, and it likely wouldn't have been published prior to the 80s or 90s.
- jostmey 12y agoAnd if that paper had landed on my desk for review in a top journal, I would have rejected it too! Just because it has the top "Almetric score" means nothing other than it was popular in the social media circles. Where was the tangible scientific contribution in this manuscript? This paper did do a wonderful job of gaining attention, though.
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoI would have taken it as a work of philosophical exploration. We don't encourage enough of this work in peer reviewed venues, and so we deservedly get the crap in the popular press instead.
- misnome 12y agoSo, publish it in a journal of philosophy.
- meric 12y ago"In the response, the editor said that (s)he has now sent the article out to another editor, one who is quite famous in this area, but who also agreed that this paper should be rejected without being sent out for peer review. In this reply, the famous editor said: "I should point out that most stock markets around the planet devote considerable resources to looking for temporally anomalous market behavior --- unusual trading patterns before significant news events. When found, such signals are not typically attributed to time travelers, but more prosaically to insider trading." I agree! This is one reason why we did not look for evidence of time travel in stock market trading. Early on, our group had discussed (briefly) this idea. On one hand, I was glad that finally we had a real criticism to address, but on the other hand, this famous editor's comment indicated to me, once again, that the journal editors did not fully appreciate the novelty, power, simplicity, and falsifiability of our approach. Instead, they gave straw-man criticisms that really meant, in my view, that they did not want to consider a manuscript so unconventional. In my reply, I argued in detail against this criticism and again asked that the manuscript at least be sent out for formal peer review" I think what the response meant may be - even if a tweet about Pope Francis before Pope Francis was pope was found, it isn't sufficient to prove time travel exist - the tweeter could have a uncle who is involved in vatican politics and the tweeter read some of his uncle's notes. The stock market example was an analogy.
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- vidarh 12y ago> the tweeter could have a uncle who is involved in vatican politics and the tweeter read some of his uncle's notes That wouldn't explain knowing about the name. Of course it is possible that someone would have guessed at possible names for a pope. Since the name is inspired from the name of Francis of Assisi, it is not inconceivable, so a search would still not be proof. But the name "Pope Francis" did not exist until Jorge Mario Bergoglio was chosen as pope. Pope Francis has stated that he himself got to think about the name based on an encounter with another cardinal during the conclave. The other cardinal had whispered to him "don't forget the poor" when it was becoming clear that he was being elected. Unless he is lying about how he selected the name, one could thus assume that knowledge of the name prior to the start of the conclave would indicate time travel. This is one of the reasons the name is a good thing to search for; as is the asteroid name. In both cases we have pretty solid knowledge of a cutoff before which the name was not known because it did not yet exist. (Of course, the incidence of "pope Francis" in a search would not in and of itself be conclusive proof of prior knowledge.) The stock market, on the other hand is a bad one because it is so simple to fool: Yes, markets checks for odd large investments right before major announcements. But there's no point in doing that, and the issue of checks for insider trading might deter a time traveler. If you know how the stock market will perform in detail far in advance, though, rather than sit on a single tip about some deal, you can do amazingly well by moving sufficiently small amounts into each of a bunch of shares sufficiently long in advance that it'd be just noise.
- Swizec 12y agoI LOVED THIS PAPER! Summarised this paper in my 52papers project! [1] Definitely one of the most interesting papers I've read so far. I should stop being side-tracked from that project, last post made over two months ago ... [1] http://swizec.com/blog/week-11-searching-the-internet-for-evidence-of-time-travelers/swizec/6479 http://swizec.com/blog/week-11-searching-the-internet-for-ev...
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- Shivetya 12y agowell if anything its easily proved that time travel is not possible within the lifespans of those searching for it for would they not try to reveal that to their past selves?
- garretraziel 12y agoThis reminds me of xkcd's "what if" Project.
