Searching the Internet For Evidence of Time Travelers

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Here's an interesting paper by two physicists at Michigan Technological University who have come up with a practical methodology for finding time travelers through the internet. 'Time travel has captured the public imagination for much of the past century, but little has been done to actually search for time travelers. Here, three implementations of Internet searches for time travelers are described, all seeking a prescient mention of information not previously available. The first search covered prescient content placed on the Internet, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific terms in tweets on Twitter. The second search examined prescient inquiries submitted to a search engine, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific search terms submitted to a popular astronomy web site. The third search involved a request for a direct Internet communication, either by email or tweet, pre-dating to the time of the inquiry. Given practical verifiability concerns, only time travelers from the future were investigated. No time travelers were discovered. Although these negative results do not disprove time travel, given the great reach of the Internet, this search is perhaps the most comprehensive to date.' Stephen Hawking's similar search (video) also provided negative results."

Comments

Whew.

[Kaenneth]

Haven't been found out yet!

Re:Whew.

[melikamp]

Of course not. Whenever anyone gets "found out", a sexy brunette time-policewoman goes back in time an fixes it. Permanently.

Re:Whew.

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't been found out yet!

Ya, me neither. I've been traveling through time my entire life, but so far have managed to blend in with the crowd enough that nobody has noticed me yet.

Re:Whew.

[pigiron]

If you do not speak English, I am at your disposal with 187 other languages along with their various dialects and sub-tongues.

Re:Whew.

[ChromeAeonium]

One might assume that a good time traveler would be aware that someone was doing this to search for them. Well, that's what you'd hope anyway...you wouldn't want just anyone traveling through time. Who knows what damage some temporally displaced dumbass with a sports almanac could do.

Re:Whew.

[JWSmythe]

Most of us don't admit to being time travelers.

Oh shit. Well, sorry. You'll be dead by last week. If it makes you feel better, she is *really* hot, and will kill you quickly and somewhat painlessly.

Re:Whew.

[Anonymous Coward]

Traveling through time is actually very easy, it's the trying to stay still part that's hard. Or, god forbid, going faster forward.

Re:Whew.

[JustOK]

I changed her mind.

Re:Whew.

[JWSmythe]

Oh, you didn't sleep with her, did you? That never goes well.

Re:Whew.

[JustOK]

No, I staid awake

Re:Whew.

[DexterIsADog]

Who knows what damage some temporally displaced dumbass with a sports almanac could do.

Stop talking about that!

Why don't you make like a tree, and get out of here!

Re:Whew.

[Joce640k]

In other news: There's people at University who believe in time travel...

What next: Ways to detect the Easter Bunny?

Re:Whew.

[s.petry]

So do you dismiss the theory of wormholes that would allow time travel? Perhaps you only dismiss the fact that we live long enough to take advantage of wormholes?

I am very much a skeptic, but to resort to reducto ad absurdum when we believe the physics to be correct is baffling. If you think the physics is wrong, lets hear it.

Re:Whew.

[danlip]

You were unadventurous? I think you mean "stayed".

Re:Whew.

[lgw]

Physics puts time travel in the same bucket as God: we can't prove it's impossible, but it's not needed to explain anything. Spending resources looking for time travelers is a bit nuts. OTOH, purely theoretical exploration of the math around time travel is valuable, because the areas where theory describes oddities are often the most productive areas to investigate.

Re:Whew.

[fahrbot-bot]

Most of us don't admit to being time travelers.

Technically, we're all time travelers - all of us, forever going forward in time.

Re:Whew.

[s.petry]

I think that your statements need clarification. _YOU_ believe that God and Theoretic Physics are in the same bucket. _YOU_ believe that contemplating philosophical questions that we can prove today is "nuts". That does not mean that others believe the same as you do, and to them the questions have enough merit to pursue.

To me, I see things quite differently. All inquiry leads to new inquiry. While we can certainly prove some things wrong over time, if the questions were ignored because someone labelled them "nuts" we really would be lacking in knowledge.

Re:Whew.

[lgw]

I think that your statements need clarification. _YOU_ believe that God and Theoretic Physics are in the same bucket. _YOU_ believe that contemplating philosophical questions that we can prove today is "nuts"

Wow, way to argue against a post you completely made up instead of the post I actually wrote.

"Theoretic Physics" is precisely what says "we can't quite prove time travel impossible, but everything makes sense without it". As I said, pursuing the math in hopes of learning more, one way or the other, is normal theoretical physics, but experimental science is simply not in the Invisible Pink Unicorn business.

There are unlimited fanciful ideas about reality, and quite limited experimental resources, so a higher bar than "we can't quite prove it impossible" is required.

Re:Whew.

[Runaway1956]

Just OK?

That's what she said.

Re: Whew.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the problem with time travel... Us assuming that a time traveller either wants to be found, or wants to change anything. How many time travellers will be familiar with our internet?

Like, think about radio and television. If someone were in space and somewhere where our broadcasts reached, how many alien civilizations would be able to decode FM radio let alone analog or digital video streams? AM radio is the only radio that can be listened to with little more than a long piece of metal and something to amplify the sound.

Now apply that reasoning to the internet. Someone who comes from... The year 3000 may not be familiar with the internet. Maybe they have some kind of quantum communication system that is completely secure and peer to peer and doesn't resemble our internet in the slightest. I could imagine a time traveller from 2200 confused about keyboards and mice. Likewise let's say a time traveller from. 3000 went to 1800 and then to 2000, you can't search the numerous BBS systems that were still around in 2000, and functional search engines did not yet exist. Yet they could have knowledge of the future that was told to people like HG Wells passively so that it did wind up in public record, just not in a shape we can recognize.

Like this experiments problem is literately that it can only find a time traveller that travelled from a near future to a near past (a 10 year window or so.) you are far more like to verify the existence of someone who can jump from parallel similar worlds or someone suffering from a mental disorder that just so happens to have better than average predictions.

Re:Whew.

[s.petry]

That's not what you wrote? It may not be what you intended, but it is surely what you wrote. Here Physics puts time travel in the same bucket as God: we can't prove it's impossible, but it's not needed to explain anything. which claims similarity and dismisses both concepts. Here Spending resources looking for time travelers is a bit nuts. which claims your belief about pursuit of these topics as "nuts". And finally here OTOH, purely theoretical exploration of the math around time travel is valuable, because the areas where theory describes oddities are often the most productive areas to investigate. where you change your position enough to claim that only what _you_ consider productive matters (which of course is subjective).

Re:Whew.

[Anonymous Coward]

She is a He.

Re:Whew.

[lgw]

lgw: "Physics puts time travel in the same bucket as God: we can't prove it's impossible"
s.petry: "_YOU_ believe that God and Theoretic Physics are in the same bucket"

So, no, that's not what I wrote. It's all the difference in the world.

Also, throughout I was clear on the distinction between theoretical exploration "purely theoretical exploration of the math around time travel is valuable," and experimental. You still seem unclear on the distinction.

The point of theoretical physics is to go nuts, exploring the details "where theory describes oddities are often the most productive areas to investigate". It's the filtering process for experimental physics, where there are "quite limited experimental resources, so a higher bar than "we can't quite prove it impossible" is required".

Re:Whew.

[s.petry]

Fair enough on the first point, and I apologize for the statement. That said, the argument changes very little. By theoretical physics principles, time travel is possible. So the issue is still that you believe it's "nuts" to investigate whether or not it's actually being used by someone in the future.

As a skeptic, I happen to share your opinion that "I" would not waste time looking for it. But that is just my opinion. What harm is there for these people to investigate? We know it's possible. Further, they came up with a method of testing. Their method may not work, but this is exactly how we make progress.

It's the filtering process for experimental physics, where there are "quite limited experimental resources, so a higher bar than "we can't quite prove it impossible" is required".

This, as with the first point, is your opinion and I believe goes the wrong direction (my opinion). I see that as we come up with concepts and try to prove them, we come up with new concepts and new methods of proof. Science is all about progression, and if you say "don't do that one" it really needs good reason other than "I think its nuts". Searching for ways of killing off certain genes is something I would agree is nuts to investigate. Searching for faster ways to infect someone with a disease is also something I would agree is nuts. On the surface, I see no such harm in looking for time travelers.

Perhaps you believe it's frivolous or that science should be studying better things, and that's okay. I might agree with that if all of science was altruistic, but it's not.

Re:Whew.

[lgw]

By theoretical physics principles, time travel is possible

Only in the sense of "not proven mathematically impossible", not in the sense of "it's a consistent model for observed data needing explanation" nor even "it's possible with stuff we no exists, and it's just a question of engineering". The only theoretical model for time travel requires either a wormhole held open with fictional "exotic matter", that could exists in theory but there's no evidence for, or a non-standard model of general relativity. Very far-fetched stuff.

I see that as we come up with concepts and try to prove them, we come up with new concepts and new methods of proof. Science is all about progression, and if you say "don't do that one" it really needs good reason other than "I think its nuts".

With limited resources you have to choose what to fund. Priority goes to stuff that there's some evidence for, or some other strong reason to believe is true. Mere creative writing not yet proven impossible must be given lower priority. I didn't think that was at all controversial.

Re:Whew.

[s.petry]

Only in the sense of "not proven mathematically impossible", not in the sense of "it's a consistent model for observed data needing explanation" nor even "it's possible with stuff we no exists, and it's just a question of engineering". The only theoretical model for time travel requires either a wormhole held open with fictional "exotic matter", that could exists in theory but there's no evidence for, or a non-standard model of general relativity. Very far-fetched stuff.

Look at it in true false statement on both sides. Your "not proven mathematically impossible" also matches with "mathematically possible". You are putting your own bias on the science.

With limited resources you have to choose what to fund. Priority goes to stuff that there's some evidence for, or some other strong reason to believe is true. Mere creative writing not yet proven impossible must be given lower priority. I didn't think that was at all controversial.

While I agree in a general sense, show me where science has become altruistic and only looks for the betterment of humanity and I'll change my opinion. Currently we have people with too much money that pay people (too little) to figure out how they can gain more wealth. We have scientists working on all sorts of nasty things which are much worse than this, which I perceive at worst as a waste of time. Complaining about this one is like complaining that your feather pillow is too soft while bed bugs chomp on you while you sleep.

Re:Whew.

[Anonymous Coward]

The cat that I had in first grade 18 years ago, who saw me through cancer and chemotherapy, died last week, and my brain refuses to stop traveling back in time.

Re:Whew.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't we be looking in psych hospitals? Because like the women who were victims of LOVEINT, that's probably where they'll be until someone blows the whistle.

Re: Whew.

[davesag]

Presumably such a Time Traveller would have been given some training, or read up on the history of the time they are travelling to. Though, perhaps not, given the way some people behave now when they travel between countries. Maybe time travellers are accidental - that that also seems unlikely. In fact the whole existence of time travellers seems unlikely, deliberate or not.

Christopher Reeve

[fustakrakich]

is somewhere in time

Re:Christopher Reeve

[Penguinshit]

I liked that movie.

Re:Christopher Reeve

[Anonymous Coward]

If I could go back in time, I'd warn myself not to see it.

Re:Christopher Reeve

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't watch "Somewhere in Time"!

Re:Christopher Reeve

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, future me! But we have to go farther back, in this timeline I already saw it.

But wait, if past me didn't see it, how will future me know he should warn past me?? Arrrrgh! This time-travel paradox stuff is a real bitch!

Dear Twitter Admins

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Twitter Admins

Now you know what to do for April Fool's Day.

Your time-travelling student,
T.S.

Re:Dear Twitter Admins

[CTU]

Twily...come on that is so mean

Re:Dear Twitter Admins

[Anonymous Coward]

Twily...come on that is so mean

Playing pranks lilke this is part of the job for up-and-coming demigods, and she was mentored by the best. (And I guess in addition to the Lorentz equations, we can now add the many-worlds hypothesis to the list of things she's figured out.)

Twitter and astronomy

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone coming back in time bother with Twitter? When I go back in time, I can't wait to setup a new MySpace page in the year 2001!

Re:Twitter and astronomy

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone coming back in time bother with Twitter? When I go back in time, I can't wait to setup a new MySpace page in the year 2001!

HOLD ON.
Who said anything about traveling backwards in time? I conducted the same type of search described in the paper, but instead looked for indications that someone should know something but does not, which would mean they have been traveling forward in time. And the number of positive matches is incredibly high.

Re:Twitter and astronomy

[Sique]

Yes, because travelling forward in time is actually possible. It's called relativistic time dilation. Mostly this gets interpreted as the local time being slower than the time in the space surrounding it due to the speed of the object the time is valid for. But one could also interpret it as the object moving forward in time (actually in time-space).

Re:Twitter and astronomy

[Anonymous Coward]

Move forward in time - you hardly have to be moving at reletavistic speeds to do THAT.

Re:Twitter and astronomy

[Sique]

I was referring to the classical meaning of movement: having a speed difference to your environment (or a referrential system). If you are moving at the same speed than your referrential system, you aren't moving at all.

Re:Twitter and astronomy

[hummassa]

you can just slip into a coma for a couple of years; hell, if you live outside your country for a year -- and make a serious effort to acclimate in the new country, instead of tuning in your equivalent to Rede Globo via internet and cable -- you can seriously miss some pop culture icons.

Re:Twitter and astronomy

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying the GCC deniers have been on a spaceship going at relativistic speeds the past decade?

Re:Twitter and astronomy

[Anonymous Coward]

I conducted the same type of search described in the paper, but instead looked for indications that someone should know something but does not

So... pretty much everyone you've ever met, then?

Re:Twitter and astronomy

[JWSmythe]

So *YOU* are the bastard that told Tom to set it up. No problem, we'll erase you before you get a chance to go back.

Re:Twitter and astronomy

[Rob the Bold]

Yes, because travelling forward in time is actually possible.

I'm doing it right now.

Re:Twitter and astronomy

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easier to avoid thinking about the timelike dimension as special, in spite of the metric signature on practically all useful distance-gauging metrics.

Set c=1. Distances are now measured on all four axes in seconds. The axes are now identical, in spite of the sign difference applied to one (which one is arbitrary, and can be subject to rotation, but is conventionally the timelike one, because it makes it easier to remember which axis doesn't need the "c" returned to it under a change of metric).

Let's consider an ordinary human observer measuring the movement of nearby slow-moving objects using conventional cartesian coordinates - the objects will traverse a short distance (in (light nano-)seconds) along the x,y,z axes and an enormous distance along the t one (in (nano-)seconds.

If we introduce gravitation and set G=1 as well as c=1, measure distances in nanoseconds, and our metric is simply dS = sqrt (- dx^2 - dy^2 - dz^2 + dt^2), which is approximately the 3d cartesian formula for three dimensions with a change of sign and the addition of a time delta, when the observer throws a ball in a straight line along the x axis, the ball will travel a few light-nanoseconds along the x axis, no distance along the y axis, and travel up and then down along the z axis by perhaps as much as one or two light-nanoseconds. However, the ball will also travel billions of light-nanoseconds along the t axis, so when the ball hits the ground, dS, the distance in space-time measured by the observer, is several billion.

Gravitation explains why the movement along the z axis is constrained. A ball thrown in a level park will move a short way up the z axis and then to just below the origin (unless the observer is really short, or the ball is caught by another person). A ball thrown off a cliff will move a short way up the z axis and then a fairly long way below the origin. An extremely massive object thrown in the park or from the cliff likely not move up the z axis much at all. Indeed, a sufficiently massive object *cannot* in practice be moved up the z axis -- its travel along the z axis is one-way-only. However it is a practical rather than physical constraint.

How about movement along the t axis? In general travel is in only one direction (futureward). Just as gravitation impedes the ability of our thrower to move an object feeling the force of gravity upwards -- heavier objects will move in a shorter distance and can only be moved upwards more slowly -- it also impedes the ability of our thrower to move an object more slowly futurewards. A really really strong ball thrower might cause a ball to move at escape velocity, in which case the ball might move upwards indefinitely; likewise, an especially strong ball thrower might cause a ball to move relativistically which causes the ball to move along the time axis at a rate the observer would measure of less than one second per second.

That last point is relativistic time dilation.

The constraint is huge - objects have to reach large fractions of the speed of light along one or more spacelike axes to be constrained to slow speeds along the timelike axis, when measured conventionally.

Unlike in Special Relativity, in General Relativity there is a complete democracy of causality cones, however light cone is a practical limit for consistency by observers like us, who have never measured any object that moves faster than light, and who expect that any local measurement of the speed of light anywhere will be the same. That said, one can think sensibly about the limit of movement along t as an object reaches c, when c is not set to unity -- the faster an object is moving along a spacelike axis, the slower it is moving futurewards along the timelike one. Light, for example, "experiences no time" because its high spacelike velocity cancels out its timelike velocity. An object moving faster than light approaches the limit from the other side; as it slows to the speed of light along the spacelike axes, it experi

Re:Twitter and astronomy

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a jolly good comment, old chap! Now can anyone spell out to me how to operate these new-fangled horseless carriages?

