This reminds me of xkcd's "what if" Project.
Mandatory XKCD Time travel Comic http://xkcd.com/716/
What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
81–90 of 195 posts
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#82Best 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."
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."
I liked the fact that someone paid him $100 to option the movie rights.
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So then why didn't the editors suggest it for a more appropriate journal rather than call it unpublishable entirely?
One guess is that the average physicist, which might include both the journal editors and the author of this paper, have no clue about journals outside of physics. :)
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#84The 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…
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?
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.
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So then why didn't the editors suggest it for a more appropriate journal rather than call it unpublishable entirely?
Probably because the editors are so siloed in their physics mindset that they aren't aware that there are journals in these fields, or if they are aware, they almost certainly don't know which journals are reputable.
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#86 "Does Tax Payer Money Burn Any Better Than Regular Money?" (Nemiroff & Wilson 2014). too funny...
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#87It'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…
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
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
Again, I just can't help but think you've been blinded by SCIENCE! What I see is a curve that is slowing, not speeding, and no particular reason to believe that the curve ever gets over the "commercially-viable fusion" break-even point, ever.
We are not obligated to stop thinking about things because of how awesome the alternate reality where this all works like gangbusters would be. This is science, not politics.
Or, more accurately, ITER is politics, and not science, which is another reason I'm not holding my breath for this. It's not an experiment we're doing because the results are just so darned promising we had to carry on... it's an experiment we're doing because politicians have decided this is the way forward. We pour billions into this, and other approaches have a hard time getting single-digit millions. I do not care to follow along with the everybody-get-happy politics of ITER, I want fusion.
Might I further add that as this is science, should ITER succeed and produce a commercially-viable reactor, I will celebrate them all the harder for doing something I thought very unlikely, not try to argue it away. However, that is my bar for success, and I will not accept something sneaking under it under a cloak of pretty words.
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#89I 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.
Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel
#90Slightly 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?