- araes 12y agoI'd be interested to see what arXiv's Impact Factor was if it was calculated like a standard publisher (if possible). I would guess it might be a top ten, based on my anecdotal encounter rate with arXiv (I may self select) and it seems like we're moving into another encyclopaedia situation (open Wikipedia stomps heavily curated Britannica). Frankly, can't wait. Despite all the editor conflict, Wikipedia is still one of the best inventions of the new millennia and if we eventually evolve towards having all SOTA research publicly accessible at our fingertips anywhere ... heaven.
- nmrm 12y agoIt's not quite a fair comparison, since a whole bunch of published papers end up on arXiv in some form
- araes 12y agoIt is and it isn't (why I included if possible). As counterpoints I would say that: - A lot of papers end up in a lot of different official journals in some form. Publishing slightly varied versions of the same work across 3-4 different journals is a time honoured tradition. - Actual journals do effectively the same thing that arXiv does, but theoretically with more 'experts' and rigour. - arXiv provides peer review, but in a distributed manner - References to arXiv have become a thing, particularly for papers that existing journals don't think fits their niche. - In several case, papers have been picked up by places like Nature after they appeared on arXiv and because of the exposure. Personal optimistic bet is a decade, and journals will be dead in their current form.
- nmrm 12y agoThanks for replying. these are all interesting points, and I'm intrigued by your prediction. If things work out that way I would be quite happy; pay walls in front of science suck! > - A lot of papers end up in a lot of different official journals in some form. Publishing slightly varied versions of the same work across 3-4 different journals is a time honoured tradition. Hm. Typically in CS these happens a different scales; e.g. a few papers with the same title (workshop, conference, perhaps another conference paper with a different application or an extension to the theory, ..., journal) but vastly different levels of detail/justification or significant extensions to theory/application. So same idea, but not the same paper and not presenting the same results. Publishing the same exact results in multiple venues is, afaik, a form of academic dishonesty and a serious black mark. Hopefully it works the same way in other fields. > - Actual journals do effectively the same thing that arXiv does, but theoretically with more 'experts' and rigour. I'd remove the theoretically qualifier; getting into top venues in very difficult. Although I'm sure many worthy papers are rejected, the bar is still very high. For your last three points, I'll cede to your knowledge on the matter.
- mseebach 12y agoI think the methodology of the paper is flawed. Why would a time traveller from the future be discussing "Comet ISON" or "Pope Francis"? According to Wikipedia, comet ISON wasn't ever bright enough to spot with the naked eye, and thus left no significant impact on humanity. It's obviously too early to decide if Pope Francis will leave a deep, significant impact, but odds are against it. For this methodology to really work, you'd need to look for mentions of someone like Hitler in the 1920s (and that's not even evidence of anything as Hitler was slowly ascending to power during the 1920s). But again, why would a time traveller talk about Hitler then? Presumably a time traveller would either be very, very cautious to not be identified, or not, in which case he'd likely get himself revealed through carelessness. On the other hand, I find it odd that they brush off analyzing the stock market (or any market, really). A cautious time traveller wouldn't buy into the market just before a sudden movement, that would attract way too much attention from insider trade authorities etc. Identify "black swan" events (dot com crash, 2007 financial crash), and look at people who slowly offloaded their assets prior to it. Identify "underdogs" that became huge (eg. Apple in the 90s) and look at people who slowly brought into it during that period.
- Rapzid 12y agoAlso, what if the first rule of time travel is: 1.) Don't talk about time travel
- beebeebee 12y agoTime travel is all about breaking rules
- BuildTheRobots 12y agoSurely "obeying all of the rules, just not necessarily in the right order"?
- jmnicholson 12y agoYou should sign up and review the paper itself! https://thewinnower.com/papers/searching-the-internet-for-evidence-of-time-travelers https://thewinnower.com/papers/searching-the-internet-for-ev...
- brianolson 12y agoI wanted the punch line to be, "The Time Lords showed up and insisted we halt all experimentation."
- anonymfus 12y agoI wanted the punch line to be about how that producer resold movie rights to Steven Moffat so he could make that Doctor Who episode. Or if these rights were non-exclusive Nemiroff could contact Doctor Who staff himself.