Re:Twitter and astronomy

[7-Vodka]

You got me. I'm traveling forward in time right now.

But you can't stop me.

Time travelers not allowed to post prescient info

[mysidia]

Posting such info could endanger the future, or risk causality paradox issues --- changing the future in such a way, that time travel is not discovered.

Time travelers from the future are historians.... they may be tweeting, but they are tweeing about the past (our present), and possibly sending those tweets into the future.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

found her!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/630/

Re:found her!

[Joce640k]

I think this matches the thread/site better: https://xkcd.com/567/

Not all time travelers log into the Net

[Taco Cowboy]

And not all of us do time travels all the time. :)

Re:Not all time travelers log into the Net

[Anonymous Coward]

And not all of us do time travels all the time. :)

I think most of us do. I had no idea there was a way to stop, or to adjust the rate of movement.

Re:Not all time travelers log into the Net

[camperdave]

And not all of us do time travels all the time. :)

I think most of us do. I had no idea there was a way to stop, or to adjust the rate of movement.

Sure there is. Gravity wells, travelling near the speed of light...

Welp.

[Anonymous Coward]

*speaks into cell phone*

The Organization has infiltrated Slashdot. I am posting anonymously as a result.

El Psy Congroo.

Re:Welp.

[Anonymous Coward]

The IBM 5100 is still waiting to be picked up.

Re:Welp.

[Anonymous Coward]

Search the internet? Why not just look up John Titor in Wikipedia?

Re:Welp.

[Anonymous Coward]

Psyolence will be used against those that reveal themselves.

How do we know...

[Anonymous Coward]

That they didn't know about this research and ensure all comments posted prior to this date were pro-actively/retroactively deleted/undone?

Well if they do exist...

[Anonymous Coward]

If time travelers do exist, they would have the information of exactly when and what was being searched for. If I didn't want the past to know time travel will be possible, I wouldn't leave any evidence to be found by these searches. And then there's the whole argument between a fixed vs. non-fixed past...

Re:Well if they do exist...

[icebike]

So you presume someone from today knows every thing that happened in the past? Nothing went unnoticed?
Or everyone meeting a time traveler would rush out and tell someone?

Re:I didn't meet myself yet

[Ambvai]

I think it would be all the money you spent on coffee.

A little late for this...

[Anonymous Coward]

We already have evidence on the internet that time travel is not only possible, but that at least one of them has traveled to our era. We've had that proof for over a decade now. Have some people really not heard of John Titor?

Re:A little late for this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, I was about to post the same thing, but you beat me to it.

They're probably too new to the internet to have heard of Titor during the era of his famous kook-dom. Almost everyone online now is.

Re:A little late for this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, I was about to post the same thing, but you beat me to it.

They're probably too new to the internet to have heard of Titor during the era of his famous kook-dom. Almost everyone online now is.

Welp, except for those of us youngsters familiar with Steins;Gate, which has already been referenced above.

No doubt, this general lack of awareness is further proof that the timeline's been tampered with.

El Psy Congroo.

Maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they are out there, but are being VERY careful about contaminating the timeline...

Re:Maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

I never really understood this paradox hullaballoo. Simply by virtue of displacing oxygen or, hell, introducing a different quantum state on the volume they occupy that was previously unoccupied, the time travellers have already irrevocably changed any "timeline".

The redneck gut-science tells me that, therefore, either the many-worlds thing is true and "time-travel" is just moving between states or that there is no such thing as a paradox, the timeline that spawned you ceases to exist the moment you go back in time because you have already changed it by arriving. No killing your grandfather needed.

Can anyone with an actual physics background comment on this?

Re:Maybe

[kasperd]

Maybe they are out there, but are being VERY careful about contaminating the timeline...

A new technology being invented and not a single person doing something incredibly stupid with it? That does not sound plausible to me. The much more plausible explanation is that it is just not physically possible to use a time machine to travel to a point in time before the creation of said time machine. So if a time machine is build in 2015, then somebody from the year 2020 can travel back to 2015, but they cannot travel back to 2014.

That idea is of course entirely hypothetical. There is no way the first generation of time machines will actually be of a quality, that will last for 5 years. It will go like any other technology as it matures the the products will last longer and longer. But eventually the manufacturers will realize that building them too durable will undermine future markets. And then they will start building them such that they last just a standard-deviation or two past the warranty period.

We all know what will happen once people realize, that they just don't build time machines like that anymore. There will be an incredible traffic of people travelling back to the year 2030 or so, where the most durable time machines were build, just so they can pick up a quality time machine.

Re:Maybe

[lgw]

That's basically correct. Another idea is that of "protected history", where time travel is possible but can't change the timeline at all, because the quantum dice only get rolled once, so the time traveler was always part of the timeline. That one holds up quite well mathematically, as it turns out.

But you're correct overall: there's no "you can change small things, but not big things" anywhere outside of fiction - it's all or nothing.

thanks for ruining it

[Anonymous Coward]

now that you have publicized your methodology they will/have already stopped and/or covered their tracks to prevent this evidence from contaminating the space time continuum.

Great story!

[Billly Gates]

Worthy of front page news and very technical and insightful for all the science and computer internets who make up slashdot.

Why would wefind one?

[CTU]

The history of the world ins quiet long compared to just the part of it humans have been around so really our time is a small fraction of when and where time travelers could go it. For all we know they could be at the global orgy that happens in the future :P

doubtful

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if the tech hurdles were overcome - and laws didn't forbid interference outright, I'd want to keep a pretty goddamn low profile.

Some have already been found out. . .

[physicsphairy]

"How did they know it was me!?" -- time traveling Hitler, participating in any online debate

Why would time travellers come here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, there are far more interesting times they could go to. I think human culture is pretty much fixed at this point - why would anybody waste time travelling to an era the same as their own?

Re:Why would time travellers come here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you *kidding* ?!

Human culture is never fixed. In fact, we are on the precipice of some really interesting times. Modern concepts of, say capitalism, didn't exist 500 years ago and will not exist in 500 years. Our modern religions will have morphed slowly over time to be vastly different in 500 years. A human speaking the lingua franca 5 centuries from now will likely sound almost incomprehensible to us and he will have cultural taboos and hangups that will seem downright alien to us.

And that's before we even take technological advancement into account. Instantaneous communication, for one, makes a type of communication possible that, to a 17th century person would seem unbelievably rude. What would direct brain-to-brain interfaces do (should we ever get them)?

We are in for exciting times. Human culture is anything but "set"

Re:Why would time travellers come here?

[Anonymous Coward]

You've been watching too much SyFy. Try watching the news channels and then come back and tell me human culture is going to change or improve from here.

Not a Complete Failure

[some old guy]

They did, however, find L. Ron Hubbard, Blackadder, and the Easter Bunny. Well worth the research!

Re:Not a Complete Failure

[steelfood]

But what about Waldo?

Re:Not a Complete Failure

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you remember arguing with zat obstinent troll? Zat's right! I vas zee camgirl in zee corner of the screen!

Time travel is not possible without

[Spy Handler]

also having excellent spaceships. By excellent I mean able to accelerate to a significant percent of lightspeed.

Say you wanna go back to 1920 and assassinate Hitler while he was a nobody and easy to get to. You build a time machine and POOF, you're in 1920. And you're also dead, since you're also in the vacuum of space... unless your time machine is also a spaceship. The earth is in a different position around the sun, and the sun has orbited to a different spot in the galaxy, and our galaxy has shifted position in the local group, and all this time the universe itself has expanded quite a bit.

I have no idea how far from earth you would be if you time traveled from 2014 to 1920, but I'm guessing it would be measured in parsecs.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[Anonymous Coward]

By a "significant percentage", I would assume you mean "faster than". In that case, you can simply say that time travel is not possible wiht spaceships, either.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[buswolley]

What is this was the real sticking point in time travel? :)

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a very good point actually.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[blancolioni]

I've time travelled from the 1970s to 2014, and I'm not dead ...

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[ColaMan]

Depends on how your time machine works.
If it's a 'jump' or sudden discontinuity between one time and another, you're in trouble.

If it's a 'linear' style time machine (a-la H.G. Wells) and you're merely pulling the 'flow of time' lever from it's rest postion of "Forwards at 1x speed" to something like "Backwards at 200x speed"..... then you're much more likely to remain attached to whatever continent you happen to be in.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[93 Escort Wagon]

Another Red Dwarf fan, I see...

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[little1973]

There was a short story about this (I can't remember the title). The story was about travelling back to Jesus's time to verify Jesus's existence but the travelers found themselves in space as Earth was elsewhere.

They had to travel ~220 million years back since that's the time the Solar system takes a turn around the galaxy's core and the Earth position would be the same when they started their travel.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[dvh.tosomja]

That's exactly why REAL time machine only change time, not space.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[Anonymous Coward]

One word, Relativity, all velocity is relative so the fact that the earth spinning and travelling around the sun, the sun around the galaxy, the galaxy is moving in the local group, the local group is moving towards the great attractor, the universe is expanding and that expansion is accelerating etc. so are you stationary, or moving at nearly light speed or does only part of this count...?

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[amaurea]

You're assuming absolute positions here. In general relativity, it is equally valid to consider the Earth to be at rest, with the rest of the universe moving and rotating in a complicated fashion. But I agree that it doesn't make sense to think of time-travel only in terms of time - it's space-time that matters.

In special relativity, the only way to travel to the past that I'm aware of is through superluminal motion, but general relativity is more flexible, and allows time travel by distorting space-time in inventive ways. Perhaps the most commonly considered time travel thought experiment in GR is via wormhole. Any wormhole potentially allows time travel: even a purely spatial wormhole can be turned into a temporal wormhole by using time dialation (from acceleration or gravity) to make less time pass for one exit from the wormhole than another. So one could, for example, make time machine by making a local wormhole (this step is left as an exercise for the reader), taking one end on a spaceship and making it orbit close to a black hole for a few years, and then bringing it back. If, say, 10 years passed for one end and only 5 years for the other, then entering the "old" end would let you exit 5 years earlier. But interestingly, one could not use this time machine to travel earlier into the past than when the wormhole was first created.

Another interesting way of distorting space that has been investigated is the warp drive, which continuously distorts space around an object. This can be used both for superluminal travel or time travel by changing the parameters. The problem, though, for all these "distort spacetime to travel to the past" approaches is that to get the correct shape for the distortion requires matter with exotic properties such as negative energy density, which has never been observed.

In common for all these time travel mechanisms is that they aren't simply "POOF, and you're there", they all involve continuous trajectories in space-time, and so don't have the problem you mentioned.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[Anonymous Coward]

This.
Not to mention the fact that the universe is traveling through time also. Which means that if you travel back in time even half a second... you are out of sync with the universe and would find yourself in an empty void.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[mysidia]

I have no idea how far from earth you would be if you time traveled from 2014 to 1920, but I'm guessing it would be measured in parsecs.

It's only really going to be useful time travel, if you can move with the earth, as you go back in time -- it makes no sense to travel back in time from 2014 to 1920, and then take 90+ years of travel in a spaceship to meet earth.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[angel'o'sphere]

Neglecting the fact that the whole galaxy was "else where" ~220 million years before.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[DexterIsADog]

You're assuming absolute positions here. In general relativity, it is equally valid to consider the Earth to be at rest, with the rest of the universe moving and rotating in a complicated fashion.

Aha! So the Catholic Church was right!

They really ought to take back that apology to Galileo.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[CyberZen]

Yeah. You'd need to account for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[LongearedBat]

Serious off-topic question:

Say we're looking at Earth and the moon from a space station located somewhere along the moon's rotational axis around Earth.

If we're "rotating" at the same rate, then by our calculations Earth and the moon should fall into each other.

If we're "rotating" fast enough, then by our calculations Earth and the moon should fall away from each other.

Clearly that doesn't happen. In fact, by measuring the mass of each body and by observing that the distance between them barely changes, we can work out how fast the rotation ought to be.

Surely that would mean that rotation is absolute, rather than relative. (Of course, translationally, velocities still appear to relative.)

Or am I grossly misunderstanding something?

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[MozeeToby]

It would be difficult, but not impossible to come up with a system of time travel that would not have this problem. Wormholes are frequently used in science fiction and by some calculations would allow backwards time travel. Of course, that requires one end of the wormhole to be nearby (and still requires the use of unrealistically good spaceships). Alternatively, you could say that while traveling back through time you continue to interact with the universe gravitationally a la dark matter. Then all you'd need to do is put your time machine somewhere with a stable orbit for the duration of your trip and start coming back.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[invid]

As far as I know the only way to go back in time involves the use of wormholes. Where you arrive in the past depends on the position of the other end of the wormhole. If you want to go to a specific time and place you have to hope someone created a wormhole then and there, and then brought one of the ends into the future using time dilation.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[Anonymous Coward]

In general relativity, it is equally valid to consider the Earth to be at rest, with the rest of the universe moving and rotating in a complicated fashion.

This statement is incorrect. There are certain types of reference frames which are "indistinguishable" in GR --- for example, if you're sealed in a box and can't see the outside universe, you won't be able to tell the difference between "floating at rest in deep space" and "plummeting in freefall towards a planet." However, you can tell whether or not you're rotating or not (by, e.g., centripetal acceleration). The earth unambiguously moves around the sun (or, they both move around the center-of-mass of the system, which is pretty much the sun) no matter what GR reference frame you're using.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[alexo]

I routinely time-travel at a speed of 3600 sec/hour.
Fast enough for you?

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're on to something - in movie adaptations the time machine from H.G. Wells' story is typically depicted as being in constant contact with the Earth during the voyage through time. No need for an FTL drive, just good shock absorbers =)

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to think this too, until I realized that motion thru space is also motion thru time, and vice versa. Thus, if you travel in time you are also implicitly traveling thru space, meaning that I zap myself back 1hr in time, since I am traversing space-time I am also zapping myself back in space 1hr, and arriving at the point in space-time that the Earth was 1hr ago
   

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[jjk3]

In all fairness, you have an excellent spaceship, the Earth.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[Anonymous Coward]

> The problem, though, for all these "distort spacetime to travel to the past" approaches is that to get the correct shape for the distortion requires matter with exotic properties such as negative energy density, which has never been observed.

Of course not, it probably all flung itself backwards through time.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[thoromyr]

A physicist/author wrote a book (back in the late 80s I think) that covered some interesting ideas. One for time travel was to build a ring and spin it up. It need enormous mass (I forget if one stellar mass was supposed to be enough) and apparently you could compensate for not quite being able to reach the speed of light in its rotation with a charge. What it would (theoretically) do is distort space time such that the angle passing through the ring would determine the time displacement. You could only come out while it was spinning -- meaning you couldn't travel before it was built or after it stopped.

I always found this sort of thing fascinating. If you think about it, there's no real issue with backward time travel, but hooboy, who you *really* want to be there when it finally becomes live and everyone or thing that is shooting for travel to the past comes through? I'm not sure such a device would stay functional long enough to be used...

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[Anonymous Coward]

And you can make a wormhole for your time machine by finding a black hole and making it spin fast enough that the event horizon forms a torus around it. This lets you get past the nasty problem of diving into the black hole itself.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea either, but the upper limit is about 1 light year (about a third of a parsec).

The sun is moving thru the galaxy at about .008 light years per year. The galaxy is headed towards constellation hydra about .002 light years per year. (Note that the galaxy's motion in the local cluster is not very well known, but .002 ly/y is largest number I have seen put forward).

Round up to a hundred years, and it works out to a nice even light year, assuming the two velocities add - which they won't.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't accounted for galactic rotation.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[amaurea]

Not really. When transforming to the co-rotating coordinate system you will find that you have introduced a gravitational field that just cancels the attraction between the Earth and the Moon. In Newtonian gravity this would be called a fictitious force (the centrifugal force), but in general relativity it is as real a gravitational field as any other, and can be considered to be a sort of frame-dragging set up by all the other objects in the universe, which are also rotating around the Earth in this frame.

So in that sense rotation is relative, just like position and velocity. But it can't be denied that there are some reference frames that make things simpler than others, and by following your thought experiment we can arrive at a frame with a particularly simple metric, which we would call the non-rotating one. In that sense you could call rotation "absolute", I guess. But it is a very weak sense of absolute: The reason why that frame is particularly simple is due to the overall velocity distribution in the universe. This is similar to how we can measure our speed relative to the cosmic microwave background, effectively giving us a "speed relative to the universe", while absolute velocity still does not matter to any physical laws.

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you. Been wondering about this for quite some time, but not knowing who to ask. :)
(LongearedBat)

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, no, in GR it would be a pseudogravitational field, or sometimes a Coriolis field, especially in precisely this application.

Pseudogravitational fields are useful tools but cause some controversy when people argue that they are substantive, similarly to how manifold substantivalist arguments work, or alternatively that they tend to lead towards the use of pseudotensors (like Landau-Lifshitz) which some people are uncomfortable with, usually on the grounds that frames of reference are inappropriate tools to use in GR problems.

Baez deals with this sort of thing entertainingly here:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/TwinParadox/twin_gr.html

'There's a reason why such forces carry the prefix "pseudo",' and the argument that introducing pseudotensors essentially turns a GR problem into an SR one (which is handy, thanks Albert!).

