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The 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 involve

by Steuard 12y ago

The 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 ago
Yes, 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.
- SilasX 12y ago
  So then why didn't the editors suggest it for a more appropriate journal rather than call it unpublishable entirely?
  - mjn 12y ago
    One guess is that the average physicist, which might include both the journal editors and the author of this paper, have no clue about journals outside of physics. :)
  - rflrob 12y ago
    Probably because the editors are so siloed in their physics mindset that they aren't aware that there are journals in these fields, or if they are aware, they almost certainly don't know which journals are reputable.
  - Steuard 12y ago
    Because (for example) I, as a physicist, didn't even know enough to immediately suggest topics like "network science, internet research, web science", and instead said the work was "sociological(?)". For all we know from this story, the rejection letters might have suggested trying a non-physics journal. But even then, the result reported here just provides weak evidence supporting an overwhelmingly expected null hypothesis ("time travel doesn't happen"). I wouldn't expect physics journal editors to be good judges of whether a possibly novel method would be publishable in another discipline when it did not lead to a noteworthy result.
    - SilasX 12y ago
      You don't have to be aware of any of that stuff in order to know the difference between "this can't be published" and "this can't be published in a physics journal". The latter is (perhaps) good judgment; the former, a poor understanding of the limits of one's expertise.
      - jckt 12y ago
unreal37 12y ago
I agree. "How I Tried to Solve a Tough Physics Problem Only Using Google Searches" isn't a classic research paper, and seems to be no surprise that it didn't get accepted in the biggest physics journals.
kolodny 12y ago
The author isn't the first person to think of this, most notably Steven Hawking tried something similar http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/07/02/stephen-hawking-time-travel_n_1643488.html http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/07/02/stephen-hawking-t...
- kbenson 12y ago
  I think the main difference is that this paper outlines a method to possibly find time travelers that weren't necessarily intending to publicize their existence, while Hawking's method presupposed that the time travelers a) Had access to that specific time b) could get to his specific location c) did not mind it being known they were time travelers d) viewed his party was worthy of their attention.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
goodcanadian 12y ago
And I'm not convinced that's publishable in any sort of competitive journal. I wholeheartedly agree with the vast majority of your comment. However, I take issue with this last sentence. A novel technique is worth publishing even if it is only used in a pilot study of questionable value. Now, anyone can take the technique and expand it to a far greater number of search terms. They can also attempt address potential drawbacks of the technique (as you have done) in future studies.
- Steuard 12y ago
  My decision to use the weasel word "competitive" there was based on very much this point. My reading of the article suggested that this author was submitting his article to fairly prestigious journals: two of the three were "a classic physics journal... [whose rejection letter was] signed by a very famous physicist" and "a really famous journal". The other was merely "a reputable physics journal" (whose editorial board had to spend time soliciting papers), which sounds like a more reasonable target. I'm not saying he should have been trying to publish work like this in a journal that has no standards and will print anything, but I think it needs to be aimed at a journal whose rejections are primarily for lack of quality rather than for lack of importance. And a non-physics journal at that level, in particular.
rbmoshe 12y ago
Can someone explain the different views of time? If someone were to time travel and make the mistake of doing a google search like that, then after they are caught, couldn't they go back and tell themselves not to do the search?
- jckt 12y ago
  By "different views of time" do you mean a scientific view, or a philosophical view? If it's the scientific view, the idea regarding time and macroscopic bodies -- general relativity -- specifically what you'd need to describe someone travelling in time, explicitly forbids that, so I don't think there is actually any possible scientific answer to your question. Philosophically, but something vaguely based on physics, there's the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. But as far as I know the "physical meaning" has no bearing on science. There's a good sci-fi novel about a universe where the MWI is true -- Anathem by Neal Stephenson.
  - thebooktocome 12y ago
    For the sake of nitpicking, it was never clear to me that MWI was true in Anathem. In any case, you need much more than that to reproduce Anathem's plot -- it runs on consensus deciding reality.
jckt 12y ago
I agree. His attempts to get his type of paper being published in established physics journals are sort of explained in his last paragraph though. He thinks that there's "room in the world of publishing for science motivated primarily BY public interest, instead of IN THE public interest". Certainly there's no reason why such a journal to exist--free speech and all. I'm not a physicist, but certainly saying that such a journal does physics is a bit of a stretch? Ignoring the fact that he hopes such a journal could accept hard sci-fi (of which I am a fan), how could such a journal be maintained properly if it was driven "BY public interest, instead of IN THE public interest"? The general public is ignorant about science, especially deep science -- which is absolutely fine. Funding agencies (as I understand them) are here to help us decide what to do so that not all of us have to go through graduate school to get an idea about the state of science. Moreover, it sounds to me that he wants a more "democratic" process of science. Democracy makes sense in politics -- we vote on politicians because they have the power to change our lives. But scientists, especially physicists, are powerless to change Mother Nature. Regardless of who we choose, as long as the physics is done half-decently, we're going to get to more or less identical answers.
- vidarh 12y ago
  I read him not as suggesting that the public should decide what is good science, but in suggesting that it would be beneficial for more actual science to be done on subjects that interests the public, even if more conventional journal considers it beneath them and funding agencies don't consider them important. Such as this time travel paper: Clearly it capture public imagination, even if the result was negative.
  - Steuard 12y ago
    I'm honestly not sure what outcome he's asking for, though. This paper did capture the public imagination! He put it on arXiv.org (where it was accepted after their very minimal but non-zero peer review), and within days he was doing a whole bunch of press interviews. What was he hoping to accomplish beyond that? Is this about getting another entry on the peer-reviewed publications list in his CV? The paper probably isn't worth that, at least as work in physics. But he's welcome to add a section to his CV about "public outreach" and talk about it there: he'd probably have a lot to say.
stcredzero 12y ago
The 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. To clarify, physics papers about time travel are published from time to time. There was a group at the University of South Carolina that had a hobby of doing this.