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- corry 12y agoImagine: Google itself could find proof of this, given that it's organizing the world's information. In fact, Google is one of the only entities that could actually 'prove' this out. What would they do if they identified the time traveller? Locate him/her? Use his knowledge to further their plans? The knowledge may be potentially world-changing; whoever finds the traveller will be in a very powerful position. Script idea: Eccentric googler finds proof of this and the company secretly finds the individual. Wild goose chase ensues. State actors get involved. I'd pay to see that. If this had already happened, would we even know?
- mhandley 12y agoAlthough Google is best placed to find any time traveller, the time traveller is even better placed to go back further in time and correct the situation to prevent the knowledge becoming widely known. Thus if time travel is possible, it's almost a certainty that Sergey Brin is a time traveller.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y agoNeat idea. But if you were a time traveller, what would you use Google for, and why? I'm not convinced you're going to be Googling the future pope, because it's trivially easy to Google the current one. The possible telltales are not obvious.
- stcredzero 12y agoI would suspect that a time traveller might have all of the world's information searchable, locally stored in his implanted neural lace nanodevice. No Google searching necessary.
- lcnmrn 12y agoWhy do you need Google? Get a web crawler, look for things that relate to your queries and you're done.
- rasz_pl 12y agoIt did happen, there is even a movie about it http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1862079 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1862079
- brento 12y agoAnyone have a TL;DR version?
- lucozade 12y agoSure. Physics professor is short of a paper over a slow summer. Said professor decides to write up an idea he and his poker buddies dreamed up that has the twin benefits of being trivial to research and having a guaranteed negative outcome. Unfortunately, all the physics journals our hero knows have standards so he ends up pushing a draft to arxiv.org in the hope of getting at least a conference poster out of it. The draft goes viral, it is an amusing idea after all, and our professor achieves minor celeb status from it. Eventually he gets published in a journal that not even he has heard about so all is good with the world. Something like that.
- chris_wot 12y agoThank you. Best tl;dr I've read in ages. If I'd read this before the article it would have saved me a lot of time.
- rasz_pl 12y agoTL;DR version: Physicist thinks time travellers are obsessed with one particular Pope and/or some non significant comet.
- andy_ppp 12y agoOf course it might be Precognition as opposed to Time Travel. The paper makes no attempt to differentiate between the two, just assuming Time Travel. They have also not factored in the obvious assertion that given the publicity of the paper, any 'time travellers' to this time obviously do not want to be detected and as such probably spend their time writing scientific papers debunking their own existence.
- jerf 12y agoFrom a physics point of view, the really interesting question is whether information can move the wrong direction in time. Physicists wouldn't much care about that difference.
- Steuard 12y agoI almost posted a response along these lines: how distinguishable are precognition and time travel from a fundamental physics perspective, anyway? It's all about information flow. But then I realized that precognition has an alternate possible mechanism: rather than extracting information from the future, it could operate by sensing the initial state/initial wavefunction of the surrounding universe and integrating the equations of motion forward in time to predict the future state (perhaps probabilistically). That would presumably require some amazing new physics just as significant as time travel, but it wouldn't be the same new physics.
- Steuard 12y agoThe biggest issue that I see with publishing this work in a physics journal is that although time travel is certainly a concept in physics, the research involved here is not physics research. I'd describe it as sociological(?) research intended to shed light on a problem of interest to physics. That may seem like splitting hairs, but there's a real question of competence here: as a physicist, I don't feel especially qualified to assess the methods they used or the reliability of the conclusions they draw. If they were instead describing an experiment to look for anomalous travel times of neutrino pulses or something, I'd know where to start: measurement apparatus precision, clock synchronization, etc. But here the observations are based on natural language and the conclusions are based on theories of how information spreads in social networks. Like most physicists, I have zero formal experience in this. It honestly doesn't feel like a topic for a physics journal even though a reliable positive result would have profound implications for physics. In the same way, I wouldn't expect a technical article reporting measurements of carbon flow in the environment to be published in a political science journal, even though climate change might have profound implications for global politics. [Discussion note: the validity of climate change has nothing to do with my point here.] All that being said, I also don't find their negative result to be particular compelling. If their two search terms were "Pope Francis" and "Comet ISON" as described, well, Comet ISON was a dud (and thus won't be much of a topic in the future), and it's easy to imagine scenarios in which future time travelers would not have a particular interest in Catholic history. And that's quite apart from the possibility that time travelers would make some modest effort to avoid asking their neighbors about future events. Maybe that's all accounted for in their paper in a compelling way, but I honestly don't see any way they could ever argue for more than a very limited negative result. And I'm not convinced that's publishable in any sort of competitive journal.