Re:Time travel is not possible without

[thunderclap]

Any rational development of time travel would take into account the local position of the earth relative to its place in space etc. Why else was the entire backseat of doc brown deloran filled with gear? But seriously, learning the location of the earth relative to everything at a specific period of time is easy. Its appearing in the right location thats hard. what if that beautiful field you picked was a building in 1929?

Well don't post about it!

[Bo'Bob'O]

If you post about it, there will be a record of how we will find you. What you have to do is not tell anyone how you are looking, then not tell anyone when you -do- find them. That way, they will never find out in the future how they were fond in the past and try to avoid it when they travel back in time.

Logically, since nobody has ever posted proof of time travelers, that means they must have found some.

Missing methodology

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Have they looked for power surges of 1.21 gigawatts?

Re:Missing methodology

[bobthesungeek76036]

Wouldn't that be "1.21 jiggawatts"?

Re:Missing methodology

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

I literally started to type it that way, and corrected it, saying to myself "Nah, some Slashdot pedant...".

Re:Missing methodology

[wbr1]

Found it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDj7gvc_dsA

Re:Missing methodology

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't that be "1.21 jiggawatts"?

Ownlee if yoo insist on spelling everything foneticallee all the time.

Re:Missing methodology

[Anonymous Coward]

Jigga what?!

Someone else's problem

[bobthesungeek76036]

I'm pretty much convinced that if one travels back in time, you would be by default in a different time continuum. Your mere presence in a past time would alter it such it will be forked from our own time line. So our "internet" will be oblivious to said time travelers. You would have to figure out a way to search all time lines "internets" to find such evidence. Good luck with that...

Re:Someone else's problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds to me like you assume that this is "the original" time continuum that didn't result from someone traveling back to it.
If time travel is possible there will likely exist a very large number of time continuum where only one is "the original".
So, out of all possible time continuum, why is it most likely that we live in the one that wasn't created by time-traveling?

Or to rephrase it. If your theory isn't a crackpot one it only changes what the search will be able to find. That is that if it doesn't find evidence of time-traveling that could be considered an indication of us being in "the original" rather than proof of time travel being impossible.

Re:Someone else's problem

[bobthesungeek76036]

I guess I am saying that this timeline is "the original". If you buy in to my theory then no one can travel back and insert themselves into a timeline. One will fork immediately. I'm 54yo so no one has travelled back during my lifetime. Overlapping my life are my parents and their parents and so on. So for all of mandkind this timeline is "the original". The only way it is not is if someone travelled back in time before mandkind and altered time's course. I'm not going there...

Re:Someone else's problem

[jemmyw]

Why would this one be the original? In your scenario someone could have travelled back in time to near the beginning of mankind and altered it such that your family line was born instead of another.

I would suggest that if it is possible to travel back to any point in time and fork it then it is more likely you're in a fork than in the original. This is the same reasoning that you would say if it is possible to simulate the whole of reality then it's more likely that you're in a simulation.

Re:Someone else's problem

[jackNY]

What if the results of the actions of time travellers are already part of our reality? Why would it have to fork in the first place?

Re:Someone else's problem

[ArsenneLupin]

No, this time-line is not the original. We had a time-traveler a couple of years ago, named John Titor.

His predictions didn't pan out, because by foolishly making them public, he altered the future.

Re:Someone else's problem

[DexterIsADog]

I believe the purple unicorns would prevent the time line from forking, so time travel would not push the traveler into a different continuum.

Hey, there's just as much scientific support for my theory as for yours! :-)

Re:Someone else's problem

[wonkey_monkey]

Your mere presence in a past time would alter it such it will be forked from our own time line.

What if your presence in the past was already an intrinsic part of the timeline that included your "present"?

Re:Someone else's problem

[jafac]

Your mere presence in a past time would alter it such it will be forked from our own time line.

What's to say that the "prior" timeline is not erased?

And if so: this shift in time, all that mass, and distance; moving, instantaneously, to wherever else they would have to be. Laws of conservation of momentum and mass? Personally, I think that it's likely that backwards time-travel would result in some cataclysmic energy releases.

Even if it's as simple as ONE person, (say, the time-traveler) - deciding that at a future point in time, he would locate himself or herself somewhere else (perhaps to avoid some traumatic event in his or her life) - the moment at which they travel back, would release the energy from how they moved from point A to point B. If it took them X amount of time to make that physical transition, the energy expended at that point would instantaneously have to go "somewhere" in the "original" timeline. (plus every other person or object which reacted to, or was affected by those changes).

Stephen Hawking

[somegeekynick]

His name is not Steven Hawkings.

Re:Stephen Hawking

[Anonymous Coward]

His name is Robert Paulson

Re:Stephen Hawking

[Brett Buck]

Coleman Hawkings brother?

Eddie

[ysth]

Eddie's in the space-time continuum.

Re:Eddie

[hawkinspeter]

Nah, I've just seen him chopping logs out back.

Not Ready to Quit

[RNLockwood]

I must admit to being time traveler. I started time traveling in 1939, inadvertently to be sure. I had no expectations that my travels would be as interesting as they have been nor as boring, from time to time, either. I've found it to be so addicting that I'm plan to keep on, and on for as long as I'm able.

Re:Not Ready to Quit

[melikamp]

Or you could just say: "I am 75."

Re:Not Ready to Quit

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I am 75!

Re:Not Ready to Quit

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I'm Spartacus.

Re:Not Ready to Quit

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I'm John Titor!

Re:Not Ready to Quit

[Anonymous Coward]

My God, why didn't you kill Hitler when you had the change!? Every time traveler wants to start with that, or hunt the dinosaurs without stepping on a butterfly.

Re:Not Ready to Quit

[Anonymous Coward]

May life grant you many more years of time travel my friend

Re:Not Ready to Quit

[Anonymous Coward]

Hitler is nothing compared to Gildsonn. Of course, you people in this timeline have no idea...

Who really wants to hand w/ Stephen Hawking??

[Arethan]

So I'm a time traveler, and I can go to any time and place that I choose. Why in this world would I go to Stephen Hawking's lame-ass party? History already recorded that it sucked. F-that, I'm gonna go crash one of Kanye's parties, get some sex from a drunk/drugged troglodyte-hooker, and score some low-priced kanye-coins before they catch on. Then I go home and be a billionaire, like I always wanted, and still get some sex from drunk/drugged troglodyte-hookers.

Honestly, Stephen, you're supposedly a great physicist, you should know better than to think that this sort of crap could ever work.

Lame. Try harder, or stop pretending to know what the fuck you're talking about.

Re:Who really wants to hand w/ Stephen Hawking??

[msmonroe]

Honestly, Stephen, you're supposedly a great physicist, you should know better than to think that this sort of crap could ever work.

Hawking is a huge fake. I saw him surfing on an episode of the family guy!

But seriously speaking ...

[Taco Cowboy]

... I did experience some kind of "reality bending", about 9 minutes prior to the earthquake that triggered the tsunami in Japan.

The date was April 11, 2011.

It was 16.07 local (Singapore) time, as I was in Singapore for a business meeting.

I was sitting in front of a computer display typing away, inside a hotel room. The desktop computer was provided by the host, and it was plugged into the net. The computer clock had just been synced with some online atomic time at noon time (some 4 hours ago).

For some reason I felt something weird, nothing moving, but I felt that something is not right. I look out of the windows (it was a high-rise hotel, and my room was in the 23 or 24th floor) and I witnessed "reality bending".

I can't really describe it, but what I saw was the window frame and the concrete pole "bend", not unlike what the "bending images" of some old vhs tapes where part of the scenes got scattered to one side.

That weird sensation only lasted a few seconds and the first thought that came across my mind was that there was an earthquake.

Since Singapore is located very near to earthquake zone, I expected that something gonna shake and was waiting to see if the shaking gonna be big and if that I have to evacuate from the hotel room.

But nothing shook.

So instinctively I look at the computer clock. It showed 16:07.

I sat there for a minute or two, waiting for some "signs" of shaking or whatever. Nothing.

Satisfied that nothing gonna happened I continued what I was doing.

A few minutes afterward, news started to trickle in over the net - a big quake in Japan, and later, a devastating tsunami.

Till now I still can't explain what exactly happened, and why my first thought after I experienced that "bend reality" was a "earthquake".

Re: But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Singapore isn't anywhere near an earthquake zone. Its in the middle of a plate.

Re: But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

So is New Madrid.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[qwijibo]

Typical glitch in the matrix. Your story would be easier to explain if it happened in Amsterdam. =)

One time, leaving a weekly lunch with friends, I commented that the weather was going to trigger the "earthquake weather" nut jobs. On my way back to work, there was a minor earthquake. It was under 5.0, so by California standards, it rates mention only on slow news days and ends up on the USGS daily summary. It would not have been memorable if the conditions didn't give me such a strong impression and if I didn't have multiple friends tell me about the quake that happened shortly (within the 45 minute commute back to work) after I said that.

Even though I'm strongly inclined towards the scientific mindset, these kinds of incidents strongly suggest there's a lot more going on than we understand.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[jimshatt]

While your post has nothing to do with time travelers whatsoever, it's still interesting. I saw a documentary recently called "Something Unknown is Doing We Don't Know What...", where they had random number generators around the world. Previous to important global events, they seem to be generating less random numbers, that is, less homogeneously distributed. My explanation is that it has something to do with some kind of local entropy, because there are less states where that event happens then there are where the event doesn't happen. But how that somehow influences the RNGs beats me. If it isn't complete bullocks to begin with.
I liked the documentary, but it failed miserably in even trying to explain the psy events the 'scientists' were researching.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[jemmyw]

Even though I'm strongly inclined towards the scientific mindset, these kinds of incidents strongly suggest there's a lot more going on than we understand.

It doesn't really. You're just looking at your one event in isolation. What about all the other times earthquake nut jobs have been mentioned and there subsequently hasn't been a minor earthquake.

Re: But seriously speaking ...

[93 Escort Wagon]

So is New Madrid.

Sure, it is NOW - thanks to those technologically advanced, time-traveling pranksters.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Taco Cowboy]

While your post has nothing to do with time travelers whatsoever, it's still interesting.

I posted what I posted in this "time traveling" story because I suspect (I do not have any proof, only suspicions) that something did travel back in time (about 7 minutes) and I just so happened to "encounter" one of the "side effects" of that "travel".

There was nothing shaking, absolutely nothing to trigger my "earth is shaking" premonition but still, that very first thought that came across my mind after I witnessed that "bend reality" phenomanon was "earthquake".

That thought came so naturally that even now, as I type, I still have no explanation of why I thought what I thought at that juncture.

My suspicion is that an earthquake had happened, and something in or near the locality somehow transmitted a "force"/ an "energy field", or whatever that I can't explain, outwards to warn its own kinds (maybe scattered around this planet, or beyond) of the danger.

And to make that warning effective, the warning itself must reach its target (or targets) before the event (in my example, the big earthquake near Japan) happened.

Or, in other words, the message must travel backward in time in order to be effective.

Re: But seriously speaking ...

[JWSmythe]

Do you know how hard it is for them to do that? It takes like a whole hour to "encourage" a city to have been founded in a different place.

The big prank is San Francisco. Every time we move it somewhere safe, someone moves it back.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, pretty much everything is thought about beforehand by someone. It's the game of numbers. How many times do you think it's possible to guess which side ends up in heads and tails? Yeah, the answer is, forever, but it's not very propable. But if every humen on the planet quessed, and they shared their guesses evenly, and dropped out when they guess wrong, the winner would guess correctly 32 times in a row. Or, if everyone played roulette, betting on black or red only, one would turn their one dollar into 7 billion dollars.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I posted what I posted in this "time traveling" story because I suspect (I do not have any proof, only suspicions) that something did travel back in time (about 7 minutes) and I just so happened to "encounter" one of the "side effects" of that "travel".

And on the other hand, a perfectly good medical reason is you had a minor "episode" (the word Doctors like to use when they don't really know what's going on). Perhaps an absent seizure and the "bendy" which you described was just the preface to your blacking out temporarily. But hey, what do I know? I'm not *anyone's* Doctor.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[JWSmythe]

That's coincidence. People say all kinds of stuff all the time.

If you're in Los Angeles, I'm sure you've looked at the USGS maps at least occasionally. If you have a week with no earthquakes, there's something wrong with the reporting. :)

I stood on top of the WTC a few days before 9/11. I said to my friend "I wonder how they'll take these buildings down." It was a discussion on the deconstruction of it, since virtually every modern building has a finite lifespan, and will be replaced eventually. Explosive demolition was out, because it would cause too much damage to surrounding buildings, even under ideal circumstances.

Now, did the fact that we were on top (observation deck, and roof) and said something like that show precognition? Not in any sort of way. People think and say all kinds of things all the time. Their memory also messes with them. We like to believe there is some sort of order to the chaos around us. In reality, we'll grasp at any two things and try to make a relationship between them.

The reality to my pondering the WTC deconstruction was simply an interest in how things work. I like to look at something and try to understand how it works, how it was put together, and how it comes apart. I've learned an awful lot about a lot of things by just asking and researching them. So far, no others have suffered a dramatic demise.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[KingOfBLASH]

The problem with any sort of discussion like this is if indeed ESP exists, it exists so weakly that you have no way of knowing if your "coincidence" is really just the outcome of randomness or a true premonition.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I experienced something similar in the UK, other than the time aspect.

I was sitting on a bed, in a flat, back to the wall. Then the wall kind of 'waved' and I was like, what the fuck, the neighbours just pushed the wall.. wait they couldn't do that in that way.

Next day I saw the news of a minor earthquake a couple of hundred miles away - notable earthquakes are rare in the UK.

You probable felt a local earthquake, see:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/mag_vs_int.php

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[JWSmythe]

I did read an excellent book a while back that discussed the possibility of ESP. The author firmly believed that it does exist. There's a section devoted to why it isn't present in modern society.

While I'm not usually a big fan of woowoo, his arguments made sense.

Imagine living in a more brutal time in our history. Someone in your neighborhood legitimately has "special" abilities, such as precognition. They would very likely be ostracized, ejected from the community, or killed. Regardless of the method, the end result is generally the same. Without the protection and welfare of the community, your reproductive and survival abilities will be diminished.

I believe the way "special" abilities are portrayed on TV and movies now are generally a fair assessment. Do you want someone knowing (and telling) about what you'll do in the future? Probably not. At very least someone with less moral high-ground wouldn't.

If (the big if) the abilities are still latent in our genes, those with such abilities would need to seek each other out, and with a bit of luck reproduce others with those same abilities.

Then the conspiracies come around, that the US and Russian governments had their programs to do all kinds of paranormal stuff. I'm sure they did at least look into it. Hell, if they could recruit ghosts to scare foreign threats to death, they'd do it. :) Do they have such working programs? Most likely no.

So, like you said, all we're really left with is the background noise. Maybe someone can see the future. Maybe they can't. Discerning the difference between a passing though that coincidentally happened, and a real precognition is virtually impossible.

I will say honestly, I've had some strange events happen, with impossible to know outcomes that I predicted with full confidence. The ones I know were real, they were provided without outside stimuli or any sort of interference on my part with the other parties. Even with that, I'd say >99% of the people who claim to have such abilities have none. Their claims are easily eliminated through scientific evaluation or investigation of the situation.

I'm really disappointed. Over the years, I've known a lot of people who have claimed to see ghosts. In most cases, I was able to simply ask a few questions, and point out the real cause of their paranormal experience, which are either extremely mundane, or pranks.

Once. Just once, I'd love to see a real ghost, or a UFO that didn't turn out to be an aircraft, weather balloon, or swamp gas. :)
 

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Till now I still can't explain what exactly happened, and why my first thought after I experienced that "bend reality" was a "earthquake".

Confirmation bias happened? ;-)

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[LordNacho]

A buddy of mine wrote an essay in his international relations class about how airplanes could be used to take down the towers, a couple of weeks before it happened.

But obviously those kinds of thoughts would be going through the head of someone who was doing a module on terrorism at the time. Just like it was going through the heads of the guys who actually did it.

Same thing with "precognition" of relatives dying. The thought crosses everyone's mind at some point. Now and again, it coincides with reality.

Re: But seriously speaking ...

[93 Escort Wagon]

The big prank is San Francisco. Every time we move it somewhere safe, someone moves it back.

That's the really brilliant bit. Sometimes they move the city, sometimes they move the fault!

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[newcastlejon]

You know what happened to me today? Absolutely nothing.

One of Feynman's, I think.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[DexterIsADog]

With, let's see, about 7 billion people on the planet, there are probably hundreds who experience a coincidental hallucination like yours just before any major event of natural disaster, terrorist attack, etc.

Without any object proof (really, without any proof whatsoever), your anecdote doesn't mean anything. It continually amazes me to see how easily people are led to believe in the occult, or in god, or that they had an extrasensory experience.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[DexterIsADog]

A buddy of mine wrote an essay in his international relations class about how airplanes could be used to take down the towers, a couple of weeks before it happened.

