Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Searching for Time Travelers on the Internet | The Volokh Conspiracy

Searching for Time Travelers on the Internet | The Volokh Conspiracy

Yet another scientific study that finds zero data upon which to report. I would expect that, in a more efficient world, we would not require public money to be used in the reporting of failure. Bad enough that we funded the spurious research in the first place.

In a paper pre-published on arXiv, a pair of actual physics professors detail their exhaustive efforts to canvass the Internet for evidence of time travelers.
[Snip]
Time travel has captured the public imagination for much of the past century, but little has been done to actually search for time travelers.
[Snip}
They go on to explain that they approached the problem by scouring the Web for tweets, Google searches, and other online postings about events—such as a comet or the naming of a new pope—that hadn’t happened yet at the time they were posted. “Given practical verifiability concerns,” the researchers note, “only time travelers from the future were investigated.” That’s understandable: Time travelers from the past presumably wouldn’t have had prescient insights to offer. Sadly, it seems, neither did any time travelers from the future. “No time travelers were discovered,” the researchers report.
The tone might be a bit light, but the money spent on this research was as real as it gets.