- mjn 12y agoYes, my first thought reading through this was surprise that he didn't try any non-physics journals. I think any number of journals devoted to a topic like network science, internet research, web science, etc., would have found the topic of the study more within their area of interest. They would also be able to provide better peer review of the methodological/modeling choices, which mostly aren't related to physics.
- mherdeg 12y agoThis sounds like a good candidate for submission to the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis, my favorite journal, http://www.jasnh.com/ http://www.jasnh.com/ .
- jmnicholson 12y agoIt has already been published in The Winnower: https://thewinnower.com/papers/searching-the-internet-for-evidence-of-time-travelers https://thewinnower.com/papers/searching-the-internet-for-ev...
- askura 12y agoInteresting but an obvious result to be honest.
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- h1karu 12y agodicey subject area, and it's probably not God playing the dice :)
- sharemywin 12y ago"Does Tax Payer Money Burn Any Better Than Regular Money?" (Nemiroff & Wilson 2014). too funny...
- lisper 12y agoI see little difference between searching for evidence of time travel on the internet and searching for evidence of pink unicorns on the internet. Current theory predicts that we should not find evidence of either one, nor any evidence of ESP, telekinesis, or a zillion other phenomena. So searching for evidence of these phenomena and failing is about as interesting as searching for evidence of anti-gravity by dropping a few dozen apples and failing.
- sanderjd 12y agoConfirming common-sense "obvious" results is actually one of the important things science is for. Sometimes it turns out those obvious things aren't actually correct and nobody had bothered to check.
- lisper 12y agoWhen the results indicate that established theory is not correct then yes, that is obviously important. But confirmations of well established results are only important when they test the theory in previously untested realms (e.g. a measurement that tests general relativity to a greater level of precision or in stronger gravitational fields than previously performed). Confirming the non-exitence of time travelers by failing to find evidence for them on the internet is like confirming the non-exitence of leprechauns by failing to find pots of gold at the ends of rainbows.
- jckt 12y agoSlightly off-topic, but normally HN is scientifically sound when physics or any other science is mentioned. But when it comes to time-travel/FTL, I can't help but feel that half the posters here seem to almost want it to be true. Or at least seem to think that all of our physics knowledge is worthless when it comes to FTL et al. Or is everyone just having a laugh?
- jmnicholson 12y agoThe piece is more about the publishing process and less about time travel. See a direct quote from the author: "First of all, the topic itself is a controversial one, as made clear immediately by the work's title "Searching the Internet for Evidence of Time Travelers" (Nemiroff & Wilson 2014). It is perhaps accepted common knowledge that people who believe in time travelers are crackpots and their ramblings are not to be believed. For the record, I do not believe that traveling back in time is possible, nor do I believe that time travelers are among us."
- jckt 12y agoYeah, that's why I said that my comment was slightly off topic. It was more concerned with the tech crowd (like HN I guess) treating the possibility of FTL/time travel with such seriousness, which is somewhat out of character for a crowd that is normally pretty well-educated about science.