Oh, that's nothing. I heard that this guy, President of the United States, I believe, got this report 36 days before 9/11, and the title of it was (get this), "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

Creepy, huh?

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[DexterIsADog]

I posted what I posted in this "time traveling" story because I suspect (I do not have any proof, only suspicions) that something did travel back in time (about 7 minutes) and I just so happened to "encounter" one of the "side effects" of that "travel".

The most likely explanation is that you had low blood sugar, maybe had a tiny event in your brain from a tear in an artery, or some other physiological symptom that made you hallucinate mildly. There must be literally hundreds, if not thousands of people who have similar events any time something major happens, because you know, coincidence. A large enough population guarantees it.

Since you suspect you have witnessed a warning sent back in time, I recommend getting a CAT scan, you may have an undiagnosed aneurysm, or brain tumor. :-)

But seriously, if something had sent a warning back in time ONLY A FEW MINUTES before the earthquake, if I were one of those being warned, I would go kick the ass of "my kind" that gave such a shitty warning.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a similar experience.
I was walking down a street with a friend. His mother was behind us with another woman and her toddler riding on her shoulders.
At one point, I have this strange feeling that something was wrong. I consciously though "The baby's going to fall and get hurt".
Well, a couple of minutes later, I hear a baby scream behind me. I didn't turn back immediately, scared of what just happened.
But the young mother and his baby were on the ground, with people running to help them... I felt strange for the rest of the night.

(Also, don't give me your precious metals (rings, keys). I don't like the feel when I touch them...)

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[drinkypoo]

Just a glitch in the Matrix.

My lady had dreams of shit blowing up before 9/11. Told me about them before it, too, because she couldn't sleep and then neither could I.

Time is poorly understood, but that doesn't stop people making declarative statements about it.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[strikethree]

I was in San Diego. I had experienced a few earthquakes previously but had felt nothing in advance of them.

One night, I was sitting on my couch and I felt a kind of pressure in my head. Almost sinus like in nature but it felt like it was grabbing my brain. It was not painful, just... odd. So the pressure was building up and I felt a release must be near and then the ground started moving like it was waves on the ocean. It was a relatively mild (5.2r @ 50 miles away?) earthquake but the sensation of the pressure was relieved. It almost felt good and expected.

No, not time travel, but related to your experience with an earthquake. Perhaps you felt "pressure" inside your head too which is why things bent?

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was supposed to be in Japan on business but got called away to another issue elsewhere and my co-worker went. Out of the blue he decided he felt like something was going to happen and went down to the lobby and bought a jar of peanut butter, bread, and a case of water and as he was entering his room with the stuff the quake hit. He ended up being able to supply water and some food to a few other people when everyone else was going crazy. It still mystifies him what happened or why and he's never experienced anything like that ever before or since.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[__aaaipu5720]

Haha, that reminds me of when I was walking down the block on a normal sunny day in Berkeley CA, and my friends were talking about how silly witches are.

I decided to try to cast a spell and a large tree fell over in our path. I was pretty proud of that.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[ma i ude]

Tim Minchin put it best: to assume that a one-in-a-million thing is a miracle is to massively underestimate the total number of things there are.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the mid 90's I was in a submarine in a drydock in Puget Sound during a decommissioning. The boat was about 25% dismantled with major water tight boundaries removed. Normally by procedure a subs personnel always have a clearly defined way of securing areas even during major maintenance periods. With so much work being done and pieces of the haul in some compartments missing, there was no way. The engineering spaces were not taken apart yet because the reactor still needed a few levels of containment available but the forward part of the ship was in pieces. One night about 2 am, I said to another watch stander, wouldn't that suck if there was an earthquake while we were in here? He said, dude, WTF, don't say sht like that. Less then one minute later while we were both still standing there talking to each other, the boat started shaking and the most ominous sign was the temporary lighting strung around was swinging back and forth. There was also a loud bang from somewhere. He looked at me funny and asked what I was doing. He thought I was playing some time of joke or like I knew some major work was going on or something that was doing something to the boat that I did not tell him about. We were not totally sure what it was but we started getting calls from people asking if everything was okay after the earthquake. Nothing bad had actually happened but we both sat in silence for about a minute thinking wow, we were just talking about that. It was only like a 4.x something and only lasted about 5 seconds but that was freaky. We were both east coasters and not used to earthquakes. We found out later the bang we heard was a large job site tool box was not secured correctly and slide off the top of the boat and landed in the dry dock.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now, did the fact that we were on top (observation deck, and roof) and said something like that show precognition? Not in any sort of way. People think and say all kinds of things all the time. Their memory also messes with them. We like to believe there is some sort of order to the chaos around us. In reality, we'll grasp at any two things and try to make a relationship between them."

No, of course not. I also am not a fan of people claiming they have "the gift" or "the sight" or whatever name they choose. Mostly because it is presented in such a way that they control it, and for only $19.95 they will use it for your benefit during this five-minute call, act now!

That said: I have found a persistent correlation between a personal feeling of unease leading up to a personal or broader catastrophe. At times it is specific to a person or place. For example, on the morning of 9/11 I was taking a train into NYC and saw a low-flying plane over the river once the skyline came into view. I distinctly recall thinking to myself "I hope he doesn't hit anything at that altitude". Ten minutes after walking out of the station onto the street, the buildings and sky overhead exploded.

I have also had the case where a celebrity or politician comes to mind a day or two before they die unexpectedly. More often than not, I have a general feeling that something is wrong right before it happens. Does it happen all the time (i.e. is it selective memory)? No. Is it something that can be controlled? Probably not.

I think there _is_ more going on than we realize... but it has more to do with fundamental physics and our human perception of "time" than the hokum people make it out to be. Special relativity and quantum mechanics allow for some amazing possibilities and that's not even considering the holographic universe hypothesis..

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Cigarra]

... I did experience some kind of "reality bending", about 9 minutes prior to the earthquake that triggered the tsunami in Japan.

The date was April 11, 2011.

Well considering your "experience" happened one month after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, I wouldn't consider it a premonition :-D

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The earthquake was in March (on a Friday, I believe), not April. Which I'll never forget because I was in Tokyo that day.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Seizure. It's a classic "Alice in Wonderland" presentation.

The seizure may have been triggered by an increase in geomagnetic activity, or some other pre-earthquake natural phenomenon.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[similar_name]

Are you referring to the Global Consciousness Project? The research mentions RNGs. Criticism is also mentioned.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

A buddy of mine wrote an essay in his international relations class about how airplanes could be used to take down the towers, a couple of weeks before it happened.

Ha.

There was this guy, Tom Clancy, who wrote a book in 1994 describing the scenario: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_of_Honor

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[asylumx]

Command & Conquer (the original) shipped with videos of weapons including one of an airliner crashing into a tower. I used that video in a report about the potential of WW3 as Nostradamus predicted when I was in high school, I think this was in 1997 or 1998. Was Nostradamus right? Did Westwood Studios predict the future? Was I a prophet of the future of the US? Nah. Just had an imagination.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Greyfox]

If you're reasonably observant, it can seem like ESP. I've accurately told people the cards they were holding while playing poker, a couple of times. I've also had that done to me a couple of times. That's not magic, that's just deduction and careful observation of your opponent. Once you learn to pay attention to people like that, you get to be a bit more in tune with what other people are thinking and feeling outside the poker room as well. The line between insight and ESP can be awfully hard to find sometimes.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny thing, someone actually thought of that and designed them to withstand such an accident.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Tanktalus]

I have also had the case where a celebrity or politician comes to mind a day or two before they die unexpectedly. More often than not, I have a general feeling that something is wrong right before it happens.

When Princess Diana was killed in an auto crash, the media fawned over her. I remember asking my coworkers if Mother Theresa would get as much publicity if she died. It couldn't have been too long after that, since the two only died, what, 6 days apart? I didn't find the prediction of death freaky, I found the prediction of apathy from the media disappointingly predicted.

Re: But seriously speaking ...

[mcneely.mike]

So is New Madrid.

Sure, it is NOW - thanks to those technologically advanced, time-traveling pranksters.

Or at least it used to be, thanks to those technologically advanced, time-traveling kids... and their dog.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[C0C0C0]

I suspect that was your inner ear trying to tell you that things were moving in a non-normal manner. If even just a little.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[u38cg]

No, you had a hallucination. It happens, quite regularly and can originate in any part of the brain and have pretty much any manifestation you can imagine. In tandem with your hallucination, you encountered a coincidence. Weird, I agree, but frankly there are better explanations than time travel.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[s.petry]

Maybe. There was an interesting experiment where people's bodies would detect erotic images before they saw them. We know that trying to measure or detect quantum events changes the outcome quantum events. Another great experiment is (or was) trying to detect global awareness and they also have some interesting results (It's been many years since I saw that project). Those are three areas where we can say "Hrm, something is happening" not to be confused with "this must be ESP".

I think you are correct that these strange events are weak but we lack data to know for sure. Scientists don't really study these things for fear of ridicule as much as lacking funding. As we can change quantum events by thinking about them, perhaps we can get different results by teaching a different belief.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[s.petry]

That, and the fact that over a year before the event a similar attack was mapped out by a couple 3 letter agencies discussing planes crashing into WTC. The really weird part is that they all claimed "We never even thought of that." after reading those reports. I think the time travelers played a trick on them and swapped the reports out with Penthouse Forum!

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Precisely, and I'd add a dose of confirmation bias to that. I wonder how many people had similar conversations on other tall buildings all over the world? None of them were hit by aircraft, so nobody remembered their conversation and imagined themselves to be prescient. When you're looking at coincidences you've got to take into account how often coincidences DON'T happen, which is rather a lot, rather than simply presenting the non-null results as some kind of evidence.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[speckman]

Problem with most people, especially smart ones that think they know how the world works, is that they just don't know when ESP hits. Yes, there is precognition. Yes, ESP, psychic communication between minds--this stuff happens all the time.

The problem with ESP is that it really, really seems like you're just thinking. You're basically using your "organ of thought" or mind or something in multiple ways. And to most people, this will seem like coincidence when they notice it. And they will not notice it most of the time. If you pay attention, the coincidences start stacking up until they're no longer coincidences.

It took me a few decades to go from a disbeliever but avid sci-fi fan of ESP to actually discovering that I had ESP and basically everyone else does too. It's subtle, only it's not that subtle once you've been paying attention for a long time. Actually, it's still subtle then. I mean I doubt this kind of thing all the time, but presumably others who aren't as noisy in their own heads (reading slashdot and thinking and shit ;)) have it easier. I've certainly known many.

The short answer as to how this stuff works is that when you're thinking, using the parts of your brain that are built for concepts, math, tech, science, logic, etc., the part of your brain that can do ESP is no longer active. There's been some interesting brain imaging studies done, tons of them, that basically show this. It explains why doubters and especially scientists (!!) do not experience ESP.

Look, just as far as precognition goes, I have had all kinds of precognitive visions and dreams and shit. And this is not unusual. The only unusual thing about it is that I go ahead and assume that some of that is precognition. I have found, and a whole lot of other people have found this too, that if you regularly write down your dreams, you will find many which come true--many very specific and weird things, combined with other random stuff, that is so much of a coincidence, and it keeps happening, every other night, that precognition starts to look like the only reasonable explanation. I'm sure 95% of you will either try to mod me down or scoff! :) But look, I do understand chance and the odds and all of that jazz. I know when things are just coincidence, and when the coincidences happen over and over and you realize you're just calling them coincidences because you're using an outdated model of how everything works... then you realize it's synchronicity or precognition.

And then there's the psychic connection, talking between minds. That's pretty regular and easily missed. It's what's happening when you start thinking about a good friend or family member right before they call or email you. It's really noticeable when you start thinking about people you haven't talked to in a year and then go check your email and find an email from them. Like I said way up top, this info comes in looking like your own thoughts, with slight differences, and also seriously throwing doubt on the whole nature of thought itself. But it's like a seriously confused sense--some info coming in and you just haven't been trained to understand it yet. Like being a baby before you understand how vision and hands and all that crap works. It takes time for the brain to sort it out, and it also takes feedback. So our ESP senses are basically never talked about, never practiced, never shown to us by our parents, our schools. It's a skill, a language, an organ, take your pick, that we are essentially all retarded at, but not because we don't have the innate ability. Our society just hasn't figured out that it exists. And yet, quite a few in our society have. Just not the mainstream scientists and pop culture.

I'm rambling a bit and I'm sure this will be modded down when people think I'm full of shit and crazy... obviously.

I wish that you guys, whoever makes it this far, would maybe trust me when I say there's a dozen experiences in my life that absolutely have no other explanation than ESP (or crazie

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[dryeo]

Seems that you could use statistics to see if there are more cancellations on doomed flights.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Golddess]

While Taco Cowboy's post does sound mildly far-fetched, the idea of "feeling" a quake before it happens (or in this case, feeling that a quake happened but not actually feeling the tremors) isn't so far-fetched. Aren't other animals supposed to be able to sense such things?

It is just another anecdote, but a few seconds before the actual shaking from that earthquake that struck the Washington DC area a while back, my environment felt... fuzzy. It is difficult to explain the exact feeling that I felt, but something felt off. It is not something that I can explain, but that is only because I do not have the knowledge required to explain it. It in no way leads me to claim that "God" was sending me a message about the impending quake, or that I had some sort of extrasensory experience (where extrasensory basically means cannot be explained by science).

Regarding Taco Cowboy, the time frame is small enough that it sounds less like a premonition and more like they merely felt whatever I had felt. And any visible bending that they saw could be explained as their brain attempting to make sense of this unknown feeling. As for why Taco Cowboy would not have felt any tremors, maybe they were far enough away to not feel the tremors, but still within range of whatever produced the "off" feeling? I don't know.

I would be remiss if I did not admit that, yes, it could have been complete coincidence. But it also seems within the realm of possibility that it is not.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a very irresponsible reply. At least provide an estimation of prior, posterior, and expected value.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Fr33z0r]

I get panic attacks when people I care about get badly hurt or die. Doesn't matter if they're thousands of miles away at the time (I've been in the UK and reacted to a broken leg in Arizona, anyway)

Take that however you will, I'm just some guy online and all so I don't expect much, but it seemed worth mentioning in this context. I'm very laid back generally, and don't really experience what I would describe as panic at any other time, I'm also very firmly grounded in the natural world, science, all that good stuff, but when people I care about get hurt I feel it the moment it happens, and I don't have any idea what the mechanism behind it might be.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[wonkey_monkey]

We know that trying to measure or detect quantum events changes the outcome quantum events.

No, we don't.

As we can change quantum events by thinking about them

No, we can't.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Fr33z0r]

Oh, I posted above, it probably would have been more suitable here - I'm one of those sorts who gets ... something ... (I don't know that I'd call it precognition) when relatives die. It's not as simple as a thought coinciding with reality for me, it's hard to describe what it is (I used "panic attack" above) but it's a feeling I get all through my body, like a negative rush in every cell.

It's overpowering, and completely debilitating, I literally can't stand up through it. The physical feeling lasts maybe a minute, then transitions to a feeling of dread (which is now "oh shit something terrible just happened" obviously, but I used to get the dread feeling before I knew what was going on too - it seems to be a natural part of whatever is going on)

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[madsdyd]

Why is this moderated up? This is absolutely no different from "I was thinking about my aunt, then the phone rang, and I found out she was dead!".

The poster had a brainfart a couple of minutes before something happened. These things happens, you know, because of the huge amount of people on planet earth, but temporal coincidende does not relation make (I am sure there is a better/well known way of saying this is english).

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[RustyTheCat]

Time Travelers would know about this type of searching because it is history to them, probably covered in Time Traveling 101, and wouldn't do anything that would cause a problem. Your only real hope is that a time traveler is from the far future where relevant records have been lost. In that case they would inevitably end up changing the past so that their exact timeline didn't exist and they didn't travel to the past, thereby not affecting the past meaning their timeline would exist so they would travel to the past thus changing their timeline so that they would never travel to the past, ... creating an infinite dual path time loop (I just invented that term!) (I have a vision of multiple timelines flickering in and out of existence, really, really fast). If you assume that each loop was slightly different, due to something like quantum indeterminacy (QI), then eventually the loop would create a stable time line where time travel is never developed. If QI doesn't apply then either the timeline would loop so that the future is dependent on the time traveler going into the past and changing something, or the universe would explode. So even if time travel is possible it either won't happen or we'll all die. Bummer.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[s.petry]

I realize that Google is hard, but this was simple to find. I don't expect an apology, but a correction to your fabrication should follow.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[iMadeGhostzilla]

You make it sound like we know what hallucinations are and why or even how they occur. Maybe he did perceive symptoms that resemble what you call hallucinations, maybe they would have even been measurable in an MRI (if it can detect hallucinations) or some future brain meter, and maybe there was a correlation between those and the movement of tectonic plates or whatever. Earthquakes don't happen out of the blue, there was a buildup of enormous energy of some sort leading up the earthquake and maybe that affected whatever processes influence the brain-mind. But we don't even understand earthquakes, let alone the brain (a living, active one) or the mind, so to write it off as "hallucinations" is unscientific (but is very scientism-ic).

