What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

https://thewinnower.com/discussions/what-happened-when-we-tried-to-publish-a-real-paper-investigating-time-travel

by jmnicholson • 12 years ago

335 181 12 years ago

thewinnower.com

PaulHoule• 12 years ago

For a paper like that I'd expect to see Haruhi Suzumiya as a co-author.

andyzweb• 12 years ago

are you an alien, time-traveler, or esper?

R_Edward• 12 years ago

Or at least Dr. Emmet Brown.

gyc• 12 years ago

I was thinking Dr. Ronald Mallett.

kappaloris• 12 years ago

That and the complete lack of John Titor references were the real reason why it was considered unpublishable.

madaxe_again3• 12 years ago

It 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

rthomas6• 12 years ago

As unlikely as these findings are, has anyone actually replicated the experiment?

opendais• 12 years ago

There was a half hearted attempt 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_again3• 12 years ago

Yeah, 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• 12 years ago

This might make for some interesting reading: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.0958.pdf

mcherm• 12 years ago

There 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.)

im3w1l• 12 years ago

I 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.

sbd• 12 years ago

Is this what the technology in the movie "Primer" was based on?

jacquesm2• 12 years ago

No, primer is about time travel, not anti-gravity or gravity shielding.

maaku2• 12 years ago

Or in the process accidentally invent limited time travel and find that you have better things to do.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384/

kator• 12 years ago

Best 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• 12 years ago

I 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."

unreal372• 12 years ago

I liked the fact that someone paid him $100 to option the movie rights.

xtrumanx• 12 years ago

Here'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_fo...

gb• 12 years ago

Perhaps no evidence was found because people from the future have seen this paper and therefore know not to reveal themselves this way!

jerf5• 12 years ago

It depends on which model exactly time travel works on.

Really, this is good science; it has a low probability of working, but the cost is very low too (literally a hobby-time expenditure), it asks a lot of interesting questions, and has a reasonable method for finding answers. It could also shine light on the question of how time travel works, if it does. Science should include a healthy portfolio of such experiments. (As opposed to low-probability, very expensive experiments, such as I occasionally wonder about our fusion experiments.)

pyre• 12 years ago

In general, I agree with you, but I think that there is a difference between time travel and (e.g.) fusion.

- Time travel as a phenomenon is not known to exist, while fusion is known to exist.

- Fusion experiments are trying to create human-controlled, energy-generating fusion reactions. We know that energy-generating fusion reactions are possible, we just don't know if we can create them under controlled conditions.

- Fusion-generated energy has the possibility to transform that world. Time travel will transform our understanding of the universe, but seems like playing with fire. Were we to discover time travel, we would now have to 'protect time' from 'evil' time travelers.

arethuza• 12 years ago

What makes you think that ITER has a low probability of success?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

madaxe_again3• 12 years ago

If 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.

bentcorner• 12 years ago

What'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.

dllthomas2• 12 years ago

Causality could be a generalization that breaks down in extreme cases, like Newtonian mechanics.

maxerickson• 12 years ago

We only have a very firm belief that causality is inviolate. I guess there isn't a way to prove that it is.

melvinmt• 12 years ago

Who says your reality is the same as my reality already? :)

bradleysmith• 12 years ago

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.

I like that. Though I would think it is not 'will' but 'life' that interacts with universal determinism, through physical expression of information over time. How that information will express itself (how gene-information will translate into physical realities in each moment) seems in the realm of the unknowable (like turbulent flow or other instances of Lorenz-y chaos in the Universe), and consciousness as one of those gene-expressions makes this even more loopy.

But I've wandered into Leary-esque fascination with faults of perception lately, which ought to stick to the human-describing world of psychology, so I should probably shut up too.

cgriswald• 12 years ago

Novikov's self-consistency principle implies that we can change the past as long as we don't know it's been changed. (Well, maybe more accurately, the time traveller has "always" done whatever it was he did in the past.) So even if causality is a requirement, it isn't necessarily violated.

Likewise, lots of time travel in fiction actually has the hidden assumption of a second time dimension. If a second time dimension existed, causality could be maintained along that dimension while seemingly broken in the time dimension we know and love.