- ithkuil 12y agoYou can implement "time travel" in the past by running a simulation of a portion of our universe and run it backward and then insert an avatar of yourself in the simulation and freak people out. That opens up a discussion about the feasibility of such a simulation, but as far as time travel goes it wouldn't break any physical law (And yes, with that setting, you'd have plenty of other ways to freak people out other prescience)
- suprgeek 12y agoThe "Real Paper investigating Time Travel" involved Searching the the Internet for two terms. The conclusion that these searches, even if they had been found, (which they were not) implied "time traveling Internet savvy people from the future searching for events in their past" is a staggering leap. Might as well theorize fairies from another dimension materialized into ours to poke fun at internet search analyzers. I am surprised this thing was even published, given that it was based off a monumental leap that ignored Occam's Razor, did not find anything the authors hoped to find and was failure both on the theorizing and the finding front. The system (flawed as it may be) worked for once.
- Steuard 12y ago"Might as well theorize fairies from another dimension materialized into ours to poke fun at internet search analyzers." Good point! Just to be clear, as far as I can tell this work wasn't ever published in a peer-reviewed journal. It was merely accepted as a preprint on arXiv.org, which requires little more than assurance that the author isn't an obvious crackpot (and it sounds like even they reclassified its subject area: almost like moving it into a journal with a different topic).
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- facepalm 12y agoHow would you explain it, though?
- andreasvc 12y agoWhat is there to explain? They found nothing, which does not necessarily explain anything.
- facepalm 12y agoI mean how would you explain it if they would find something? I guess this is another Bayesian vs classical statistics thing. In Bayesian thinking, absence of evidence is evidence (not proof, mind you, but it is information).
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y agoWhenever I mention my skepticism of the peer review mechanism, someone is always quick to claim how important and special it is, and that I should have faith in it. Here, they reject a paper and refuse even to peer review it. They refuse to explain why they feel it unacceptable. It comes from a scientist who has already published, and in the relevant fields. If they'll do this because of the slight risk of someone making fun of it, what will they do when the paper is politically inconvenient?
- al2o3cr 12y ago"They refuse to explain why they feel it unacceptable." I read the paper. It's unacceptable because it's LITERALLY a "here are some things we Googled, and there weren't any time travelers" with a bibliography attached: there's no detailed explanation of experimental procedure, no detailed data. It's roughly equivalent to sending a middle-school book report to a literary journal.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y agoWere that true, why the reluctance to say as much? If anything, I would expect that to invite stinging, painful criticism and sarcastic explanations.
- jmnicholson 12y agoThis is precisely one of the reasons The Winnower (where it was published) was founded. Peer review is becoming increasingly shown to be faulty at identifying mistakes. It is better at holding back controversial or unorthodox ideas, which are what ultimately drive science forward!
- kenjackson 12y agoThis paper makes a very fundamental mistake, IMO. If you were to time travel to the future and do a query, you wouldn't query about a past event. You'd query about a present event. For example, if time travel were created today, we wouldn't go back to 2000 and query about something that happened in 2001. We'd query about Lebron James or Obama. They should be looking for queries about technology/people/events that are relevant/interesting in the era when time travel is done. Unfortunately, in order to know that you probably need to time travel to the future. :-)
- privong 12y agoI'm not sure it's a fundamental mistake. To make a counter-argument, if one travels back to some point in time, but can't remember (or don't know[0]) exactly when a major event happened, one might query it, to see if/when it has happened. Or one might query it because one is mistaken about when it happened. In either case, one might expect to see queries about things in advance of their occurrence. So while this particular work certainly doesn't rule out time travel, I don't think it's fundamentally flawed. Perhaps overly optimistic though. [0] One might presume historical records are somewhat corruptible, and therefore someone from the future might not have perfect knowledge of when major events in the past actually occurred.
- mung 12y agoThe iPhone 42s contains all the worlds knowledge past present and future and you just need to think about what you want to know and it will send it to you telepathically. Why on earth would I use something as archaic as Google search from the 21st century? Siri is a still humourless cow though.
- bsder 12y agoYou are assuming perfect knowledge of the past. The amount of information you could access would be limited to a transportable device (assuming an inability to communicate temporally--probably reasonable). You would have to supplement your knowledge with local information. With the Internet, maybe perfect information is valid, but I suspect not. Try hunting down what was once widespread knowledge about Visual Basic 6. Or anything which was mostly exchanged on NetNews. There is a lot of lossage already and we're only about 20 years from it. The real problem is that you need a mediocre search that a time traveler would do. Something that would not be indexed in a portable computing device and yet would still be interesting enough to require using temporally local search capabilities.