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[DexterIsADog]

While Taco Cowboy's post does sound mildly far-fetched, the idea of "feeling" a quake before it happens (or in this case, feeling that a quake happened but not actually feeling the tremors) isn't so far-fetched. Aren't other animals supposed to be able to sense such things? As for why Taco Cowboy would not have felt any tremors, maybe they were far enough away to not feel the tremors, but still within range of whatever produced the "off" feeling? I don't know. I would be remiss if I did not admit that, yes, it could have been complete coincidence. But it also seems within the realm of possibility that it is not.

But the problem is that Taco Cowboy's explanation is that some individuals (he doesn't specify non-human, but that seems to be the gist) sent a warning to others of their kind BACK IN TIME. That's absurd.

He didn't say, "well, I might have physically felt something of the geologic event that I didn't consciously register", he said he suspects it was messages sent through time. While technically ANYTHING is possible, this is more in the range of "well, blue fairies might have done it".

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Golddess]

he said he suspects it was messages sent through time.

Re-reading the post again, the closest I can find to referencing time travel is that he says he experienced "reality bending", which he later explains as he literally saw a window frame and a concrete pole bend, followed by the thought of an earthquake randomly coming to him. But nothing seems to imply that he believes that thought to have been planted from the future.

I guess the whole "I felt this 9 minutes prior" could be seen as a reference to time travel, but as I said, the time frame is small enough that I just chalked it up to him feeling it as it happened.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[nine-times]

And if it's so weak that it "premonitions" can't be distinguished from randomness, then on a pragmatic level, ESP doesn't exist.

To give an analogy, if I hand you a new cancer medication and say, "This medicine works, but it works so weakly that the incidences of the drug working are scientifically indistinguishable from the outcomes of untreated cancer." Well guess, what... that cancer drug doesn't work then.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Salgat]

People do this all the time, yours just happened to be coincidentally close enough to an actual event. It's kind of like the person fearing his plane crashing then the plane crashing. Not really surprising when you realize how many people are afraid of planes.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[jafac]

In the biggest earthquake I was ever in, I was about 50 miles from the epicenter of a 6.5. I was standing on a thinly carpeted concrete floor, which was directly on the ground floor (single-story office building). We're next to a busy road, so trucks going by frequently make the ground shake. But as it started, it lasted longer than a normal truck, then it got a little stronger. I stood up, and looked across the room. (cube farm), and I saw the cubes at the far end of the room start to shake violently. And this shaking advanced across the room towards ME. Maybe took 2-3 seconds to go across a 30-40 yard room? I actually felt the wave go under my right-foot, then under my left foot. It was very surreal. I saw my desk bend, in a way that should have broken it to splinters, as the wave passed. I never really figured out if that was real, or imaginary.

After the quake, we all ran out the emergency exit - and we were standing in the parking lot looking at each other. There was no more shaking, but we were all feeling quite seasick for several minutes after. None of us could tell if the ground was actually still moving, or if we were all feeling motion-sickness. That was very weird.

But in relation to your story, I could postulate that as the seismic waves transited your location, you were insulated from the shaking at the ground level. But the energy of things moving in weird directions may have caused some disorientation, and your brain got confused about how it was interpreting what you were seeing+feeling?

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

April 11

That happened on March 11. I am quite sure since that happens to be my birthday.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[wonkey_monkey]

You can have an apology, because I was clearly having some kind of senior moment over the first half of my reply. So:

We know that trying to measure or detect quantum events changes the outcome quantum events.

Yes, we do.

As we can change quantum events by thinking about them

No, we really can't, that's complete and utter bullshit.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, did you even look for a job today?

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[s.petry]

No, we really can't, that's complete and utter bullshit.

Do I really need to Google that one for you too? There is a fascinating interview with an engineer designing one of the first working quantum computer that points out this very phenomenon. If you consider that observation changes results, this is not so far fetched. I'll go two for two, but what do I get for my efforts?

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[lgw]

Imagine living in a more brutal time in our history. Someone in your neighborhood legitimately has "special" abilities, such as precognition. They would very likely be ostracized, ejected from the community, or killed

Wait, what? Shaman really is the world's oldest profession. We've been giving people who claim special powers added respect for so long and at such a basic level that making up woowoo nonsense is the oldest and most basic specialized trade of our species.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[wonkey_monkey]

Do I really need to Google that one for you too?

Which "one"? There have been countless claims of psi-like phenomena "because of quantum!!!11!" none of which have stood up to any kind of scrutiny.

There is a fascinating interview with an engineer designing one of the first working quantum computer that points out this very phenomenon.

What phenomenon, exactly?

If you consider that observation changes results, this is not so far fetched.

Yes it is. It's a massive leap to go from "carefully placed polarising filter causes some weird counter-intuitive results when looking at individual photons" to "people can detect porn from the future" or "you can affect an RNG just by concentrating." (or whatever specific phenomenon it is you're referring to above).

Not that that has stopped a global industry in bullshit quantum marketing from separating suckers from their money all over the world.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[DexterIsADog]

Oh, sorry for the confusion, he started citing time travel in a follow up post to that one.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[s.petry]

Which one? The only statement you said is false and continue to claim is false which contradicts the information I provided to find the data. Further, you didn't bother to read the science behind the article I presented or just dismissed it out of ignorance to your own belief system.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Golddess]

Guessing you mean this post, which yeah, totally didn't see until now.

Thanks for the clarification.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[wonkey_monkey]

the information I provided to find the data

What information? What data? Were you expecting to be able to find the interview you were talking about just based on your vague description of it?

The one article you linked to describes an experiment which shows how quantum phenomena can be affected by observation, but I'd already retracted that part of my original post. The article has nothing to say on the subject of thought supposedly being able to change quantum events. In fact, as the article states, "The "observer" in this experiment wasn't human." It was an electron detector. Your claim that "we can change quantum events by thinking about them" has nothing to do with the experiment in the article.

Further, you didn't bother to read the science behind the article I presented or just dismissed it out of ignorance to your own belief system.

The science behind the article is quantum theory. Quantum theory does not mean we might all have latent super powers.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The original cover for The Coup's "Party Music" album had them blowing up the twin towers in roughly the same spots the planes hit. It was slated to come out a couple weeks after 9/11 and some pre-release copies were already out. Here's the original cover. The Coup - Party Music

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[darkpixel2k]

Imagine living in a more brutal time in our history. Someone in your neighborhood legitimately has "special" abilities, such as precognition. They would very likely be ostracized, ejected from the community, or killed

Wait, what? Shaman really is the world's oldest profession. We've been giving people who claim special powers added respect for so long and at such a basic level that making up woowoo nonsense is the oldest and most basic specialized trade of our species.

I thought prostitution or killing was the oldest profession...

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[careysub]

It would also be going through the heads of anyone who watched the pilot of The Lone Gunmen TV series.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[funwithBSD]

Holy crap, you mean the truther's claim of the BBC announcing that Building 7 collapsed before it actually did is not proof of a government conspiracy ... but of TIME TRAVELERS?!

OMG!

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[jimshatt]

Yes, that's the one. I didn't know its name, but now I do. So, thanks :)

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[JWSmythe]

The USAF was kind enough to provide me with this identification chart

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[lgw]

That's the joke, but it doesn't actually work out that way. At least, in every still-primitive society we've been able to observe, if the tribe has the ability to support just one person in a specialized trade (that is, not gathering his own food, but performing work in trade for food), it's a shaman of some sort.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[JWSmythe]

I've been on planes flying into the city. They come in low and fast over water. One particular flight was very bumpy, and it looked like we were very close to the water. I kept thinking "This is going to suck if we crash, that's a long way to swim."

If we crashed, would that have been a precognitive event? Since we didn't, would it be implied that thinking it could happen stop it?

Nope, the pilots are fully responsible for the outcome of that event. They did their jobs. I seriously doubt either of them said "hey, I have this funny feeling the guy in 27B doesn't want to swim in, how about we land on the runway instead."

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[JWSmythe]

Judging by the number of people who worry that they'll plummet to their deaths in an elevator that makes a funny sound, and paranoid people who know they're "due" for a car accident, ya, there are an awful lot of coincidences that don't happen. That's a damned good thing too. There are a lot of paranoid people out there, who come up with some really crazy ways to accidentally die.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even though I'm strongly inclined towards the scientific mindset, these kinds of incidents strongly suggest there's a lot more going on than we understand.

It doesn't really. You're just looking at your one event in isolation. What about all the other times earthquake nut jobs have been mentioned and there subsequently hasn't been a minor earthquake.

Stop talking about the earthquake nutjobs, dammit, you're going to shake our planet to pieces!

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Spiridios]

Seems that you could use statistics to see if there are more cancellations on doomed flights.

That assumes a time-traveler didn't know their flight was doomed until after they booked the ticket.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tim Minchin put it best: to assume that a one-in-a-million thing is a miracle is to massively underestimate the total number of things there are.

Nice, but I prefer this one:
Baby, you are one-in -a-million! So it's like I have 7,000 spares of you out there.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[s.petry]

And when I dig up that quote what do I win? I'll have to dig because the interview is older. I proved you wrong on the first one and can prove you wrong again (I have an exceptional memory, but don't necessarily pay attention to everything about an materials I read). I will agree that a simple google search did not come up with the result. "Quantum computer interview thinking about the state changes the state".

Nobody said we have superpowers except you (reducto ad absurdum) to try and prove yourself correct. I said that we don't really understand what's going on regarding certain quantum events, and simply thinking about the quantum state can change the quantum state, just like observing quantum events changes those events (as the linked article states with clarity). You claim that observation and thinking are dissimilar, which is untrue. Name my prize, and I'll go hunting

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[JWSmythe]

Everyone knows the BBC is the only organization with personal contacts with the last surviving Timelord. Of course they know the future and past, and screw around with fixed events in time.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[adnonsense]

> The date was April 11, 2011.

So you're saying you had this ESP-like experience a whole *month* after the earthquake actually happened?

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Rixel]

The hip-hop group The Coup was just about to release an album cover showing members of the group blowing up the towers. The pictures had been taken in June, 2011 and the album was planned to be released in November. They quickly decided to go with a different theme. Read more:

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/thecoup.asp

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Lost Race]

Taco Cowboy's experience allegedly happened on 2011-04-11 at 16:07 SGT. The big quake happened on 2011-03-11 at 14:46 JST, which is 13:46 SGT. So neither the date nor the time of the story checks out. If his memory of those particular details is so sketchy, then all his other memories of the experience are suspect -- perhaps whatever caused the hallucinations also disrupted his time sense, or perhaps the entire memory is false. (I'm not suggesting that the story is fictitious, just that it's based on an unreliable memory.)

Even ignoring the date/time errors in the story, we don't really see any evidence of spooky premonition. There had been a magnitude 7.2 quake two days earlier, which probably had a lot of people thinking randomly about earthquakes just before the big one hit.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[wonkey_monkey]

And when I dig up that quote what do I win?

Nothing at all. Why do you have to win anything?

and can prove you wrong again

If you can prove that thought can have a direct influence on the outside world you would change the whole world overnight. If, on the other hand, what you mean by "prove" is "point me to a webpage that makes claims of such effects," well, I can point you to a thousand of those, along with a thousand about alien abductions and the existence of ghosts.

Nobody said we have superpowers except you (reducto ad absurdum)

Could you stop using the phrase reductio ad absurdum until you actually understand what it means? You didn't last time, and you clearly still don't. Hint: it's not a phrase you can trot out just because someone's said something [that you think is] absurd.

Would you not regard the ability to affect the outside world through the use of thought alone to be a superpower? I think most people would.

simply thinking about the quantum state can change the quantum state, just like observing quantum events changes those events (as the linked article states with clarity)

What do you mean "just like"? Those two things are not alike. You can't say "[A], just like [B]!" when A is not like B at all. An observation - which, in this case, did not involve a conscious observer - is nothing like thought. For one thing, observations (measurements) in such experiments have the distinction of an actual physical interaction with the thing being observed, which is why they are able to cause these bizarre effects. There is no such interaction when you just think about something.

You claim that observation and thinking are dissimilar, which is untrue.

The "observer" in the experiment from the article was incapable of thought, being as it was an inanimate object, so there's one dissimilarity.

Name my prize, and I'll go hunting

What, so you just get to make your extraordinary (and vague) claim, but when challenged to defend it - or even provide an anecdote of such an event having occurred - you start demanding prizes? Your "prize" is that, if you can produce even remotely decent scientific evidence that supports your claim, I might start taking it seriously. I'm fairly confident that's not going to happen, though.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not nessecarily crazy, but you are wrong. Read up on confirmation bias.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[s.petry]

I personally have no difficulty understanding fallacy arguments, perhaps it's you that should consider what you claim in a discussion. Reductio ad absurdum is an argument from the absurd. Where for example you claim something absurd like having superpowers as an answer to someone claiming we know that observation changes the results of experiments. (Quantum theory does not mean we might all have latent super powers.) That example is within the definition, as would be a claim of the flying spaghetti monster when discussing whether the Universe requires a creator.

If you intended something other than what you said, use more caution with your statements.

My description of the similarities of thought and observation I agree is lacking, but there is only so much I'm willing to do when I am pretty sure I'm correct. If you were courteous in your response, or simply inquisitive, I would most likely be different in my responses. *shrug*, not that you have been a complete douche, but not what I consider friendly dialogue.

If you stop and consider how observation and thinking are similar, perhaps you would see the point. If I can find the link to the interview I'll pass it along. You should also go looking since I was right about 1 of 2 statements you so bluntly claimed "wrong" on, and 2 out of 3 in the examples given are easily provable statements.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[wonkey_monkey]

Reductio ad absurdum is an argument from the absurd.

No, it's not, as I've explained before. It's a reduction to the absurd, and it's not a fallacy at all, but a method of reasoning. The common mathematical proof of the irrationality of the square root of 2 is a reductio ad absurdum, for example.

Where for example you claim something absurd like having superpowers

To be able to influence events by thought - which is your claim, not mine - would be regarded as a superpower by most people.

as an answer to someone claiming we know that observation changes the results of experiments.

I wasn't stating it as an "answer" to anything, but if I was it was to your claim that thought can influence events - not the fact that observation (in the quantum mechanics experiment sense, not just "looking at something") can influence events.

Nothing in quantum theory suggests that thought can have any kind of influence over external events. Thought is just electrical impulses bouncing around between neurons. It's nothing special or fundamentally different to the myriad electromagnetic interactions that happen all over the universe, except that a lot of them all happening in one place seems to give rise to something called consciousness.

If you stop and consider how observation and thinking are similar

I've not seen any reason to do so.

and 2 out of 3 in the examples given are easily provable statements.

Which examples are you referring to?

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[dryeo]

Thinking more about ESP. Seems if it was real there'd be more cancellations, no shows and such.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[s.petry]

It's a reduction to the absurd, and it's not a fallacy at all, but a method of reasoning.

Yes, Depends, and No. Yes it's a reduction to the absurd. By Wiki's definition you would be correct but in practice it depends on the use (see slippery slope and straw man by Wiki's definition). My college text books list reductio ad absurdum as a conditional fallacy, No it's an "invalid" method of reasoning.

To the remainder, there is no reason to add clarity to what you claimed is false and what I have already shown to be true. Feigning ignorance is not very becoming especially when you tend to quote what you want to see so have read the materials.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I read a book

well then. I guess we should listen to you.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[JWSmythe]

Well, since I'll take your comment as you haven't read a book, mine is probably much better for you.

Re: But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

What you experienced was probably caused by the high frequency waves causing disorienting effect that normal senses cannot detect. Much in the same manner animals detect natural disasters before they happen, this was your warning.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[ShoulderOfOrion]

The problem with equating earthquakes and random coincidence is that science knows that earthquakes often generate phenomena prior to the earthquake that can be picked up at a 'sub-conscious' level (sorry for the pun). As a lifelong CA native I've experienced my share of earthquakes, and half the time I can 'sense' the quake at least a few seconds before any actual shaking begins. It's an eerie uneasy feeling. I know a lot of people who have the same experience. I'm convinced it has nothing to do with ESP and everything to do with subsonic wave motion or some other similar natural phenomena ahead of the main quake. It's similar to the way that watching the ocean suddenly recede a kilometer offshore isn't a sign to go pick up the shiny shells, it's a signal nature is sending saying 'run away now'. It wouldn't surprise me if you had that premonition because you had picked up some 'vibe' from a natural phenomena that made you uneasy.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but I challenge you to explain how you would take down Building 7!

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[AmiMoJo]

I've been in a fair few earthquakes and they do kinda sneak up on you. Often you just noticed you are swaying back and forth a bit and assume you are doing it yourself, but then find you can't stop. Large earthquakes do cause things like the earth's magnetic fields to shift, air pressure to change and so forth. It has been demonstrated that changes in GPS signal latency can be used to predict earthquakes a few minutes before they happen, sometimes.

