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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

#151

Post by grkvlt »

jckt wrote: post #122
SilasX wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't seem to find the claim in the post where the journal editors actually said "this can't be publishable, period". I am pretty sure that when the physics journal editor rejects your paper, she isn't even actually saying "this can't be published in a physics journal", she's really saying "this can't be published in this physics journal" (unless she says otherwise, explicitly, of course).

> she isn't even actually saying

Why not go with "they aren't even actually saying" rather than the faux-affirmative-action sexism of using "she" there? This really grates with me, even more so when used with traditionally male-dominated roles, such as physicists or system administrators. Yes, you're freaking out the squares with your right-on craziness, but it's really rather childish. If you (100% rightly) want to be non-sexist, use a gender-neutral phrase, such as in my example above.

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

#152

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

al2o3cr wrote: post #131
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #99

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 ma…

"They refuse to explain why they feel it unacceptable." I read the paper. It's unacceptable because it's LITERALLY a "here are some things we Googled, and there weren't any time travelers" with a bibliography attached: there's no detailed explanation of experimental procedure, no detailed data. It's roughly equivalent to sending a middle-school book report to a literary journal.

Were that true, why the reluctance to say as much?

If anything, I would expect that to invite stinging, painful criticism and sarcastic explanations.

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

#153

Post by bsder »

kenjackson wrote: post #111

This paper makes a very fundamental mistake, IMO. If you were to time travel to the future and do a query, you wouldn't query about a past event. You'd query about a present event. For example, if time travel were created today, we wouldn't go back to 2000 and query about something that happened in 2001. We'd query about Lebron James or Obama. They should be looking for queries about technology/people/events that are…

You are assuming perfect knowledge of the past.

The amount of information you could access would be limited to a transportable device (assuming an inability to communicate temporally--probably reasonable). You would have to supplement your knowledge with local information.

With the Internet, maybe perfect information is valid, but I suspect not.

Try hunting down what was once widespread knowledge about Visual Basic 6. Or anything which was mostly exchanged on NetNews. There is a lot of lossage already and we're only about 20 years from it.

The real problem is that you need a mediocre search that a time traveler would do. Something that would not be indexed in a portable computing device and yet would still be interesting enough to require using temporally local search capabilities.

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

#154

Post by tormeh »

Steuard wrote: post #114
vidarh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read him not as suggesting that the public should decide what is good science, but in suggesting that it would be beneficial for more actual science to be done on subjects that interests the public, even if more conventional journal considers it beneath them and funding agencies don't consider them important. Such as this time travel paper: Clearly it capture public imagination, even if the result was negative.

I'm honestly not sure what outcome he's asking for, though. This paper did capture the public imagination! He put it on arXiv.org (where it was accepted after their very minimal but non-zero peer review), and within days he was doing a whole bunch of press interviews. What was he hoping to accomplish beyond that? Is this about getting another entry on the peer-reviewed publications list in his CV? The paper probably…

He wants more papers that capture the public imagination?

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

#155

Post by bsder »

jerf wrote: post #34
arethuza wrote: post #20

Earlier 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…

> 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.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. The Supeconducting Supercollider drove superconducting magnet technology which then made its way into all manner of other devices. Would anybody have put that amount of money into superconducting magnets without the SSC funding? Doubtful.

If you want to see fusion work, it's quite simple--convince China to announce that they are funding fusion at billion dollar levels. At that point the US will fund it at billion dollar levels and we'll have fusion before 2020.

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

#156

Post by jckt »

grkvlt wrote: post #151
jckt wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't seem to find the claim in the post where the journal editors actually said "this can't be publishable, period". I am pretty sure that when the physics journal editor rejects your paper, she isn't even actually saying "this can't be published in a physics journal", she's really saying "this can't be published in this physics journal" (unless she says otherwise, explicitly, of course).

> she isn't even actually saying Why not go with "they aren't even actually saying" rather than the faux-affirmative-action sexism of using "she" there? This really grates with me, even more so when used with traditionally male-dominated roles, such as physicists or system administrators. Yes, you're freaking out the squares with your right-on craziness, but it's really rather childish. If you (100% rightly) want to…

You're easily irritated, no?

Maybe I'm a girl and, try as I might to say "he" all the time (to avoid comments like yours), the one time it slips and I say "she" the Internet thinks it's all about some "femi-nazi" agenda of mine?

Chill out and talk to me about sexism/feminism/SJW when it's actually relevant (clue: not here).

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

#157

Post by lcnmrn »

corry wrote: post #46

Imagine: Google itself could find proof of this, given that it's organizing the world's information. In fact, Google is one of the only entities that could actually 'prove' this out. What would they do if they identified the time traveller? Locate him/her? Use his knowledge to further their plans? The knowledge may be potentially world-changing; whoever finds the traveller will be in a very powerful position. Script…

Why do you need Google? Get a web crawler, look for things that relate to your queries and you're done.

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

#158

Post by nmrm »

araes wrote: post #113
nmrm wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is and it isn't (why I included if possible). As counterpoints I would say that: - A lot of papers end up in a lot of different official journals in some form. Publishing slightly varied versions of the same work across 3-4 different journals is a time honoured tradition. - Actual journals do effectively the same thing that arXiv does, but theoretically with more 'experts' and rigour. - arXiv provides peer review,…

Thanks for replying. these are all interesting points, and I'm intrigued by your prediction. If things work out that way I would be quite happy; pay walls in front of science suck!

> - A lot of papers end up in a lot of different official journals in some form. Publishing slightly varied versions of the same work across 3-4 different journals is a time honoured tradition.

Hm. Typically in CS these happens a different scales; e.g. a few papers with the same title (workshop, conference, perhaps another conference paper with a different application or an extension to the theory, ..., journal) but vastly different levels of detail/justification or significant extensions to theory/application. So same idea, but not the same paper and not presenting the same results.

Publishing the same exact results in multiple venues is, afaik, a form of academic dishonesty and a serious black mark. Hopefully it works the same way in other fields.

> - Actual journals do effectively the same thing that arXiv does, but theoretically with more 'experts' and rigour.

I'd remove the theoretically qualifier; getting into top venues in very difficult. Although I'm sure many worthy papers are rejected, the bar is still very high.

For your last three points, I'll cede to your knowledge on the matter.

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

#159

Post by andreasvc »

andreasvc wrote: post #148
bostonpete wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

EDIT: The second "the article" should read "the editors".
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