What Happened When We Tried To Publish a Paper Investigating Time Travel (2014) | Hacker News Reader

What Happened When We Tried To Publish a Paper Investigating Time Travel (2014)

thewinnower.com

50 pointsDarkContinent25 comments

> How is it that a paper that could not get published had the fourth highest reported Altmetric score for all scientific contributions in 2013 (Liu 2014)?

Altmetric is not tied to scientific value. It can be used as an interesting metric though but this is a great example of how it fails catastrophically.

Are you implying the paper had no scientific value?

No, he is saying it openly.

Imply: indicate the truth or existence of (something) by suggestion rather than explicit reference.

Spot the subtle difference. Saying it openly would look like this:

"This paper has no scientific value."

How is searching the internet, especially when it finds "no evidence" of something nobody expected there to be evidence for, something that should be a topic for a "classic physics journal"?

In general, publishing studies with negative results can still be very valuable. If nothing else, they save time that might otherwise have been wasted investigating the same thing. Conversely they may provide a starting point for other researchers to look into something similar with potentially different results. They may also be useful as part of the basis of meta-studies.

So the fact that no supporting evidence of a hypothesis was found certainly shouldn't disqualify a paper from publication.

I also can't see any reason why it's relevant that their work primarily involved searching the internet. They provided logical reasoning that if time travelers exist, it would potentially be possible to discover them through this technique. Most likely time travelers don't exist, and so they don't expect to find anything, but that doesn't make it worthless to try. And since the feasibility of time travel is (as far as I understand) still technically an open question of physics, it does appear to be an appropriate, if unconventional, topic for a classic physics journal.

I'm not necessarily saying I disagree with the editors' decisions to reject the paper, and it's certainly their decision to make, but I don't see it as a foregone conclusion.

What would a positive result have even looked like? "We found evidence of time travelers, but it's probably just a sign our model is bad?" or "We discovered people from the future hiding perfectly from us, until this (presumably well-known in this future) paper was published that revealed them?"

If it's inconceivable that there could be a positive result, it's not science. It's fodder for publicity.

Your argument presupposes that we actually know something to be true before ever looking at the data. If you have the data and refuse to look at it because you think you already know what it says that is not science, that is dogma.

>If it's inconceivable that there could be a positive result, it's not science

If it's "inconceivable" from the start then you're not following the scientific method, in which nothing is "inconceivable" until proven so (not even macro-world logical impossibilities, as quantum mechanics have a few).

There's nothing really inconceivable about time travel. Greatly impossible yes, but totally conceivable. Physicists have even come up with a few mechanisms. And that's for the past.

For travelling forward in time, all it takes is going faster (literally).

I find it completely inconceivable that there are secret time travelers who would be found by searching the internet. I think it's legitimately more likely that you would discover dragons living in the earth's core by searching the internet.

With all the knowledge we have of what's possible and empirical data, your assumption is wrong. Finding time travellers on the internet would be much more likely (even if still very unlikely) than finding "dragons living in the earth's core".

In fact, they gave an opportunity for future time travelers to contact them, requesting that the contact be made before the offer was extended. Since they obviously knew at the time that that hadn't happened, the only value was in proving that if time travelers do indeed exist, they don't wish to make themselves known. (A fact that may seem obvious, but I could see a legitimate time traveler having a difficult time proving their existence, given that people will ignore significant evidence in the face of the impossible.) So in that case they actually know the result will be negative, but there's still some value in doing it.

I hate to use science fiction as an argument, but basically every sci-fi movie with time travel as a plot has no problem coming up with some way of using knowledge about the future to (at a minimum) massive profit. If Elon Musk or some other billionaire said "I'm actually from the future, here's evidence of 20 more things from the future", it would be reasonable to try to verify that claim.

As I said the last time this story got discussed on HN: just because it's publishable, doesn't mean it's publishable in a physics journal. The method they're using would provide a nice, orthogonal, independent piece of evidence on the topic of time travel.

However, it doesn't fall into a physicist's area of expertise (sorry, "wheelhouse" is the hip term now). Their method depends heavily on related hypotheses about when people would post about things, and thus relies more on the expertise of sociologists and journalists.

So they were right to reject it from physics journals, although they probably should have said, "hey, this would be of greater interest to the guys in this other kind of journal ..."

Why should research showing that 'alternative medicine' is ineffective be published in a medical journal?

It provided a method and showed the negative results. Next time you are in discussion with someone who claims that time travelers are possible, you can now refer to this research.

Even if the first two journals rejected it, it sounds like the "third physics journal geared more toward the philosophy of physics" should have been a good fit.

I agree with your point in general, but technically this paper doesn't disprove the possibility of time travel. It does however appear to prove, or at least strongly suggest, that if time travelers exist, they don't want to be found.

Negative results are as important as positive ones when trying to discover new things. The problem in general is that they are far less sexy than positive results.

Typos:

>We had plenty or "real" research projects to work on.

Or -> Of.

>I therefore decided to upload the manuscript to a standard web site that posts manuscripts and papers both before and after publication, the arXiv at http://arXig.org/.

arXig -> arXiv.

>About a month later, after some haggling, he mailed both Wilson and me each a check for $100.

I'm not sure, but I think "both" and "each" are redundant.

On another note:

The journal editors would do neither, and eventually asked me to stop emailing them on this topic. So I stopped.

That's what makes this person sane :)

Also, previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7920642

I searched for this paper before it was published but couldn't find it. Turns out I just had to wait until they wrote it.

> Eventually we narrowed the focus to two well-thought out search terms to keep things manageable: "Pope Francis" and "Comet ISON".

Yes because if I come from the future, I want to discuss the Pope and some random comet.

Was his paper as verbose as this article? If so it's no wonder that no one would publish it.

He writes like he's being paid per word....

2014.

Thanks, added.

I know, I'll do a search on the Internet for Dragons, and if I don't find any, I'll publish a paper on it. That's science, right?

Yes. You might even make it to the IgNobel prize list.

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