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What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
31–40 of 195 posts
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#32It 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
Is this what the technology in the movie "Primer" was based on?
No, primer is about time travel, not anti-gravity or gravity shielding.
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#33"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…
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.
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 experiment…
What makes you think that ITER has a low probability of success? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
The low rate of success achieved to date would be my first clue. I try to avoid the trap of letting today's glittering promises of future success distract from the fact that yesterday's glittering promises of future success' dates have actually come and gone (and come and gone and come and gone again).
Cards-on-the-table, my definition of success is full-on commercially-viable fusion, because little else justifies the enormous investments made into this technology. Any other "incidental" benefit you might want to cite, such as "better understanding of plasma physics", could probably have been obtained for orders of magnitude (plural and no exaggeration) less money.
(I also try to avoid the trap of seeing the word "science" and just shutting off my brain and throwing money at the problem because "SCIENCE!". Nonsense. Science is not immune to cost/benefit analysis just because it's shiny, and cost/benefit analysis is always probabilistic so yes, it can perfectly well deal with uncertainties of discovery too. See my previous comment about the value of keeping some cheap longshots in the portfolio. Just think, what other science could we have done with the billions of dollars it has consumed?)
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this what the technology in the movie "Primer" was based on?
No, primer is about time travel, not anti-gravity or gravity shielding.
Off the top of my head, I remember the engineers' initial idea was to reduce the weight of a load in a truck. Then, they realized the technology could be used to build a time machine.
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#36well 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?
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, primer is about time travel, not anti-gravity or gravity shielding.
Off the top of my head, I remember the engineers' initial idea was to reduce the weight of a load in a truck. Then, they realized the technology could be used to build a time machine.
Ah yes, the 'object inside' right. I'd totally forgotten about that, apologies.
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#38This reminds me of xkcd's "what if" Project.
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#39Perhaps no evidence was found because people from the future have seen this paper and therefore know not to reveal themselves this way!
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.
Causality could be a generalization that breaks down in extreme cases, like Newtonian mechanics.
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#40"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…
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 pre…
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.