And there's always the possibility that causality isn't a given and is simply how we experience the universe. Just because it has always been observed and it makes intuitive sense doesn't mean it is always true. :)

lloeki• 12 years ago

I claim the opposite: one of the rejections was obviously made by a time traveler who has seen a yet to be shot Doctor Who episode written by the scenarist mentioned by the paper's author. Quite a mise en abyme.

bbwharris• 12 years ago

Furthermore, simply the act of publishing this paper likely caused our time line to shift to a point where future travelers are privvy to automated methods to detect their presence in the past.

bentoner• 12 years ago

It'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

mjn3• 12 years ago

I 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

chrisdevereux• 12 years ago

Most 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• 12 years ago

Physics journals are, sadly, extremely wary of accepting anything that seems philosophical.

What's so sad about this?

SoftwareMaven• 12 years ago

It'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• 12 years ago

And 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• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

So, publish it in a journal of philosophy.

meric• 12 years 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.

vidarh5• 12 years 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.

njharman• 12 years ago

Pope names form a fairly limited set. I bet if you asked 100,000 Catholics to guess the next pope's name, > 0 would get it right. I'm actually surprised there isn't tons of speculation about it. Maybe it's not a "thing" or sacrilegious or this sort of speculation is not on the Internet?

jackgavigan• 12 years ago

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.

If, however, you consider the stock market to be a chaotic system, your small trades will change the market's performance.

andreasvc7• 12 years ago

This point is quite immaterial. If they did find a mention of "pope Francis", then yes, they would have to consider alternative explanations before jumping to the conclusion of time travel. However, they didn't, so it's perfectly reasonably to report that there is no evidence of time travelers talking of pope Francis.

ohitsdom• 12 years ago

Correct but if it was before the previous pope had died, that would be very unlikely.

tomp• 12 years ago

You mean, resigned.

jebus9892• 12 years ago

I just googled but couldn't hit it (+at work) but I remember an instance of someone editing Wikipedia claiming some known person had been found dead a day or so before it happened. Police investigated and found it was just a freak coincidence — just some guy vandalising the page. Kind of "a million monkeys" in practice: given there's loads of nonsense additions, at some point over a few years they will accurately predict future events.

robmcm• 12 years ago

This happens a lot on twitter, I follow a number of football (soccer) account and often when a shock result or event happens people search for other that have predicted it, to retweet. Also don't forget paul, the match predicting octopus!

They also often search for people (typically other professionals) predicting the opposite in order to embarrass them.

triplenineteen• 12 years ago

I think you are referring to this: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Death_of_Nancy_Benoit_rumour_pos...

Swizec• 12 years ago

I 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-ev...

Shivetya• 12 years ago

well 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• 12 years ago

This reminds me of xkcd's "what if" Project.

windust• 12 years ago

Mandatory XKCD Time travel Comic http://xkcd.com/716/

rmbe• 12 years ago

this one fits too http://xkcd.com/675/

araes3• 12 years ago

I'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.

nmrm2• 12 years ago

It's not quite a fair comparison, since a whole bunch of published papers end up on arXiv in some form

araes3• 12 years ago

It 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.

mseebach• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

Also, what if the first rule of time travel is: 1.) Don't talk about time travel

beebeebee• 12 years ago

Time travel is all about breaking rules

jmnicholson4• 12 years ago

You should sign up and review the paper itself! https://thewinnower.com/papers/searching-the-internet-for-ev...

vidarh5• 12 years ago

I 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.

The problem is that they needed something to search for where we have a clear, well defined horizon before which people were extremely unlikely to mention the name at all.

Both of these meet the criteria because the names are now all over the historical record, but the names were new. In the case of Pope Francis, he was not only the first Pope Francis, but also the first pope in a millennium to pick an entirely new name (John Paul I was the first John Paul, but both John and Paul separately have a long history).

You are right that it might mean that they would miss time travellers. Who knows: If time travelling exists, all travellers might even be warned about this specific experiment.

But they in any case could not prove that we have not been visited by time travellers - all they could do was to pick terms that if they found them would give a strong indication that something odd was afoot.

They were also limited in that they were explicitly looking for something that could be researched cheaply, and by looking at the internet, and so an example like Hitler would not work.

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.

