Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct but if it was before the previous pope had died, that would be very unlikely.
You mean, resigned.
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What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
61–70 of 195 posts
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
The fusion triple product has improved exponentially, and is 10,000 times better now than it was in 1970. It's a hard problem, but it's not so much "we keep trying and failing" as "we're consistently improving, but the bar is really high."
It's as if computers were useless until we had a 6th-generation Core i7, and people were saying "bah, computers, haven't succeeded so far." We're not there yet, but we're getting pretty close.
It is true that early researchers made some over-optimistic predictions. But they conditioned those on a certain level of funding. For the funding they got, they said it would never happen.
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 unt…
> 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.
We should assume that, but that affects your ability to make predictions to some extent past the moment you arrive, and so you may find your knowledge quickly becomes out of date, but you don't need to be 100% right - your knowledge needs to remain "close enough" for you to beat the odds with some reasonable margin.
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#64Of 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.
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.
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#65[deleted]
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#66dicey subject area, and it's probably not God playing the dice :)
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#67The 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…
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...
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#68The 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…
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Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#69It'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…
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Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#70Anyone have a TL;DR version?
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.