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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

#141

Post by jimmaswell »

bentoner wrote: post #9

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…

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

What's so sad about this?

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

#142

Post by bostonpete »

SilasX wrote: post #129
dragonwriter wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So then why didn't the editors suggest it for a more appropriate journal rather than call it unpublishable entirely? Because knowledge of out-of-domain journals to which an out-of-domain paper might be appropriate is neither the role nor general competency of a journal's editors (OTOH, general familiarity with the published work in the area in which you are attempting to publish, which necessarily includes some fam…

I'm not suggesting they should have said, "Resubmit this to the International Journal of Experimental Sociology ." Just "Hey, this is more of a question for sociologists; maybe try that kind of journal." Much like how Sokal criticized Social Text for not recognizing when something was a question for physicists.

Why should they have to give less direct feedback or make suggestions like that? To avoid hurting his feelings? To point him in the right direction so he knows what to do next? The author is a tenured university professor, not some high school student.

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

#143

Post by stcredzero »

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…

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.

To clarify, physics papers about time travel are published from time to time. There was a group at the University of South Carolina that had a hobby of doing this.

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

#144

Post by BuildTheRobots »

beebeebee wrote: post #112
Rapzid wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Time travel is all about breaking rules

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

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

#145

Post by 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.'

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

#146

Post by facepalm »

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.…

How would you explain it, though?

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

#147

Post by andreasvc »

SilasX wrote: post #129
dragonwriter wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So then why didn't the editors suggest it for a more appropriate journal rather than call it unpublishable entirely? Because knowledge of out-of-domain journals to which an out-of-domain paper might be appropriate is neither the role nor general competency of a journal's editors (OTOH, general familiarity with the published work in the area in which you are attempting to publish, which necessarily includes some fam…

I'm not suggesting they should have said, "Resubmit this to the International Journal of Experimental Sociology ." Just "Hey, this is more of a question for sociologists; maybe try that kind of journal." Much like how Sokal criticized Social Text for not recognizing when something was a question for physicists.

Did you know Sokal submitted his paper to several journals before getting accepted? And that he rewrote it to make it appeal to what he thought the editors would want to read? The paper wasn't even peer reviewed, so the fact that it was published is not significant at all, even though I found the discussion interesting and justified. I just think that the deception he used was not warranted and only served to generate attention and sensation.

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

#148

Post by andreasvc »

bostonpete wrote: post #142
SilasX wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not suggesting they should have said, "Resubmit this to the International Journal of Experimental Sociology ." Just "Hey, this is more of a question for sociologists; maybe try that kind of journal." Much like how Sokal criticized Social Text for not recognizing when something was a question for physicists.

Why should they have to give less direct feedback or make suggestions like that? To avoid hurting his feelings? To point him in the right direction so he knows what to do next? The author is a tenured university professor, not some high school student.

Why do you say less direct? The impression I get from the article is that none of the article actually gave a specific reason why the paper was not appropriate for the journal.

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

#149

Post by andreasvc »

SilasX wrote: post #110
Steuard wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hyp…

You don't have to be aware of any of that stuff in order to know the difference between "this can't be published" and "this can't be published in a physics journal". The latter is (perhaps) good judgment; the former, a poor understanding of the limits of one's expertise.

You're assuming they actually read the paper. I'm guessing the editors simply rejected it based on the title / topic. This might be understandable, given that they probably get lots of cranks submitting similar sounding papers.

On a different note, I think you have the responsibilities of authors and editors mixed up: it is up to the author of a paper to select an appropriate journal and weigh their chances, the editor is only responsible for the quality of their own journal. Yes it would be great if they also gave you free advice about other journals, but it's really not their job.

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

#150

Post by lloeki »

gb wrote: post #7

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

I claim the opposite: one of the rejections was obviously made by a time traveler who has seen a yet to be shot Doctor Who episode written by the scenarist mentioned by the paper's author. Quite a mise en abyme.
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