So, assuming what happened to you was in some way related to the earthquake (which I was in, BTW, 5th floor of a building, stuff falling over around me, interesting experience) then maybe you did sense it somehow and your mind just didn't know how to process that input. Then again, maybe it was just coincidence.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[wonkey_monkey]

No it's an "invalid" method of reasoning.

It's perfectly valid. The irrationality of the square root of 2 can be soundly proved by reductio ad absurdum.

Reductio ad absurdum may be abused, like any tool, but that doesn't make it a fallacy - in the same sense that simple maths can be used to "prove" that 1=2 when it is misapplied.

All of this is moot, of course, since my original statement about superpowers wasn't meant to be any form of logical argument or fallacy.

To the remainder, there is no reason to add clarity to what you claimed is false and what I have already shown to be true

You've only claimed it* to be true. To show something to be true requires you to show some evidence.

*To clarify (again, since you seem determined to keep going back to a statement I've already retracted) I am not talking about the statement "We know that trying to measure or detect quantum events changes the outcome quantum events." I already said I was mistaken to call that into question.

What I claim to be false is your claim that "we can change quantum events by thinking about them" which you've provided no evidence for.

Feigning ignorance is not very becoming especially when you tend to quote what you want to see so have read the materials.

What materials? You've supplied one link so far, to an article about a perfectly "ordinary" demonstration of the effect of an observer (an inanimate piece of lab equipment incapable of thought) on quantum effects.

-

TL:DR: What is your evidence for your claim that "we can change quantum events by thinking about them"?

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Reziac]

I'm gonna make shit up here, but I think there's some logic worth investigating:

Maybe you had a slight reaction (affecting your sense of balance and such) to the quake's equivalent of an EMP pulse, which I'd think would happen at the moment the slip started -- like a giant static charge, maybe affecting local magnetic fields. And I expect the initial slip starts some time before the event we call a quake.

On a related note, I have this little vibrating massage doohickey, that if I use it on my scalp, it makes my eyes jiggle so everything looks bent.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure it wasn't 16:01?

Sometimes I have a hard time with the one's and seven's. Maybe take a trip back to verify.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

at least one of the buildings dropped as intended.

Re: But seriously speaking ...

[gzuckier]

. It's your kids, Marty. Something gotta be done about your kids!

Re: But seriously speaking ...

[gzuckier]

Or something like the Bermuda triangle that wasn't in the middle of the ocean. Yeah, ships and planes vanish in the ocean. You want to impress me, have an Amtrak train vanish in the middle of new jersey.

Re: But seriously speaking ...

[gzuckier]

"There was an interesting experiment where people's bodies would detect erotic images before they saw them."
Yeah but that's not time travel, that's just the time lag between lower level brain responses to stimuli and their appearance to your consciousness after quite a bit of additional processing.

Re: But seriously speaking ...

[gzuckier]

I've had similar experiences which were actually shared with another person at the time, but I still classify the whole thing as a possible needle in a haystack of horseshit. Whatever reality is there will only be revealed after some unknown advance (s) and will likely turn out to be something for which we don't even have basic concepts yet.

Re: But seriously speaking ...

[JWSmythe]

    That happens occasionally, but they're always recovered in a mafia dumping ground, with the possessions of all the travelers seemingly missing.

    Clearly, aliens.

Re: But seriously speaking ...

[speckman]

Yeah, but wait till you have those experiences 100 times, and then you'll have your own body of personal evidence. But seriously, there has been science done on this. There's a great book, THE ESP ENIGMA, that summarizes a lot of it.

I hear what you're saying, but I think it's not that we don't have the concepts yet, it's that the mainstream and vast majority of people do not know those concepts exist already. There's a lot, say, in Buddhist literature and circles about this, and they have particular language and concepts and theories and even laws and such for how it all works. They've been studying it for a very long time. And there's people who say science has disproved it or not addressed it or can only find a tiny, weak possibly insignificant correlation, but it's an insulated feedback system of everyone believing it's not possible and citing the same studies, doing the same kind of studies, etc. That book I mentioned is really great about explaining why studies fail, how to do them better, etc. all based on the blood/activation flow in the brain as these things are happening. As in if you make your experiment extremely arbitrary and abstract (like virtually all ESP experiments do), you will be destroying the ESP effect that you're trying to measure. ESP is most in play when you're emotionally attached. You will get the biggest examples of it, especially the psychic, mind-to-mind, connection, concerning loved ones or physical danger, etc. If it relates to tomorrow's bitcoin price, good luck. :) The parts of the brain that do math and numbers and concepts are basically wired up to only work when the ESP parts are not working and to shut off the ESP parts when working. Find someone who's meditated their whole life and you'll find someone who regularly experiences ESP and knows how it works.

OK, but all of that being said, people can be really dumb about attributing cause and effect, especially in their own mind. I'm not advocating labeling anything weird as ESP. But there are rules and such that seem to be in play when they happen. I am personally convinced because of having so many and seeing others do the same, *even though* I am only sure about some portion of all of the possible experiences. The precognition for me is nuts. At first it was sci-fi, then theory, and then a friend reporting that it was happening via dreams and dream journaling. Read up on it, saw some study was done a century ago. Tried it out, recording my dreams regularly, and then started to find regular precognitive events that were so random (not always important) and particular, specific, unlikely for me to just dream up or even think about, that would happen afterwards. I mean people I hadn't seen in a couple decades, in a dream and then run into them on the street. Stuff I found that I'll never find again, seeing myself carrying it, and then in real life, carrying it. Weird, random, specific details. Not generalities and vague predictions. And again, often not important, though there were a few of those. And that's just the precognition. Other stuff like mind-to-mind communication... I am never really sure about it, but when I think of someone and then they call/email me, and it happens once a week or so, sometimes more, sometimes less, I start to recognize what's going on there and weed out the it's-just-chance explanation. I try to stay doubtful and open-minded, if that makes sense. But to me, I just can't explain all of that stuff with the standard theories anymore. I could have 15 years ago, but I've had a thousand plus more experiences, samples, experiments, etc. since then. So now I'm like 70% convinced. :) And most of those are inconsequential. The ones that were so nuts that I still regularly tell as stories, like someone teaching me how to read each other's worst memories in an instant, a few hours after confirming that her eyes could indeed emit flashes of light... that's still nuts to me, and yet it happened. haha I am eagerly awaiting being able to pigeonhole that one. Or others w

Re: But seriously speaking ...

[speckman]

Also, I just want to stress how ridiculous people can get in their minds. The whole Jesus thing. I wouldn't be surprised if over half of the US population thinks they're talking to "God" or sometimes Satan (get out!). I'm not saying gods don't exist, but the idea that there's just one and he's in your head, that's stretching it. The idea that everything with a brain, all the humans and animals and such, can be in each other's heads, that's way more local. I actually do think there are spirits and gods and such out there though (sort of the natural denizens of the material that the ESP occurs in). Once you start accepting ESP, a whole lot opens up. But knowing what the hell is going on with that, wow, just holy shit, I have no idea. And very few do. But what Christians and all the other idiots do ;) is shove all of that weirdness into a seriously outdated, plagiarized, unscientific belief. I'm looking for the scientific one, and not the one that dismisses it but the one that actually explains the nuts and bolts. What are the laws? What is it? How the hell does this work? And what does it mean for the rest of reality? I want to see these answered! And saying I think gods exist, I don't believe this, it just kinda fits into the picture. That if you can communicate with other people you know via just your mind, and you can also apparently do it with ancient entities... I mean it's crazy, but again, what I'm talking about is what is the actual reality of this, that all religions and most of science and pop culture grossly misinterpret? Our scientific understanding of this stuff is like Chemistry before pre-chemistry. Just about worthless. But we have a long tradition of our science being horseshit and then someone figuring out some aspect, revolutionizing it, writing some simple laws. Cycle and repeat and we advance knowledge. And I definitely understand that quite a lot of what I think may be happening is easily not. I'm real open-minded about this. I put way more stock in the small-level ESP stuff. And I fully understand how easy it is for my mind to trick itself. :) I feel I'm actually pretty damn scientific about this, in that sense. It's a working hypothesis. I could easily be crazy. I always keep that hypothesis in mind too. And let me just say, I was raised by a statistician, so I have a pretty healthy respect for and knowledge of chance. And I played RPGs as a kid. :) I know how likely different dice rolls are. I know all about seeing chance events as meaningful when they're not. So it's all a working hypothesis for me and I'm not easily fooled. I hope. :)

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Vitriol Angst]

Forget precognition; The twin towers went through everyone's heads on that plane.

-- sorry, too soon?

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[u38cg]

A hallucination is disordered activity, typical in the frontal cortex. There are many causes, many of them well understood (eg LSD). That and the mathematics of probability lead me to conclude that a hallucination is more likely than a magical, unobserved and unexplained field. If you think your theory is more likely, propose a mechanism and we'll test it. I would be delighted to be wrong.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[s.petry]

I think you skipped a few lectures in Logic. You could read, but don't. You could understand that Wiki is not a great source of truth on Logic and Philosophy as well. Reductio is what you are describing, which is an error in reducing arguments as required by the Socratic Method. That Reduction error is exactly what the Wiki page is referring too, and not the "absurdum" portion.

I realize that thinking can be very difficult, but Wiki lists "reductio ad hitlerum (which is not in any of my text books)" as a genetic fallacy. Do you really think that the level of reduction to something absurd can only be with Hitler references? Come now, you can't be daft. Get a good College level Logic text book and find out what good source claims about reductio ad absurdum. Further, Wiki's references given previously for straw man and slippery slope hint at it, let's see if you can connect the dots on why it's a conditional fallacy and not the same as a "reduction error". It only takes a trip to a University Book store to confirm. It would be better of course to take the classes that the books come from.

I could not find the speech by the quantum developer, but you can search. I have no reason to lie, and remember that the two other points I started with were correct (even though you claimed one was false). You don't have to take my word for it, but you can find the information on your own.

All of this is moot, of course, since my original statement about superpowers wasn't meant to be any form of logical argument or fallacy.

For this, there is no need to continue. Comparing a lack of knowledge (what I stated) to someone having superpowers (your counter to my statement) is illogical, and only done for the purpose of trying to win without concern for truth. That is about as anti philosophical as you can get, though I'm sure you will deny that.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[iMadeGhostzilla]

No, we don't know the causes. All we have is a catalog of correlations, e.g. a person takes LSD and they report hallucinations, sometimes. We have no understanding why or how. Quote from "Psychology Today": "The precise mechanism by which LSD alters perceptions is still unclear. "

To chalk off the OP's change in perception (if true) to "mere" hallucination would be to replace one unknown with another, to create the illusion we understand what's going on. I am not saying it's not a hallucination (you can call it however you want), the question is is it correlated with arriving earthquakes or some other external phenomena. To design an experiment would be relatively easy, i.e. have volunteers press a button when they experience "unusual" symptoms and look for correlation between their reports (false or true) and incidence of earth tremors/earthquakes or some other large natural events. To get funding for it, probably a bit harder.

But it's the need to create the illusion of understanding that I called unscientific (and scientism-ic).

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[wonkey_monkey]

Reductio is what you are describing,

What's "Reductio" by itself? Are you still talking about reductio ad absurdum? I ask because you sometimes seem determined to be amiguous.

which is an error in reducing arguments as required by the Socratic Method.

R. a. d. is not an error (if that's even what you're trying to say). It's a perfectly valid logical tool. Do you agree with that or not? It's really hard to tell.

From the Wikipedia page itself:

Reductio ad absurdum (Latin: "reduction to absurdity"), also known as argumentum ad absurdum (Latin: argument to absurdity), is a common form of argument ... this technique has been used throughout history in both formal mathematical and philosophical reasoning, as well as informal debate.

For the sake of clarity, which (if either) of these statements do you believe to be true:

1) Reductio ad absurdum is a form of argument
2) Reductio ad absurdum is a logical fallacy

I could not find the speech by the quantum developer, but you can search.

If you can't find it, I'm not going to have much luck (and already haven't).

I realize that thinking can be very difficult, but Wiki lists "reductio ad hitlerum (which is not in any of my text books)" as a genetic fallacy. Do you really think that the level of reduction to something absurd can only be with Hitler references? Come now, you can't be daft.

When did I say anything about Hitler? What has reductio ad hitlerum got to do with any of this? What does the question in bold mean? Are you trying to argue that because there's a fallacy named after r. a. d., then it must be a fallacy itself?

Just because a logical tool can be abused, doesn't make it a fallacy.

and remember that the two other points I started with were correct (even though you claimed one was false).

Making two correct points doesn't mean I should accept your third without evidence. Continually harping back to an error I've apologised for isn't exactly ingenuous either.

Comparing a lack of knowledge (what I stated) to someone having superpowers (your counter to my statement) is illogical

That's not what I did. What lack of knowledge? You claimed knowledge when you stated "we can change quantum events by thinking about them" as a fact. I compared it to a superpower because to most people that is exactly what the ability to influence events with the power of thought alone would be. All I'm after is some evidence. If you can't put your finger on the interview (which doesn't sound like a scientific investigation in any case) just stick "I believe" on the front of that statement when you make it.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[wonkey_monkey]

Hah, what a maroon I am. I managed to abbreviate reductio ad absurdum to "r. a. d." in my other reply. Please mentally substitute with "r. a. a."

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[u38cg]

No, we know many of the causes, though by no means all, but we have incomplete understandings of the mechanisms. Again, though, there is simply no evidence for external phenomena having the effect you posit. I don't need to demonstrate anything. You do. Science is not a performing monkey that disproves whatever bullshit hypothesis you dream up.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[iMadeGhostzilla]

You didn't need to, but you have just demonstrated what is called scientism. You have decided (if you were an authority, which you're not) that you don't like the idea of having any correlation between external phenomena and internal states, so you say there's no evidence, and we should not take to the task of trying to get the evidence, and we should ridicule those who try to do so. The OP presented anecdotal evidence; the next step would be to see if others have done so; there are reports of animals behaving differently immediately before natural disasters; and so on.

What you don't seem to understand is that the impetus for the scientist's work -- at least, a good scientist, not one who is content with publishing in rubbish journals -- comes from a *hunch*. "Could it be? No way! But what if...?" and so he or she spends the next 5 or 10 or 20 years acting on it, sometimes in vain, sometimes with breakthrough results that break previous models. What you're doing on the other hand is saying no that's not worth looking because by what we know now that cannot be possible (even though our current models are very weak). If you're just an armchair scientist though, like most of us here, then that's fine, your opinion won't make a difference.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[s.petry]

I was pretty clear on all accounts, try to reread it again. I would venture to guess that a large portion of the problem is that you believe Wiki is a source of truth for Logic and rhetoric which it is not. It is a human modified semi-truthful summary and not an in depth conceptual study for either of those subjects.

Very common today that people believe that simply looking at a Wiki or Google result gives them knowledge, and it does anything but present "knowledge".

As stated, read a text book on Logic (my text books are well over 500 pages each) and actually attempt to "learn" the subjects. Or don't and continue believing that an opinionated summary makes you intelligent. Either way, this discussion is concluded from my end.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[wonkey_monkey]

I was pretty clear on all accounts, try to reread it again.

You may believe you were, but you were not. Simply suggesting I "reread it again" when you could instead answer some of my simple direct questions is being disingenuous.

you believe Wiki is a source of truth for Logic

Don't tell me what I believe (you shouldn't state as anything as fact without evidence). I used Wikipedia because it was a handy source for a reasonably decent defintion or r.a.a. that I thought anyone reading this discussion could understand without too much trouble. I've understood and used r.a.a. as a logical tool since about five years before Wikipedia came into existence. I could also point you at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy's page on r.a.a., or The Free Dictionary's.

Or here's a good one - Encyclopedia Britannica:

reductio ad absurdum, (Latin: “reduction to absurdity”), in logic, a form of refutation showing contradictory or absurd consequences following upon premises as a matter of logical necessity.

In common speech the term reductio ad absurdum refers to anything pushed to absurd extremes.

There's your definition at the end. In common speech. Not formal logic; common speech. It's like when people misuse "begging the question." It has nothing do with logic. This is exactly the sense in which you used it. It can't be anything else because I wasn't making any kind of logical conclusion when you used it. You thought I'd said something absurd and you grasped for a clever-sounding latin phrase that you - wrongly - thought was appropriate.

I can't find anything to support your view of r.a.a as a logical fallacy. Can you provide anything?

As stated, read a text book on Logic (my text books are well over 500 pages each) and actually attempt to "learn" the subjects. Or don't and continue believing that an opinionated summary makes you intelligent.

Am I supposed to be impressed that you have big text books? It's not "subjects"; it's a single term under discussion. I don't need to read a dozen books to understand what reductio ad absurdum is, because I've understood it perfectly since I was taught how it could be used to prove that the square root or 2 is irrational nearly 20 years ago. How can the application of a logical fallacy prove a mathematical truth?

You didn't get your version from The Big Bang Theory, did you? They appear to have made the same mistake.

Very common today that people believe that simply looking at a Wiki or Google result gives them knowledge, and it does anything but present "knowledge".