- untilHellbanned 12y agoOnarbor, https://onarbor.com https://onarbor.com, is a peer-reviewed journal that would certainly let you publish this.
- hesselink 12y agoGreat article, but I was annoyed that in an online science publishing platform, this article contained no links, but textual references that the reader had to look up manually.
- digz 12y agoI went to a conference* in 1994 in which Kip Thorne gave a talk on time travel. He made an offhand comment about evidence that backwards time-travel does not occur that was along similar lines. 2 points: 1) Not inconsistent for 'real' physicists to think about these issues. 2) I don't think this work is as novel in concept as the author thinks. * Was for Carl Sagan's 60th birthday... was intended for serious audience of big time scientists but was intended to entertain.
- methodover 12y agoIf one did find searches of Pope Francis before his appointment, reasonable explanations would include: 1) A random guess. 2) Unintentional data storage (I.e., the search was made after the appointment but was stored incorrectly as happening in the past.) 3) Deliberate doctoring of data. I.e., a hoax. And probably a few other cases I'm not thinking of, all of which would be more reasonable than 'It's a man from the future.'
- stuartd 12y agoSeems a bit unfair as "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" was published in 1948.
- feralmoan 12y agoConcept attenuation.... don't think many 57th Century Ultra-monkeys (or drones, or praeter-singularity-humans or whatever) will know or care anything about the Pope. Brilliant thought experiment though, and love that it tests the bounds of discipline and rigour!!!
- rasz_pl 12y agoMethod described would work only on Time Travellers that are stuck in our time with no technical means of going back and no detailed documented knowledge of current time [1]. Two queries chosen (pope and some comet) are non significant in daily life. You would be lucky to find 1 in 10000 people that ever in their lives formulated a question about those subjects out loud. In my opinion it would be more prudent to look for signs of prior knowledge about natural disasters. Stranded time traveller will be more interested in avoiding tsunami, earthquake, tornado or a flood, and will most likely know general time frame instead of detailed dates (unless he possesses [1] device). *1: $25 WikiReader Pocket Wikipedia http://www.amazon.com/WikiReader-PANREADER-Pocket-Wikipedia/dp/B002N5521W http://www.amazon.com/WikiReader-PANREADER-Pocket-Wikipedia/... Something tells me time traveller from the future would have modernized equivalent.
- zenciadam 12y agoI'm from 1843. Nice to meet you.
- radarsat1 12y ago> I mentioned this to my wife who surprised me by saying that she herself has seen -- or knew about -- every Dr. Who episode since the modern reboot in 2005 Keeper.
- terranstyler 12y agoI somehow hoped the blog article would say that the submission was rejected because it was not novel because someone just published a similar article a few weeks before. Now that would have been a refutation of time travel...
- jimhefferon 12y agoI know this isn't the point of the article, but surely if you were a time traveller you wouldn't bet on the stock market and risk being found out or have your cash confiscated? Surely you'd research a financial instrument that has existed for a long time before your now and go back and make a modest investment in it. You could do a number of things that are more subtle to establish ways for the investment to not be noticed, by moving the money around, etc., but I expect that your main concern would be how to fly under the radar while compounding works. In fact, perhaps people in the time-travellers world who want to invest into their future would be chiefly concerned that time travellers in their future are coming back and dominating all the investments without ever plowing the proceeds back into their present ..
- sriku 12y agoDid they consider facts about events added to Wikipedia before they actually happened? :) [1] [1] http://xkcd.com/978/ http://xkcd.com/978/ - 'Citogenesis'
- aman_abhishk 12y agoEssentially, it must be noted that physics and any kind of science is driven by concrete data and mathematical analysis. This work is speculative, in very speculative at that. What he wrote is not a "paper", its probably an interesting article.