How would we know if metre travelers are visiting the present ? You could calculate for clues — but the safe reading might be found on the internet . Unfortunately , two researchers tried to look for clues to fourth dimension travel online … and came up with nothing .
It ’s anunpublished studythat appears at the Cornell University Library ’s arXiv pre - print archive , but it ’s interesting nonetheless . alike tolooking at old photos or newsreelsfor chronological inconsistencies , or the font wherea human race named John Titor told the Internet he come from the future , researchers Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson explore the web for prescient selective information not previously available . Technically speaking , then , this was n’t a study delving into the strong-arm plausibility of clip travel ; rather , the authors tried to prove sentence travel by uncovering anachronistic ( i.e. chronologically impossible ) datum on the Internet .
All the grounds that Time Travel is Happening All Around Us
https://gizmodo.com/the-man-who-told-the-internet-hed-come-from-the-future-5869362
“ Technically , what was searched for here was not strong-arm time travelers themselves , but rather informational traces left by them , ” spell the authors .
For the study , the duo chose two terms that could n’t possibly have survive until recent times , namely “ Pope Francis ” and “ Comet ISON . ” The current Bishop of Rome is the first in history to go by that name , and ISON was only recently discovered . Nemiroff and Wilson searched both Google and Twitter hashtags for mentions of these two term over the last seven years . They also conduct log searches at NASA’sAstronomy Picture of the Day ( APOD)web site .
And because they ’re not dazed , the researchers also necessitate time travelers to respond actively to a request for prescient communicating . To do so , they asked suppositious meter travellers to to respond with a communicating let in either the hashtagged terminal figure “ # ICanChangeThePast2 ” or “ # ICannotChangeThePast2 ” on or before 2013 August .
Unfortunately ( or fortuitously , reckon on your opinion of time travelling ) , Nemiroff and Wilson found perfectly no evidence oftime travellers . But they let in this is n’t definitive substantiation that clock time travel is n’t potential . The researchers close their study with these words :
How do we know time traveler are n’t constantly changing the past times ?
First , it may be physically out of the question for time travelers to allow for any lasting remnants of their stay in the past , including even non - corporeal informational remnants on the Internet . Next , it may be physically inconceivable for us to find such information as that would violate some yet - unknown law of physics , possibly like to the Chronology Protection Conjecture [ 16 ] . Furthermore , time travelers may not want to be find , and may be good at covering their tracks . Additionally , time travelers just may not have left the specific event tags that we were look for for . Finally , our search were not comprehensive , so that even if time travelers left the precise event tags search for here , we might have missed them due to human error , supervision , incompleteness of cyberspace catalogs and search , or inaccurate contentedness time tatter .
Full prop to Nemiroff and Wilson for a highly inventive and original cogitation .
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