by Steuard 12y ago

mjn 12y ago

Yes, 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.

SilasX 12y ago
So then why didn't the editors suggest it for a more appropriate journal rather than call it unpublishable entirely?
- mjn 12y ago
  One guess is that the average physicist, which might include both the journal editors and the author of this paper, have no clue about journals outside of physics. :)
- rflrob 12y ago
  Probably because the editors are so siloed in their physics mindset that they aren't aware that there are journals in these fields, or if they are aware, they almost certainly don't know which journals are reputable.
- Steuard 12y ago
  Because (for example) I, as a physicist, didn't even know enough to immediately suggest topics like "network science, internet research, web science", and instead said the work was "sociological(?)". For all we know from this story, the rejection letters might have suggested trying a non-physics journal. But even then, the result reported here just provides weak evidence supporting an overwhelmingly expected null hypothesis ("time travel doesn't happen"). I wouldn't expect physics journal editors to be good judges of whether a possibly novel method would be publishable in another discipline when it did not lead to a noteworthy result.
  - SilasX 12y ago
    You don't have to be aware of any of that stuff in order to know the difference between "this can't be published" and "this can't be published in a physics journal". The latter is (perhaps) good judgment; the former, a poor understanding of the limits of one's expertise.
    - jckt 12y ago

unreal37 12y ago

I agree. "How I Tried to Solve a Tough Physics Problem Only Using Google Searches" isn't a classic research paper, and seems to be no surprise that it didn't get accepted in the biggest physics journals.

kolodny 12y ago

The author isn't the first person to think of this, most notably Steven Hawking tried something similar http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/07/02/stephen-hawking-time-travel_n_1643488.html http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/07/02/stephen-hawking-t...

kbenson 12y ago
I think the main difference is that this paper outlines a method to possibly find time travelers that weren't necessarily intending to publicize their existence, while Hawking's method presupposed that the time travelers a) Had access to that specific time b) could get to his specific location c) did not mind it being known they were time travelers d) viewed his party was worthy of their attention.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

goodcanadian 12y ago

And I'm not convinced that's publishable in any sort of competitive journal. I wholeheartedly agree with the vast majority of your comment. However, I take issue with this last sentence. A novel technique is worth publishing even if it is only used in a pilot study of questionable value. Now, anyone can take the technique and expand it to a far greater number of search terms. They can also attempt address potential drawbacks of the technique (as you have done) in future studies.

