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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

#161

Post by jerf »

bsder wrote: post #155
jerf wrote: post #34

Earlier 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…

> 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 Superco…

We are funding it at billion-dollar levels! This is the result of funding it at billion-dollar levels!

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

#162

Post by neurobro »

jckt wrote: post #156
grkvlt wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Maybe. Or maybe your wording was intentional, politically motivated, and equally as out-of-place as the attention it predictably draws.

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

#163

Post by triplenineteen »

jebus989 wrote: post #33
meric wrote: post #17

"In the response, the editor said that (s)he has now sent the article out to another editor, one who is quite famous in this area, but who also agreed that this paper should be rejected without being sent out for peer review. In this reply, the famous editor said: "I should point out that most stock markets around the planet devote considerable resources to looking for temporally anomalous market behavior --- unusual…

I just googled but couldn't hit it (+at work) but I remember an instance of someone editing Wikipedia claiming some known person had been found dead a day or so before it happened. Police investigated and found it was just a freak coincidence — just some guy vandalising the page. Kind of "a million monkeys" in practice: given there's loads of nonsense additions, at some point over a few years they will accurately pre…

I think you are referring to this: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Death_of_Nancy_Benoit_rumour_pos...

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

#164

Post by freshhawk »

jckt wrote: post #79
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…

I agree. His attempts to get his type of paper being published in established physics journals are sort of explained in his last paragraph though. He thinks that there's "room in the world of publishing for science motivated primarily BY public interest, instead of IN THE public interest". Certainly there's no reason why such a journal to exist--free speech and all. I'm not a physicist, but certainly saying that such…

Yeah, he described Omni magazine basically didn't he?

Which was pushed by "public interest" into a lot of fringe silliness and ads from outright con artists selling pseudoscience.

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

#165

Post by jckt »

neurobro wrote: post #162
jckt wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Maybe. Or maybe your wording was intentional, politically motivated, and equally as out-of-place as the attention it predictably draws.

I feel bad derailing this thread further, but you know bloody nothing about me.

My comment was on-topic. grkvlt's was not, regardless of what he thinks I meant with that one pronoun (which was wrong, anyway).

Maybe you should realise that sane women, just as much as sane men, don't think pronouns will "solve" sexism. If I'm referring to a specific person, I'll be specific. If it's some random imaginary person, it's none of your bloody business what pronoun I choose.

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

#166

Post by feralmoan »

Concept attenuation.... don't think many 57th Century Ultra-monkeys (or drones, or praeter-singularity-humans or whatever) will know or care anything about the Pope. Brilliant thought experiment though, and love that it tests the bounds of discipline and rigour!!!

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

#167

Post by mahranch »

jerf wrote: post #88
DennisP wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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."

I think even educated people have a few misconceptions about fusion energy. We have already created fusion, we can do it in our test facilities on command. The problem researchers are currently facing is getting the efficiency to a commercially viable level. Getting out much more energy than they are putting in.

The research they are doing requires 2 things; time and money (and lots of it). They're trying to get the plasma models "just right" to achieve the desired efficiency. And they're not shooting for the stars, their goals are incremental. That's important because there will never be a time where researchers will announce out of the blue "We've done it!". It will be a slow build up due to how their research is taking place.

Harnessing fusion power isn't just theoretically possible, the models are completely mathematically sound. Unfortunately for the scientists, superheated plasma is incredibly unstable, hard to predict, and hard to control. To figure out the best way to stabilize it to maximize efficiency, they have to run countless tests, review the data, then try a countless more tests. It's not impossible, we WILL have fusion power eventually, that much is not in dispute, what is up for dispute is the "when".

If fusion researchers had unlimited funds, we could have a commercially viable fusion plant supplying power to a public grid in less than 10 years. Fusion is likely the only area of science where you can literally throw money at it and achieve your goal of a viable working product. The problem is that nobody wants to spend billions of dollars every year for the next 20 years. Only governments are footing the bill, and they're notoriously unreliable when it comes to scientific research due to the shifting political landscape

There was a great thread on reddit right after the fukushima disaster where several experts were talking about this very issue. I wish I could find it, it was a fantastic read.

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

#168

Post by dameyawn »

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.…

Is there any actual scientific substance to Occam's Razor?

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

#169

Post by SoftwareMaven »

jimmaswell wrote: post #141
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?

It's sad because the interpretation of quantum physics is important scientific work. What does a dual slit experiment tell us about our world? Trying to answer that question is where the Many Worlds Interpretation came from, and it likely wouldn't have been published prior to the 80s or 90s.

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

#170

Post by chris_wot »

lucozade wrote: post #70
brento wrote: post #47

Anyone 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…

Thank you. Best tl;dr I've read in ages. If I'd read this before the article it would have saved me a lot of time.
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