
What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel - jmnicholson
https://thewinnower.com/discussions/what-happened-when-we-tried-to-publish-a-real-paper-investigating-time-travel
======
Steuard
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.

~~~
jckt
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
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
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.

~~~
tormeh
He wants more papers that capture the public imagination?

------
meric
"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.

~~~
vidarh
> 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
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?

~~~
vidarh
> Pope names form a fairly limited set.

Does it? For starters consider that "Francis" was a new name - he's the first
pope to use it.

He was also the first pope in a _millennium_ to pick an entirely new name
(John Paul I obviously was the first pope John Paul, but he picked two names
that has a very long tradition, and that are obviously names with a very
special connection to the church; consider also that some disliked that John
Paul I broke new ground that way, even though it involved using two very well
respected traditional names).

> 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?

[EDIT: The paper actually mentions that they _did_ find _one single mention_
of Pope Francis, which was then reviewed and found to be overtly speculative,
so they did run into this]

Maybe. Maybe not. But there _is_ speculation about pope names. A lot of it.
And apparently despite lots and lots of articles that were written about it
none of them got it right.

Of course not representative, but here's a poll that was conducted before
Bergoglio was elected, with about 5k votes:
[http://wdtprs.com/blog/2013/02/poll-what-name-will-the-
next-...](http://wdtprs.com/blog/2013/02/poll-what-name-will-the-next-pope-
choose/)

Of those, 694 picked the "???? the First" option, which was the correct
answer. But most seems to expect a name with tradition.

Here is another example of speculation back in 2008, from before Ratzinger was
elected:

[http://papam.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/possible-names-for-
the...](http://papam.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/possible-names-for-the-next-
pope/)

And here is one gives the list of papal names _after_ Francis was chosen, and
points out that his successor _could_ choose to do like Francis, but pope
Francis was the _first pope to do so since the tenth century_, as mentioned
above. So prior to Francis, there was a millennium long tradition creating a
strong expectation that Bergoglio/Francis would pick from the list of past
names rather than break new ground.

Here's one from before Francis was chosen, which speculates on names, and
suggests the most likely names would come from the list of past popes, and
gives some suggestions:

[http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/moving_forward_what...](http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/moving_forward_what_name_will_the_next_pope_choose)

Here's a blog post reproducing a graph from The Economist with names, coupled
with betting odds on the names:

[http://www.davidlose.net/2013/03/what-name-will-the-next-
pop...](http://www.davidlose.net/2013/03/what-name-will-the-next-pope-take/)

Knowing, as we do now, that he was willing to ignore the list, many might have
guessed Francis, but I'm much less confident they would before.. Especially
given that from a few searches it appears that even now most appears to expect
the next pope again to most likely pick one of the traditional names.

Here's another one:

[http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3712/predicting-next-
pop...](http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3712/predicting-next-popes-name)

This also lists odds from the bookmaker Paddy Power, giving Leo 3-to-1, Peter
2-to-1, Gregory 6-to-1, Pius 8-to-1. And he gave "Joseph" as his one new name.

One of the commenters then goes on to reference a CNN article on the name
choice, that says amongst others this:

> Allen described the name selection as "the most stunning" choice and
> "precedent shattering."

> "There are cornerstone figures in Catholicism," such as St. Francis, Allen
> said. Figures of such stature as St. Francis of Assisi seem "irrepeatable --
> that there can be only one Francis," he added.

Maybe others would feel differently - that Francis would be a good name
exactly because of how important St. Francis of Assisi is to the church, but
this is nevertheless an interesting reaction.

------
suprgeek
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.

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

~~~
eruditely
The meaning has certainly been diluted over time.

------
bentoner
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](https://scirate.com/arxiv/quant-ph/0101012)

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

What's so sad about this?

~~~
SoftwareMaven
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
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
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
So, publish it in a journal of philosophy.

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

~~~
beebeebee
Time travel is all about breaking rules

~~~
BuildTheRobots
Surely "obeying all of the rules, just not necessarily in the right order"?

------
kenjackson
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
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
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.

------
madaxe_again
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Podkletnov)

~~~
rthomas6
As unlikely as these findings are, has anyone actually replicated the
experiment?

~~~
madaxe_again
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.

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

~~~
madaxe_again
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.

~~~
dllthomas
Causality _could_ be a generalization that breaks down in extreme cases, like
Newtonian mechanics.

~~~
ludwigvan
This is scary.

~~~
dllthomas
Why?

------
mherdeg
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/](http://www.jasnh.com/) .

~~~
jmnicholson
It has already been published in The Winnower:
[https://thewinnower.com/papers/searching-the-internet-for-
ev...](https://thewinnower.com/papers/searching-the-internet-for-evidence-of-
time-travelers)

------
rasz_pl
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/...](http://www.amazon.com/WikiReader-PANREADER-Pocket-
Wikipedia/dp/B002N5521W)

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

------
lisper
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
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.

~~~
lisper
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.

------
Swizec
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...](http://swizec.com/blog/week-11-searching-the-internet-for-evidence-of-
time-travelers/swizec/6479)

------
jckt
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?

~~~
jmnicholson
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."

~~~
jckt
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.

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

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

------
corry
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?

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
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.

~~~
stcredzero
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.

------
araes
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.

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

~~~
araes
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.

~~~
nmrm
Thanks 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.

~~~
araes
Both thank you for the reasoned comments, and you're welcome. Also, I cede the
"theoretical" point, as that was mostly me being snarky.

I agree that publishing the 'exact' same results is a no go, and that will
usually get you a demerit (it's just too easy to discover these days).
However, I would argue that the level of detail/justification that people
change can vary dramatically. Some people _are_ on the honest end of the
scale, like you say, and change each version significantly. In fact, to step
away from hyperbole, I would say that probably most trend that way.

However, I feel like the current system also incentivizes dishonesty,
particularly with how brutal the associate professor and tenure tracks have
gotten for many fields. For example, while CS is a relatively nice field,
since its both new, and the job market for its PhDs is hot, others like
Physics, Math, most liberal arts, ect... are awful, with 10:1 ratios in some
cases between candidates and positions. In those, you'd better be perceived as
a rockstar, or you're going to be flipping burgers. And the natural way to be
seen as a rockstar? Publish. A lot.

Actually, now that I think about it, that would probably make a good sociology
paper. Possible correlations of plagiarism, minor-edit multi-submissions,
yatta... to the level of competition for professor spots.

------
methodover
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.'

------
jimhefferon
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 ..

------
kator
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
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."

~~~
xtrumanx
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...](https://pay.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1va4vq/we_searched_for_time_travelers_who_inadvertently/)

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terranstyler
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...

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digz
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.

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NoMoreNicksLeft
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?

~~~
al2o3cr
"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
Were that true, why the reluctance to say as much?

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

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

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andy_ppp
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.

~~~
jerf
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.

~~~
Steuard
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.

------
feralmoan
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!!!

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

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

------
hesselink
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.

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Shivetya
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?

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

~~~
windust
Mandatory XKCD Time travel Comic [http://xkcd.com/716/](http://xkcd.com/716/)

~~~
rmbe
this one fits too [http://xkcd.com/675/](http://xkcd.com/675/)

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

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

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

~~~
anonymfus
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.

------
askura
Interesting but an obvious result to be honest.

------
radarsat1
> 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.

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brento
Anyone have a TL;DR version?

~~~
lucozade
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
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.

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h1karu
dicey subject area, and it's probably not God playing the dice :)

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zenciadam
I'm from 1843. Nice to meet you.

