
What Happened When We Tried To Publish a Paper Investigating Time Travel (2014) - DarkContinent
https://thewinnower.com/discussions/26-what-happened-when-we-tried-to-publish-a-real-paper-investigating-time-travel
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aaron695
> How is it that a paper that could not get published had the fourth highest
> reported Altmetric score for all scientific contributions in 2013 (Liu
> 2014)?

Altmetric is not tied to scientific value. It can be used as an interesting
metric though but this is a great example of how it fails catastrophically.

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retrogradeorbit
Are you implying the paper had no scientific value?

~~~
coldtea
No, he is saying it openly.

~~~
retrogradeorbit
Imply: indicate the truth or existence of (something) by suggestion rather
than explicit reference.

Spot the subtle difference. Saying it openly would look like this:

"This paper has no scientific value."

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powera
How is searching the internet, especially when it finds "no evidence" of
something nobody expected there to be evidence for, something that should be a
topic for a "classic physics journal"?

~~~
tempestn
In general, publishing studies with negative results can still be very
valuable. If nothing else, they save time that might otherwise have been
wasted investigating the same thing. Conversely they may provide a starting
point for other researchers to look into something similar with potentially
different results. They may also be useful as part of the basis of meta-
studies.

So the fact that no supporting evidence of a hypothesis was found certainly
shouldn't disqualify a paper from publication.

I also can't see any reason why it's relevant that their work primarily
involved searching the internet. They provided logical reasoning that if time
travelers exist, it would potentially be possible to discover them through
this technique. Most likely time travelers don't exist, and so they don't
expect to find anything, but that doesn't make it worthless to try. And since
the feasibility of time travel is (as far as I understand) still technically
an open question of physics, it does appear to be an appropriate, if
unconventional, topic for a classic physics journal.

I'm not necessarily saying I disagree with the editors' decisions to reject
the paper, and it's certainly their decision to make, but I don't see it as a
foregone conclusion.

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powera
What would a positive result have even looked like? "We found evidence of time
travelers, but it's probably just a sign our model is bad?" or "We discovered
people from the future hiding perfectly from us, until this (presumably well-
known in this future) paper was published that revealed them?"

If it's inconceivable that there could be a positive result, it's not science.
It's fodder for publicity.

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coldtea
> _If it 's inconceivable that there could be a positive result, it's not
> science_

If it's "inconceivable" from the start then you're not following the
scientific method, in which nothing is "inconceivable" until proven so (not
even macro-world logical impossibilities, as quantum mechanics have a few).

There's nothing really inconceivable about time travel. Greatly impossible
yes, but totally conceivable. Physicists have even come up with a few
mechanisms. And that's for the past.

For travelling forward in time, all it takes is going faster (literally).

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powera
I find it completely inconceivable that there are secret time travelers who
would be found by searching the internet. I think it's legitimately more
likely that you would discover dragons living in the earth's core by searching
the internet.

~~~
coldtea
With all the knowledge we have of what's possible and empirical data, your
assumption is wrong. Finding time travellers on the internet would be much
more likely (even if still very unlikely) than finding "dragons living in the
earth's core".

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ikeboy
Typos:

>We had plenty or "real" research projects to work on.

Or -> Of.

>I therefore decided to upload the manuscript to a standard web site that
posts manuscripts and papers both before and after publication, the arXiv at
[http://arXig.org/](http://arXig.org/).

arXig -> arXiv.

>About a month later, after some haggling, he mailed both Wilson and me each a
check for $100.

I'm not sure, but I think "both" and "each" are redundant.

On another note:

 _The journal editors would do neither, and eventually asked me to stop
emailing them on this topic. So I stopped._

That's what makes this person sane :)

Also, previous discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7920642](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7920642)

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tfandango
I searched for this paper before it was published but couldn't find it. Turns
out I just had to wait until they wrote it.

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chengiz
> Eventually we narrowed the focus to two well-thought out search terms to
> keep things manageable: "Pope Francis" and "Comet ISON".

Yes because if I come from the future, I want to discuss the Pope and some
random comet.

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wmil
Was his paper as verbose as this article? If so it's no wonder that no one
would publish it.

He writes like he's being paid per word....

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maaku
2014.

~~~
dang
Thanks, added.

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BraveNewCurency
I know, I'll do a search on the Internet for Dragons, and if I don't find any,
I'll publish a paper on it. That's science, right?

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mdpopescu
Yes. You might even make it to the IgNobel prize list.