As opposed to reading an interview with someone who worked on a quantum computer, and extrapolating from what at this point I can only categorise as an anecdote (an anecdote of an anecdote, in fact) that "we can change quantum events by thinking about them" and stating the same as a fact, despite having no evidence in support of that view?

Not quite as bad as diving into a discussion on the holographic principle and declaring it to be poppycock without even taking the time to find out what the holographic principle is, but still...

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[RespekMyAthorati]

As we can change quantum events by thinking about them

No, you can't.

You can change quantum events by absorbing photons (as with your eye or a detector of some sort), but that has nothing to do with "thinking about them".

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[RespekMyAthorati]

Do I really need to Google that one for you too?

Yes.

There is a fascinating interview with an engineer designing one of the first working quantum computer that points out this very phenomenon.

Citation?

If you consider that observation changes results

No, it doesn't. Absorption of photons, as with your eye or a detector, can alter quantum events.
Observation implies absorption, not vice-versa.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[RespekMyAthorati]

I have no reason to lie

No, but you have a reason to be dead wrong. Like, because you are.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Change" is somewhat misleading, what you're actually doing is determining the outcome, i.e. going from an indeterminate statistical probability to a definite result.

"Change" implies that it would have gone some other way if left to itself, and thanks to quantum indeterminacy, we have no way of knowing how it will go in advance. It's not just unknown; it's unknowable.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[u38cg]

No. There is anecdotal evidence for everything from aliens to talking dogs. With finite resources, we have to pick the most likely avenues for investigation. Magical earthquake fields travelling through time to influence the mind - yeah, maybe, but if you really believe it, you do the work and show there's something real worth investigating.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[iMadeGhostzilla]

Of course you don't jump into looking for research funding based on one guy posting in a forum. Instead you ask could there be more phenomena like this, and then spend 15-20 minutes here researching informally to see if there are more indications of it. Or you say, that doesn't interest me, I believe there's likely nothing there and it would be complete waste of time for me. You however, in your ideology, declared that *no one* should be looking because *you know* it's a hallucination. That is scientism.

Speaking of finite resources, just consider the enormous amounts of money and effort spent on searching for alien life with the SETI program. And yet that was based on nothing more than a fiction -- with absolutely zero evidence whatsoever -- that alien life must exist and not only that but that we must be able to communicate with each other, with 01 sequences and whatnot. I'm not saying that should or shouldn't have been done (it doesn't interest me and I believe there's likely nothing there, 01-communication-wise), but be aware that ideology plays a large role in any given scientific community.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[u38cg]

No, it is not scientism, it is living in a society filled with hogwash psuedo-scientific bullshit every minute of every day. You're making the same argument Creationists make. Time-travelling earthquake waves that influence our brains fall squarely into the category of things I can ignore unless someone proves there is something of interest.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[iMadeGhostzilla]

While I would agree with the pseudo-scientific bullshit saturation statement (everything is quantum this and quantum that, e.g. quantum healing), that should not blind the scientist to what is his or her primary task: observing patterns in nature and coming up with some model that can predict appearance of those patterns in the future.

It's a bit different topic, but you can also ask yourself though why the society is filled with the hogwash you mention -- is it because people are stupid or because there is an unmet need that is being suppressed, e.g. forcing a scientific view on everything including things like philosophical questions on meaning for which science cannot provide the answer, or even negating first-hand experience -- which is the only thing we really have -- like when Francis Crick said from the position of authority that the mind does not exist and is only a reflection of neural activity. That was not good science -- it was not even stated as a falsifiable theory -- but was accepted more or less as a fact by many. That again is scientism, replacing religion with whatever masquerades as science.

Scientism breeds more hogwash, and more hogwash breeds more scientism. That's a common pattern in human societies (eg. oppression+terrorism, prohibition+bootlegging in the US etc.) That's why I think a scientist should not fall for it.

Re:But seriously speaking ...

[Master Moose]

We must have willed this to happen as I remember thinking, asking and feelinge the exact same thing.

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[Z00L00K]

I agree - and if they do something it has to be actions that dissipates quickly in the noise and don't disturb the future. A small gambling win is quickly absorbed in the currents of time but a major one makes the headlines and may hurt the future.

Killing Hitler in the cradle might have stopped WWII, but it could also have been a stopper for the Apollo project. Or it might only have delayed WWII and made it a nuclear war where the whole world now would be speaking German. Ordnung muss sein!

Another problem with posting on twitter - how do you distinguish between an accurate prediction based on existing facts and a post from someone from the future? Especially if a post made is somewhat fuzzy in the prediction.

If we have time travelers - then I doubt that they actually do show up in our time where there's a crapload of information produced, look back in history instead. Some might want to see and meet Leonardo da Vinci, others might want to see Jesus. The three wise men showing up when Jesus was born?

Re:I didn't meet myself yet

[Anonymous Coward]

I, like any other slashdotter, am quite familiar with the scenario of inviting myself out for coffee...

It's great. We get to talking, find we have a lot in common, and then we go back to my place for some sexy times.

John Titor

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone else remember John Titor? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor

I'm surprised they didn't find anything.

[bluegutang]

So many millions of people have posted information to the internet. Is there algorithm so good it did not have a single false positive?

Re:I'm surprised they didn't find anything.

[bluegutang]

Is there algorithm so good

That should be "their" obviously. I should proofread...

Re:I'm surprised they didn't find anything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there algorithm so good

That should be "their" obviously. I should proofread...

Next time just go back in time and fix it before you hit submit.

Just remember that you have to do it before someone (including yourself) comments on the typo. Fixing it now would destroy the space-time continuum.

Test with other data we know?

[AHuxley]

Re 4. Searching for Prescient Search Queries
Would be fun for the http://cryptome.org/2014/01/nsa-codenames.htm lists
2. Types of Sock puppets vs Time Travelers?

Forming a Time Travel Association -- why not join?

[SlithyMagister]

If anyone is seriously interested in Time Travel, the inaugural meeting of the Vancouver Time Travel association will be held last Tuesday at the planetarium.

Correction

[thrill12]

*Four* wise men, of course, everyone knows th...
...
hold on, what year was this again ?

Re:Correction

[dkleinsc]

They left you out because a wise guy doesn't count!

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[dunkelfalke]

Tell that to John Titor.

Nothing insightful in these comments

[dastasha]

Just as I thought. Nothing "insightful" will show up under this story

Re: Nothing insightful in these comments

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but why want to go to the past? Go to the future and gets some secure opportunities. http://www.idroidspace.com

Unlikely they'd use our antiquated tech

[atticus9]

If I went back to the 1850's with today's technology I wouldn't send prescient telegraphs to my fellow time travelers, I'd use modern methods of communcations. It seems unlikely they'd turn to twitter or the internet if they are here.

Re: Unlikely they'd use our antiquated tech

[Captain Hook]

It wouldn't necessarily have to be the time traveller posting the message. It could be someone they interact with from our time learning something (probably very mundane and not realising the significance) and making a post which references the new knowledge in some way.

Search for evidence of the Tooth Fairy

[Required Snark]

An equally useful and scientifically valid effort.

Language

[pigreco314]

The research assumes that time travellers would speak and only speak and tweet and post and blog... in the english language, doesn't it?
èYè'--åç(TM)½å..."

Re:Language

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed a ^. Yes, grammar Nazis exist in the future.

Time travel is impossible

[little1973]

because time is imaginary. It does not exist.

Why physicists insist using Einstein's equations as a 'proof' of time travel is beyond me. It is the same as if one used Newton's equations for speeds faster than 0.6 c.

In both cases the results are bogus as these equations were obviously not designed to handle these extreme cases.

Do not forget that these equations try to describe reality and they do this with very great precision, but it does not mean reality itself 'runs' these equations.

Re:Time travel is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

If time does not exist, what is speed? Time exists, it's just not a dimension, it's a force.

Re:Time travel is impossible

[VortexCortex]

Time travel is because time is imaginary. It does not exist.

Explain how you were able to post this message then. You are not allowed to use any time to do so.

Re:Time travel is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

Fine, explain how the species is going to colonize the universe. You are not allowed to invoke sci-fi and fantasies, only what you see, pal.

Re:Time travel is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

pretty sure what he is on about is a concept gaining popularity that time is not a dimension nor any direct relation to space that can be travelled through but simply an emergent property of change in the universe. If at some point the universe ceases to change then there will be no such thing as time.

Re:Time travel is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

Forgot to add: the universe ceasing to change would basically be once maximum entropy is reached, if it is possible for maximum entropy to be reached

also that this is a really difficult concept to design tests for so who the fuck even knows.

Re:Time travel is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, things seem to move from one position to next in an orderly fashion, or at least my brain interprets it as such. Some things have already happened, i'll call that "past", somethings are happening just now.. "present", I think somethings might happen after the things happening now have happened, i'll call that "future". The flow of these "states" I will call "time". There, now it exists.

Re:Time travel is impossible

[ArsenneLupin]

Time exists, it's just not a dimension, it's a force.

If that is the case, why then is it measured in seconds rather than in newtons?

Re:Time travel is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't say it was "force", I said it is "a" force.

Re:Time travel is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

Even in a system of maximum entropy, there is an incredibly small chance something interesting would happen, even at large scales. You can talk about the classic example of all the air going to one half of a room, or talk about a pocket of galaxies forming out of uniform gas. Usually it is pretty pointless, as the probabilities of such things happening make it unlikely to have ever happened even if the universe were orders of magnitude older than current estimates. However, if the universe reached a static point of maximum entropy, then there would be infinite amount of time for such events to happen, and at some point you would get events that look like our visible universe to pop up again. This wouldn't happen if the expansion of space happened in a way that things would never be the same, but then you wouldn't have a static point of maximum entropy but something continuing to change with time.

Re:Time travel is impossible

[RJFerret]

Hear, hear. Although I'd not have said it was imaginary as much as a label for a measuring system. Saying "time travel" is as nonsensical as saying "metric travel" or "quantity travel".

Interestingly, there is a culture/language without time. No words for year or yesterday, grandparents were "respected". The people were able to understand the premise if taught the concept of time measurements, but had functioned (and may well still function) quite well never using the system or even being aware of it.

Procrastination

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no time to read these comments.
I'll do it yesterday.

Re:Procrastination

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

I have no time to read these comments.
I'll do it yesterday.

Make that a first post while you're at it.

John Titor...

[Mendy]

...would have been found but there isn't a Twitter client for an IBM 5100.

Conspiracy

[Brett Buck]

No false positives = a little too convenient.

        The utter lack of evidence is undeniable proof of a gigantic PLOT!

time travel is so last millenium

[bzipitidoo]

Time travel is such a plot destroyer, such a deus ex machina, it ought to be dropped from SF altogether, much the way psychic phenomena have. It is so overused and tame. The traveler goes back in time, and fixes the mistake without otherwise altering the future at all, then skips right back home to the future to find everything worked out exactly as desired. If they have a difficult time of it, they might have to make several trips back in time to fix the problems, but they of course succeed.

Time travel is also, so far as we know, impossible. Star Trek can lean on the crutches of FTL and time travel, to speed the plots along, but it's not necessary. We can conceive of interstellar civilizations without such fantasy. It is quite possible to build a space ship that can carry us to a nearby star system over a period of thousands of years, and terraform a world for our use. We lack the technology to do it right now, but maybe, in a few more centuries, we can. Time travel does not look like it will ever be possible, and ought to be relegated to fantasy.

Re:time travel is so last millenium

[Powercntrl]

Time travel is also, so far as we know, impossible.

While bi-directional time travel to any point in history is likely impossible, there are more than a few organisms that can put themselves into stasis to essentially travel into the future. When we finally figure out how to do it with humans, time travel into the future will be quite possible - albeit a one way trip.

Re:time travel is so last millenium

[dunkelfalke]

I recon you haven't read/seen Steins; Gate then. Exactly as desired my arse.

Re:time travel is so last millenium

[Anonymous Coward]

Travel to the future is already possible - we're doing it right now! Changing the rate at which we travel to the future is also well within the realms of science - the crew of the International Space Station is travelling to the future at a different rate than we are.

Re:time travel is so last millenium

[VortexCortex]

Time travel is such a plot destroyer, such a deus ex machina, it ought to be dropped from SF altogether,

SPOILER WARNING. I thought as you did once, until I read Julian May's Many Colored Land, which opens in the not too distant but radically different future, and then jumps straight into the past, far removed from the current timeline, to the Pleistocene epoch. I liked her trilogy where explorers and misfits who didn't fit in the future sought to explore a simpler time in the distant past, before humans had yet formed. So, I continued to read her books, the next was Intervention, which happens in near past, through present and near future setting: At the height of the cold war humans begin to evolve psychic powers, and aliens finally intervene to prevent global war despite their rule against this -- humans have just too much potential for good says the highest order of aliens, though the others don't see how anyone can know such a thing -- just look at murderous primates! --still having wars! The next in the series is the Galactic Milieu trilogy which take places after the alien Intervention and follows the Remillard family's exploits along with strange alien overseer races. The most enigmatic, powerful, and ethereal race of aliens has particular interest in Marc Remillard and his uncle; You see, while alien tech allows rejuvenation tanks, their family has a natural immortality gene. Stop now, if you plan on reading the stories for I shall severely spoil the series next.

As it turns out Marc's little brother Jack, while not having the immortality gene, is a psychic powerhouse -- demonstrating amazing ability while still an infant. Jakc helps his audacious brother with controversial mechanical psychic augmentation gear, but is struck down with cancer and his body dies... but his brain lives on. Marc is nearly obsessed with attaining this awesome new state of human evolution himself. Due to a series of hardships combined with the frustrations of the restrictions imposed by humanity's probationary period of admittance into the galactic society, and Marc's enhancement gear being frowned upon, Marc and a team of loyalists leads a rebellion to overthrow the alien overseers, and free humanity to their own ends, but his plans don't come to fruition... at least not in the way he expects. The ghost-like alien entity which had prodded his uncle along and gotten Marc out of a great deal of trouble also thwarted his plan. Marc wound up discovering the Pleistocene gateway, and escaping into exile along with a few loyalist separatists.

Now, it had been almost two decades since Julian's first book in this universe, so I re-read it, and sure enough, there was Marc Remillard's band, in what seemed to be somewhat out of place and arbitrary or inconsequential was an unmistakable plot hook, and even interacting in a few key events -- She had planned this from the very beginning. As it turns out, Marc visits the primitive alien races that would one day gain sentience and psychic awareness and form the Galactic Milieu -- An end to which he personally oversees, he's not a bad person, really. Over millions of years he finally achieves the goal of his Mental-Man project, leaving behind his body behind as his brother once did, and becoming a quite quirky and enigmatic ghost-like alien being, who has an uncanny ability no others possess in knowing at least this future, and a keen fondness for his uncle and his young trouble-making self. Of course he decides the Milieu should intervene, despite contrary convention, before nuclear war destroys his planet.

This is a tale one can read in a loop at the very least twice over to get the entire story which was apparently recursively designed from the outset to reveal more plot on the next read through. So, I would argue strongly that time travel remain in science fiction, and would suggest you read some more imaginative writers instead of foolishly abolishing time-travel from sci-fi before your race even discovers quantum entangled plot devices.

Re:time travel is so last millenium

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah and the device you are posting from are obviously one of the six computers the world had any market for.

Re:time travel is so last millenium

[Anonymous Coward]

Tropes are neither good nor bad, just tools, and as with anything else, lazy writing will make bad stories.

Now, go and play Achron and witness time travel as a plot device done right.

Re:time travel is so last millenium

[Anonymous Coward]

People enjoy it, get over yourself.

Re:time travel is so last millenium

[Bucc5062]

I'll mod myself off topic, but thank you for posting this summary and comment. I've looked into series and will plan to buy them. I also agree that time travel can be a good tool to help in moving a plot along or setting a good story. Science Fiction is not always about the science, but how science effects the characters. According to the Parent, we should not have FTL, beam weapons, aliens, or the rest of the milieu that makes up the world of SciFi. Me, I can take a reasonable suspension of belief (Helix, by Eric Brown comes to mind) if a good tale is told.

Re:time travel is so last millenium

[Jason Levine]

Not all science fiction uses time travel as a dues ex machina. "Off To Be The Wizard" by Scott Meyer has time travel, but it can't solve the main character's problems due to some limitations. He can travel anywhere he wants in the past but can't travel to the future past his "own time." And once he gets into the past, he's limited to some degree in his travels so he winds up not being able to travel to any time but the exact day/time he arrived in the past. (Of course, this isn't a time travel story as much as it is a "the world is run by computer code and some folks discover how to hack it" story. I highly recommend it.)

Re:time travel is so last millenium

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree that time travel is a plot destroyer. I'm a big fan of Dr. Who, which is basically nothing without the concept of time travel.

Re:time travel is so last millenium

[Anonymous Coward]

It is so overused and tame.

It is, but that's more a sign of bad writing than a bad plot device.

