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What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

thewinnower.com

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Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#91

Post by Steuard »

goodcanadian wrote: post #75
Steuard wrote: post #50

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…

And I'm not convinced that's publishable in any sort of competitive journal. I wholeheartedly agree with the vast majority of your comment. However, I take issue with this last sentence. A novel technique is worth publishing even if it is only used in a pilot study of questionable value. Now, anyone can take the technique and expand it to a far greater number of search terms. They can also attempt address potential d…

My decision to use the weasel word "competitive" there was based on very much this point. My reading of the article suggested that this author was submitting his article to fairly prestigious journals: two of the three were "a classic physics journal... [whose rejection letter was] signed by a very famous physicist" and "a really famous journal".

The other was merely "a reputable physics journal" (whose editorial board had to spend time soliciting papers), which sounds like a more reasonable target. I'm not saying he should have been trying to publish work like this in a journal that has no standards and will print anything, but I think it needs to be aimed at a journal whose rejections are primarily for lack of quality rather than for lack of importance.

And a non-physics journal at that level, in particular.

Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#92

Post by nmrm »

araes wrote: post #42

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…

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

Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#94

Post by Steuard »

jerf wrote: post #64
andy_ppp wrote: post #49

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.

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.

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.

Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#95

Post by anonymfus »

brianolson wrote: post #44

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

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.

Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#96

Post by 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.

Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#97

Post by Steuard »

SilasX wrote: post #76
mjn wrote: post #51

Earlier 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?

Because (for example) I, as a physicist, didn't even know enough to immediately suggest topics like "network science, internet research, web science", and instead said the work was "sociological(?)".

For all we know from this story, the rejection letters might have suggested trying a non-physics journal. But even then, the result reported here just provides weak evidence supporting an overwhelmingly expected null hypothesis ("time travel doesn't happen"). I wouldn't expect physics journal editors to be good judges of whether a possibly novel method would be publishable in another discipline when it did not lead to a noteworthy result.

Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#98

Post by sanderjd »

lisper wrote: post #89

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 droppin…

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.

Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#99

Post by 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?

Re: What Happened When We Tried to Publish a Real Paper Investigating Time Travel

#100

Post by Steuard »

suprgeek wrote: post #96

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.…

"Might as well theorize fairies from another dimension materialized into ours to poke fun at internet search analyzers."

Good point!

Just to be clear, as far as I can tell this work wasn't ever published in a peer-reviewed journal. It was merely accepted as a preprint on arXiv.org, which requires little more than assurance that the author isn't an obvious crackpot (and it sounds like even they reclassified its subject area: almost like moving it into a journal with a different topic).

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