Steuard 12y ago
My decision to use the weasel word "competitive" there was based on very much this point. My reading of the article suggested that this author was submitting his article to fairly prestigious journals: two of the three were "a classic physics journal... [whose rejection letter was] signed by a very famous physicist" and "a really famous journal". The other was merely "a reputable physics journal" (whose editorial board had to spend time soliciting papers), which sounds like a more reasonable target. I'm not saying he should have been trying to publish work like this in a journal that has no standards and will print anything, but I think it needs to be aimed at a journal whose rejections are primarily for lack of quality rather than for lack of importance. And a non-physics journal at that level, in particular.

rbmoshe 12y ago

Can someone explain the different views of time? If someone were to time travel and make the mistake of doing a google search like that, then after they are caught, couldn't they go back and tell themselves not to do the search?

jckt 12y ago
By "different views of time" do you mean a scientific view, or a philosophical view? If it's the scientific view, the idea regarding time and macroscopic bodies -- general relativity -- specifically what you'd need to describe someone travelling in time, explicitly forbids that, so I don't think there is actually any possible scientific answer to your question. Philosophically, but something vaguely based on physics, there's the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. But as far as I know the "physical meaning" has no bearing on science. There's a good sci-fi novel about a universe where the MWI is true -- Anathem by Neal Stephenson.
- thebooktocome 12y ago
  For the sake of nitpicking, it was never clear to me that MWI was true in Anathem. In any case, you need much more than that to reproduce Anathem's plot -- it runs on consensus deciding reality.

jckt 12y ago

I agree. His attempts to get his type of paper being published in established physics journals are sort of explained in his last paragraph though. He thinks that there's "room in the world of publishing for science motivated primarily BY public interest, instead of IN THE public interest". Certainly there's no reason why such a journal to exist--free speech and all. I'm not a physicist, but certainly saying that such a journal does physics is a bit of a stretch? Ignoring the fact that he hopes such a journal could accept hard sci-fi (of which I am a fan), how could such a journal be maintained properly if it was driven "BY public interest, instead of IN THE public interest"? The general public is ignorant about science, especially deep science -- which is absolutely fine. Funding agencies (as I understand them) are here to help us decide what to do so that not all of us have to go through graduate school to get an idea about the state of science. Moreover, it sounds to me that he wants a more "democratic" process of science. Democracy makes sense in politics -- we vote on politicians because they have the power to change our lives. But scientists, especially physicists, are powerless to change Mother Nature. Regardless of who we choose, as long as the physics is done half-decently, we're going to get to more or less identical answers.

vidarh 12y ago
I read him not as suggesting that the public should decide what is good science, but in suggesting that it would be beneficial for more actual science to be done on subjects that interests the public, even if more conventional journal considers it beneath them and funding agencies don't consider them important. Such as this time travel paper: Clearly it capture public imagination, even if the result was negative.
- Steuard 12y ago
  I'm honestly not sure what outcome he's asking for, though. This paper did capture the public imagination! He put it on arXiv.org (where it was accepted after their very minimal but non-zero peer review), and within days he was doing a whole bunch of press interviews. What was he hoping to accomplish beyond that? Is this about getting another entry on the peer-reviewed publications list in his CV? The paper probably isn't worth that, at least as work in physics. But he's welcome to add a section to his CV about "public outreach" and talk about it there: he'd probably have a lot to say.

stcredzero 12y ago

The 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. To clarify, physics papers about time travel are published from time to time. There was a group at the University of South Carolina that had a hobby of doing this.