How to Avoid the Time Wars

https://jmossbridge.medium.com/how-to-avoid-the-time-wars-4d35d023f137

by walterbell • 5 years ago

44 26 5 years ago

jmossbridge.medium.com

lostmsu• 5 years ago

There's is a lot of text, and the question in the title is not answered.

Somewhere in the middle the author also purports to build a time-machine using a photon detector, and possibly even admits it does not work (yet). Were not able to read that far due to the feeling of time being wasted.

ad-astra• 5 years ago

Same

TranquilMarmot• 5 years ago

To avoid the time wars, you must waste the time of others. Ha.

akamoonknight• 5 years ago

A ways down after a fair amount of skimming:

"Here’s the proposal I’m offering in all seriousness. We avoid the time wars by accessing unconditional love on a global scale."

Jensson• 5 years ago

I didn't read it, but how did the article get 12 points here on HN then? Did 12 people actually upvote this?

hungryforcodes• 5 years ago

13 now.

bryanrasmussen• 5 years ago

if you waste your time, you will not war over it.

on edit: I see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29146558 already made the point.

ladberg• 5 years ago

I'm a bit astounded that the author has a PhD and is seriously proposing that time travel is the source of the correlation in an Arduino-based "time machine" and hasn't really explored any other options like the pseudorandom number generator being inaccurate.

How does this get on HN and does anyone actually believe it?

EDIT: I'm looking through the preprint PDF and it looks like they selected the future action (how long to expose for) using the last bit of the previous observation as a random seed (see page 9).

That will of course create a correlation from the past event to the future action, and they use that correlation to try to claim that the future action is impacting the past observation. It's 100% bogus and terrible science.

I don't know how they could possibly not see an issue with using the very measurement they're trying to find a correlation with as the source of randomness for deciding the future action instead of literally any other pure RNG available. It really seems like they were maliciously creating that correlation for academic clout, job prospects, etc.

bpiche• 5 years ago

Robert Anton Wilson or PKD might have liked this. I think it's adjacent. Reminds me of the Pi film. Pretty crazy.

mrjangles• 5 years ago

These crackpot papers appear on the archive all the time. I know a few physicists who rejoice in reading through them for a laugh. I'm quite sure that would be why it was posted... I hope.

JKCalhoun• 5 years ago

I guess I read it as part tongue in cheek, part meditation on life and self (and past selves), and part criticism of modern physics.

314• 5 years ago

Responding to your edit: that is not what it says in the preprint. The last bit is used to decide the rounding mode for converting the rand in the interval 0-1 to an index of the shuffled array. They do not specify how the seed was picked at all.

jmossbridge3• 5 years ago

That's correct. In fact, I give the code in the paper.

FYI -- the same effect has recently been replicated by a Berkeley physicist using a totally independent random number generator. But I understand the concern here; that's why I asked him to try to replicate it using better equipment.

As to the concern about it being Arduino-based -- it's easy to criticize experiments because they don't use sophisticated equipment. However, what actually matters is if you can find an explanation for why the student-level equipment would result in the artifact(s) you suspect are there. That's more difficult to do, and in fact no one has been able to do it yet.

We will see how this shakes down, but I've been doing the experiment continously for two years and the effect is robust.

Thanks to everyone for reading the article. The argument is good to read. It's a delight to me that people are thinking about these issues, since as should be clear from the article, I think they are important to think about.

And, of course, I certainly don't have all the right answers. But science isn't about that -- it's about allowing yourself to be brave enough to find questions that you are curious to answer (even if no one else is) -- and rigorously trying to discover the answers. Or at least, further questions.

-- Julia

pitdicker• 5 years ago

After the first two paragraphs I stopped reading the article seriously. But I love science fiction for the idea's, and this article has a few in them.

For example her take on / comparison of nuclear war with time war:

After that, I was no longer afraid of nuclear war. The solution was easy. We already knew nuclear war was a risk, we just had to avoid the paths of timelines that would lead to it.
I’m not interested in losing time wars, or winning them. In real life, I think it’s a great idea to avoid them entirely.

And on avoiding bad events:

“Time is like a room. If you want to avoid bumping into the chair when walking across the room, you can do that — but you have to know that there is a chair and where that chair is in the room.”
It left me with the clear intuitive feeling that as a species we could work to avoid a particularly bad possible event or move toward a particularly good possible event, but we needed some intelligence about what those possibilities are and where/when they are in spacetime.

madaxe_again• 5 years ago

I don’t think we need to act as a species, rather we each carve out our own path, choosing which universe we fork off into. We think of it as making decisions and acting, but rather, you could look at it as picking a universe.

ncmncm• 5 years ago

There are lots of complaints here.

But it is refreshing to have a scientist talking about what she, exactly like her colleagues, doesn't know, but in her case hopes to. She leads with pointing out that everything she is saying could be wrong, so complaining about that amounts to petty griping.

To my knowledge, there is nothing in physics that says a future event cannot be precognized with perfect reliability, even if the person might act differently as a consequence of the knowledge. Not getting on a plane you are sure will crash is probably a desirable outcome, even if you can't convince anybody else.

A mechanism for such communication is a tough nut. Continuity of the individual--in one future, you die, another, you don't--seems to offer a sort of channel, but physics doesn't care whether you are alive or dead. However, if in one scenario your molecules get incinerated and scattered, in the other they continue moving in what we might call "you" formation, that is a physically objective change. If your cells can bounce signals off your past and future selves, and enounter a discontinuity, that could affect your reproductive fitness, so be fodder for evolution.

Life is not bound by our preconceptions of how physics ought to work; life explores the space of actual reality, and has often found ways to exploit phenomena we have not noticed, never mind understood. So, what she does might look a lot like woo, but that is not the same thing as actually being woo, and I am glad she is thinking about it, and telling us.

You are not obliged to be interested.

denton-scratch• 5 years ago

This is woo. If there's a trace of sense in it, I didn't find it.

I tried to play-along with the "time-travel" thing as some kind of metaphor, but she actually seems to mean it literally. I found this observation particularly woo-ish:

"What is important to point out here is that precognition is no longer just a scientific curiosity."

I couldn't read on past that.

spacehome• 5 years ago

Affiliate Prof., Dept. of Physics and Biophysics at U. San Diego

Is this the quality of education I can expect from UCSD?

bulatb• 5 years ago

That's a different school. The University of San Diego is a private university in San Diego. UCSD is the San Diego campus of the University of California.

mikewarot• 5 years ago

So, to subtract as much woo as I possibly can... single photons in the double slit experiment interfere with something, and the theory is they are interfering with photons from other times.

In a not terribly rigorous experiment, confirmation was found after spending some money raised in a kick starter.

I won't write it off completely, but it would be interesting to replicate on the cheap with strictly solid state gear.

bradgranath• 5 years ago

RNG experiments with an Arduino. And some enormous assumptions. Er... Yikes?

irthomasthomas• 5 years ago

This gets 35 points and Einstein's Lost Hypothesis never gets more than 2. Yep, I'm definitely on the wrong timeline.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29147658

ashurbanipal• 5 years ago

This story is about the legalization of psychedelics. If it don’t believe me, read to the end.

How to Avoid the Time Wars

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