The problem is that you will likely find lots of people. People have all kinds of different reasons for investing, many of which leads to looking prescient after the fact.

brianolson• 12 years ago

I wanted the punch line to be, "The Time Lords showed up and insisted we halt all experimentation."

anonymfus• 12 years ago

I 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.

corry• 12 years ago

Imagine: 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• 12 years ago

Although 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• 12 years ago

Neat 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.

stcredzero3• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

Why do you need Google? Get a web crawler, look for things that relate to your queries and you're done.

rasz_pl3• 12 years ago

It did happen, there is even a movie about it

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1862079

brento• 12 years ago

Anyone have a TL;DR version?

lucozade• 12 years ago

Sure. 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• 12 years ago

Thank 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_pl3• 12 years ago

TL;DR version: Physicist thinks time travellers are obsessed with one particular Pope and/or some non significant comet.

andy_ppp• 12 years ago

Of 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.

jerf5• 12 years ago

From 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.

Steuard6• 12 years ago

I 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.

Steuard6• 12 years 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.

mjn3• 12 years 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.

SilasX3• 12 years ago

So then why didn't the editors suggest it for a more appropriate journal rather than call it unpublishable entirely?

unreal372• 12 years 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• 12 years 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-t...

kbenson• 12 years 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.

goodcanadian• 12 years 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.

Steuard6• 12 years 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• 12 years 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?

jckt9• 12 years 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.

jckt9• 12 years 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.

vidarh5• 12 years 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.

jckt9• 12 years ago

Can't edit, so correction: "...no reason why such a journal should not exist..."

freshhawk• 12 years ago

Yeah, he described Omni magazine basically didn't he?

Which was pushed by "public interest" into a lot of fringe silliness and ads from outright con artists selling pseudoscience.

frozenport• 12 years ago

> motivated primarily BY public interest, instead of IN THE public interest

Isn't this what the Discovery Channel or a show like Myth Buster's does?

stcredzero3• 12 years 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.

mherdeg• 12 years ago

This 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/ .

jmnicholson4• 12 years ago

It has already been published in The Winnower: https://thewinnower.com/papers/searching-the-internet-for-ev...

askura• 12 years ago

Interesting but an obvious result to be honest.

h1karu• 12 years ago

dicey subject area, and it's probably not God playing the dice :)

sharemywin• 12 years ago

"Does Tax Payer Money Burn Any Better Than Regular Money?" (Nemiroff & Wilson 2014). too funny...

lisper2• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

Confirming 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.

lisper2• 12 years ago

When 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.

jckt9• 12 years ago

Slightly 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?

jmnicholson4• 12 years ago

The 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."

jckt9• 12 years ago

Yeah, 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• 12 years ago

You 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• 12 years ago

The "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.

Steuard6• 12 years 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).

facepalm2• 12 years ago

How would you explain it, though?

andreasvc7• 12 years ago

What is there to explain? They found nothing, which does not necessarily explain anything.

dameyawn• 12 years ago

Is there any actual scientific substance to Occam's Razor?

eruditely• 12 years ago

The meaning has certainly been diluted over time.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 12 years ago

Whenever 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?

jmnicholson4• 12 years ago

This 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!

al2o3cr• 12 years 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.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 12 years ago

Were that true, why the reluctance to say as much?

If anything, I would expect that to invite stinging, painful criticism and sarcastic explanations.

kenjackson• 12 years ago

This 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• 12 years ago

I'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• 12 years ago

The 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.

bsder2• 12 years ago

You 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• 12 years ago

Onarbor, https://onarbor.com, is a peer-reviewed journal that would certainly let you publish this.

hesselink• 12 years ago

Great 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• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

If 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• 12 years ago

Seems a bit unfair as "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" was published in 1948.

feralmoan• 12 years ago

Concept 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_pl3• 12 years ago

Method 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/...

Something tells me time traveller from the future would have modernized equivalent.

zenciadam• 12 years ago

I'm from 1843. Nice to meet you.

radarsat1• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

I 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• 12 years ago

Did they consider facts about events added to Wikipedia before they actually happened? :) [1]

[1] http://xkcd.com/978/ - 'Citogenesis'

aman_abhishk• 12 years ago

Essentially, 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.

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