When they do it four times a season in what is supposedly a space-exploration TV show, it's pretty hard for it not to get tired. When you have a time-travel based series, then yes, you're pretty much

On the other hand, you have plenty of movies or books where it's obvious that the writer(s) really tried to think through the consequences, or at least make things interesting . Generally, these very quickly turn into a mind-screw. Triangle, Twelve Monkeys and Primer, for example.

Re:time travel is so last millenium

[Anubis IV]

Primer.

I may generally agree with you about time travel being overused and trivialized, but go watch Primer if you want a good reason to reevaluate your position. See: the bottom right corner of xkcd 657 for relevant information.

Re:time travel is so last millenium

[Quirkz]

The traveler goes back in time, and fixes the mistake without otherwise altering the future at all, then skips right back home to the future to find everything worked out exactly as desired. If they have a difficult time of it, they might have to make several trips back in time to fix the problems, but they of course succeed.

That's one of three major themes. The other two are:

2. Time traveler becomes the source of the events which necessitate the time travel, creating a paradoxical loop.

3. Attempts to change anything fail, with the premise (sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken) that it's essentially impossible to change anything through time travel.

Re:time travel is so last millenium

[Anonymous Coward]

"... ought to be relegated to fantasy" ... Duh. It already is: The "F" in "SF" stands for "fiction", which means almost the same thing.

Re:time travel is so last millenium

[sinnergy]

If you haven't seen the movie "Primer", do so. They get it more right than a lot of other science fiction films.

Re:time travel is so last millenium

[painandgreed]

Time travel is also, so far as we know, impossible.

Nope. Time travel as far as we know is quite possible, but the extreme conditions needed for it may be impossible. Physics itself has not issue with time travel and could give a rat's ass about causality. One such example is a Tippler Machine ( "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation". Physical Review D 9 (8): 2203–2206. ). Others include solutions for a rotating universe or wormholes. Tachyons are possible but only in a universe that is at a false vacuum. Physics allow for time travel, but the engineering problems associated with such may be beyond any hope of being constructed.

Re:time travel is so last millenium

[Anonymous Coward]

All time travellers say this.

If you know what to look for..

[msmonroe]

This is silly, doesn't it stand to reason that if you know what to look for then the time travelers will make sure not to reveal those things? Doesn't it make more sense to look for things that we don't know what we should be looking for?

Time is not imaginary

[Viol8]

The constant increase of entropy in the universe is real. Now you can call the process that allows that time or you could call it Kevin, it really doesn't matter. But it DOES exist and entropy DOES increase at different rates depending on relative speed and gravity and pretending it doesn't is simply being the physics equivalent of an Ostrich.

Re:Time is not imaginary

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what little1973 was driving at is time is a measurement of change. AS change happens the previous point is extinct, it no longer exists.

there are none

[frovingslosh]

I believe that there are no time travelers because every time that someone invents a time traveling machine, eventually some idiot goes back to before the machine is invented and does something that stops the machine from being invented.

Re:I didn't meet myself yet

[Dunbal]

Or spent all that money at coffee shops...

Kill samzenpus!

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the fuck is this moron who can't spell STEPHEN HAWKING correctly? What the fuck is he doing on slashdot?

Ycm. co bry frgpo yr lnaf ,cyd

[Anonymous Coward]

d.b yd. naoy oyrb. co urgbe frg ,cnno..

Dupe!!

[waynemcdougall]

This is totally the same article as the one posted on the 5th!!

Re:God

[Cenan]

eagerness of

What? WHAT? Come on dude, you might be batshit crazy but at least fix that damn cutoff so you can spam with complete sentences.

Since 1733 and on...

[Forget4it]

Time travel as a human conception was first documented in 1733 - track the history since then here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_travel_science_fiction#Time_travel_in_novels_and_short_stories/

How about this?

[hughbar]

Twin towers on Johnny Bravo: http://tinyurl.com/pvblodn, however I'm sure it's a cloud, something photoshopped/gimped or 'not meant to be that'. Intriguing to look at images that 'shouldn't' be too though.

Re:How about this?

[squiggleslash]

FWIW, I count only one tower. And burning/exploding skyscrapers is hardly a concept that was kicked off with 9/11, never appearing in action movies prior - I can think of two movies featuring them off the top of my head, from the 1970s and the 1980s.

It's a generic action movie poster featuring a generic action movie scene.

Time traveling sock puppets?

[tlambert]

Do you know how hard it is for them to do that? It takes like a whole hour to "encourage" a city to have been founded in a different place.

The big prank is San Francisco. Every time we move it somewhere safe, someone moves it back.

Time traveling sock puppets?

Or just the Wikipedia editors?

Re:Time traveling sock puppets?

[JWSmythe]

I'm just playing along, because ... well ... the story is a joke. They just missed April Fools by a few months. I can't speak for the others (or sock puppet driving other).

Time travel is commonplace

[Anonymous Coward]

I do time travel couple times a year. It screws up my sleep cycle every time.

Yawn...

[hyades1]

I knew they were going to try this. ;-)

What about all the other worlds?

[VortexCortex]

They're only checking this reality? Not all the other ones as per the Many Worlds interpretation? OK, so if the many worlds interpretation is correct, and some one invents a time travel device in the future and travels back in time, then we will not find them here. You see, everything that can happen does -- Time travel into the past splits the time line as Good 'ol Doc Brown told you.

Now, time travel to the future is more than possible, you're doing it right now, and in fact, GPS has to deal with future time drift: Satellites experience less gravity so their clocks run into the future faster than ours. Just get next to a large gravitational mass for a while, and if you can survive to make it back home, you'll be further into the future than us. To the observers you're just gone in the interim.

However, time travel to the past would be more tricky. When you arrive at a past point in time the interactions you make cause the universe to split, as it does for every interaction. The time-line where the time machine will be created and you will travel back in time remains untouched, and a new series of events unfold. Unfortunately for Doc Brown's plot, you could easily prevent your mom and dad from dating and it wouldn't cause you to disappear -- Because they're dating elsewhere in another universe that you will be from in the future, thus eliminating any paradox.

One could think of the paradox resolution through predestination as well. The probability of you traveling back in time to do the split was already encoded in the state of the universe that allows you to do so. When looking at the time-line hierarchy, as a whole there were events leading up to the discovery of time travel and those universes up to those points all had probability for your splitting of them by returning to them, so by the time you got in the time machine, you had already done the things in the past. From a single time tree moving forward, as time marched forward you would see time travelers appearing and branching off from the time-lines where time travel would become possible up to and beyond the invention of the time machine, this way your single destination still has its quantum probability distribution of when and where to arrive.

So, if you are waiting for time travelers and they don't show up, it could be that they are all showing all around you in separate universes, and this is the universe from which the time machine will first be invented. In other words: You could send yourself yesterday's lottery ticket, but that ticket would exist in an alternate time and you'd remain just as poor as you are in this universe, in some other universe you may get all (or only most) of the lottery numbers correct (depending on if your interaction caused the numbers probabilities to change). If you could maintain stream of information to the past you could call yourself up, and have a conversation, and the current you wouldn't remember being called, and the past you may never get around their past self. This is no paradox in the Many Worlds interpretation.

However, I'm not convinced that interpretation is correct. It hints at mock-free will through predestination of every possible outcome, but it would mean the infinite dissipation of energy for the encoding and processing of all outcomes would be strangely detached from reality. I think it far more feasible that things like quantum "teleportation" will work out to be far more mundane than they first appear -- Hint: the "tele" in "teleportation" has to do with transmitting information, and the teleport is not faster than light... Entropy would seem to suggest that travel to the past in a single time-line would take as much (and more) energy as all the events that led up to the present. However, I have a corner of the house that's always empty the event that I'm wrong since our dreams have often proven more powerful than reality.

Re:What about all the other worlds?

[mwissel]

Those are some interesting thoughts. However probable or improbable each interpretation of timetravel appears to me, I cannot help the thought that our perception of time itself is nothing but a mere illusion and that everything that has happened and will happen coexist as we progress at our subjectively experienced pace.

Travelling to the past would then mean to "unlive" your life and undo all actions completely, with the first thing you forget being that you just triggered a time travel.

Re:What about all the other worlds?

[Anonymous Coward]

The many-worlds theory is bullshit, and a lazy way to look at the Universe.

Re:What about all the other worlds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Time is in the mind
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR3kEx53IaY

Re:What about all the other worlds?

[Vitriol Angst]

About 25 years ago I was thinking of a multiverse concept, but I discarded it about 15 years ago, because nothing REALLY STRANGE ever happened. I would have to be extremely lucky not to live in the Universe where occasionally the possibility that gravity was ignored or that my coffee cup transmuted spontaneously into a cat did no occur.

And as I google for "cup transmutes into cat" I get no good results for strangeness but I do find reports by strange people.

Either choices we make matter and thus there is causality, or we are just randomly nice or evil, depending upon a roll of dice. So for every given entity, they are likely all partially going to Hell. Which makes any judgement of morality kind of useless.

Likely all potentials are explored "in a way" but only one reality resolves out of these potentials. I've always said that "physics has no law and things defy it all the time -- they just don't exist." And that is a funny statement, unless you really understand what I'm saying and then your head explodes -- in a metaphorical way. Not because all possibilities of head states are being explored by a pointless multiverse.

It is more mysterious than one might imagine

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the world's population are time-travelers - but they are totally unaware of their own time-warped existence. They simply don't understand the mechanism at work, and assume their arrival on the planet via "birth" somehow excludes any time-travel component.

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[Suferick]

But they showed up in the wrong place, and clearly didn't know where to go

Re:I didn't meet myself yet

[Anonymous Coward]

I've done this experiment many times during my life. I wouldn't meet my future selv, as nothing would happened.

However, now, years later, I don't remember which date I was trying to set up the meeting on! So of course I wouldn't be able to travel back.

Monkeys with typewriters

[gmuslera]

We are not enough to type really at random all shakespeare works, but we are enough to put things that end being true in the middle of all spam, jokes, typos, tales, car analogies, several musings, and, in particular, random "predictions" that we put in internet every minute. If you find deep enough, buried in the mountain of garbage, will be some gold, but that is because the amount of garbage, not because someone intentionally created gold. If enough people write numbers at random around 16000 some could hit tomorrow's dow jones value, but that won't mean that it was predicted or written with actual knowledge of the future.

Time travel to the past is a mined field for paradoxes, even for information. Even knowing for real a future that we could change could make weird things like blue butterflies. And, btw, we are all time travelers, but we travel only to the future, never back.

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[digitalchinky]

All of this presumes a single timeline where those events occurred in the same way for all observers. What if there are a large number of parallel universes that follow through on all of those possible threads? It seems to me this would make the probability of detecting evidence of time travel so close to zero that it simply wouldn't be found.

Even if you could jump through time instantly, the earth isn't going to be where you left it anyway, tricky business to be in...

We don't see time travelers

[X10]

If time travel is possible, then at one point in time they will actually physically travel to our times. But we don't see them, do we? Even if they have instructions to not make themselves known, if you wait long enough one will, and will travel to our time or before. Unless of course the world ends soon after time travel has become an option.

Re:We don't see time travelers

[wonkey_monkey]

Or perhaps one can't travel back further than the moment the time machine was first made operational.

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[Anonymous Coward]

Kill Hitler, and someone more militarily competent would have risen to take his place, given the economic and social conditions of Germany at the time would remain unchanged. That isn't something we would have wanted to happen.

Ancient tech

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would time travellers use twitter? Is it going to be around for ever?

It's like going back 10000 years and carving a message in a piece of wood for your future self to find.

They missed all the posts...

[Anonymous Coward]

... of Satoshi Nakamoto?! Inconceivable!

J.W. Dunne

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Experiment_with_Time

Re:I didn't meet myself yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe time travel will be much like when you go into another room and you say "I can't remember why I came in here". So you travel back in time, and then can't remember that you were supposed to go to the coffee shop and go to a bar instead and miss yourself. And so the universe ensures that no paradox ensues and life continues safely. Just remember that the old drunk you see in the shop doorway ranting about being a time traveller just might be your future self after departing the bar. But don't speak to them or there will be a rift in the space-time continuum.

Time Travelers sank the Titanic?

[twosat]

There's a theory that the Titanic sank so quickly because it was weighed down by a huge number of time-travelers from the future.

Re:Time Travelers sank the Titanic?

[DTentilhao]

Also there were no 'real' locals at Golgotha, they were all tourists from the future re-enacting the event ..

Usenet msgs from the future ..

[DTentilhao]

'John Titor is the name used on several bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001 by a poster claiming to be a time traveller from 2036

Compromise

[ThatsNotPudding]

I'd be satisfied with a paper that could explain the last third of Primer to me.

Re:Compromise

[nblender]

xkcd did a good job of it:

http://xkcd.com/657/

And seers?

[Pope Raymond Lama]

Given that for each "not immediate dismissable" time traveler there are thousands of plausible future-tellers, I don't know how
positive identifications of "events published before they happen" could actually signal one rather than the other.

Not the only example

[CdBee]

In 'Cryptonomicon' (Published 1999) Neal Stephenson introduces a character (Avi Halaby) and a few locations (a town and a pub called the Bomb & Grapnel) who are set up, created, founded in the Baroque Trilogy of novels (Published 2003,2004,2004)
- Halaby's family background is included as an irrelevant throwaway comment which jars with the storytelling trend, until 5 years later when one of his characters in a storyline centuries earlier, founds the dynasty

Hugh Pickens DOT Com

[Anonymous Coward]

Another asinine Hugh Pickens DOT Com submission. Why do we see his crap daily, and I do mean crap. Friend of editors / DICE?

Never will be found

[mcspoo]

The issue with searching for evidence in time travel is that once it's happened, no one would know it except the time traveler themselves, assuming they avoiding any paradoxes which eliminated their very existence, or eliminated the circumstance whereas they invented or gained assess to time travel proper. Once time travel (into the past, presumably) has taken place, all evidence of the previous time line is erased from existence. Therefore, only the word of the time traveler(s) itself exists to confirm or deny the actuality.

Unless of course, you have an appropriate tachyon emitter than can track the rate at which all matter in the universe spins and locate matter that is out of sync... localized to a single person or location or item that may have been sent back....

Re:Never will be found

[Anonymous Coward]

So then, you're not surprised to the lengths which humans will go in order to avoid entropy?

Look for time travellers, and you find...

[Wdi]

a) wrongly set system clocks leaking into page timestamps, etc.

b) conspirators communicating about/cashing in on their nefarious schemes

They are talking about me.

[PopeRatzo]

I have come here from the second half of the 20th century.

I have pictures of myself standing outside CBGB with the bad hair and punk rock clothes to prove it.

Re:I didn't meet myself yet

[Richard_at_work]

Why would he need to spend more than one day at the coffee shop? He knows when he went, all he has to do is go back to that day to meet himself - theres no need to go to the coffee shop day after day.

This is time travel we are talking about, after all.

Just ask

[TheCarp]

I have been traveling through time since I was born, forwards, at very large portions of C relative to the third planet from your sun. In fact, I have traveled over 35 years since I was born, its been quite a wild ride.

Re:Just ask

[Floyd-ATC]

Same here but they chose to ignore us because of "practical verifiability concerns". And they call themselves researchers...

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[punman]

Posting such info could endanger the future, or risk causality paradox issues --- changing the future in such a way,
that time travel is not discovered.

Time travelers from the future are historians.... they may be tweeting, but they are tweeing about the past
(our present), and possibly sending those tweets into the future.

You can go forward in time, one-way trip, and not cause any problems. Your knowledge of things in the past does no harm in the future where those things already happened. In fact, you "skip" some time and probably are worse off for it.

You cannot go forward in time and then return, or backwards in time at all. You will have knowledge of at least some part of the future and you would return to a timeline permanently altered, if ever so slightly at first. This slight difference would be magnified as the years pass (i.e. the butterfly effect) to a degree perhaps only noticeable to yourself, but it is necessary that, as you make choices, due to your future knowledge, when your new timeline catches up to the point you jumped to in the future, it will be extremely different.

You cannot go backwards in time. Once you do, your alteration of that timeline is permanent. The mere existence of time travelers immediately and irrevocably inflicts an alteration of that timeline which is cosmic in scale, paradoxes can and will (and have) happened.

So given that we have no known time travelers my postulation is that either it is impossible or our universe -- that is, the specific probability vector we are currently on -- is the only universe, out of the infinite set of vectors comprised of every permutation of possible events, that has not and will not and will never invent, or discover, or experience time travel. (Or, it is one-way to the future only, which is rather pointless, if you think about it even briefly.)

I used to be able to send emails from the future!

[Anonymous Coward]

Spam filtering put a stop to that.

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[Anonymous Coward]

https://twitter.com/RealTimeWWII

I read that paper ages ago...

[KritonK]

...in subjective time and used it as a guide for things not to do, if I want to remain undetected when I went back to the past. So far it seems to have worked.

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[Z00L00K]

There are two Bethlehem too... One outside Jerusalem, the other outside Nazareth.

You'd know

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd know if it were me because
Google - Droogle
Yahoo - Drewhoo
Hotmail - Drewtmail
AOL - Drew O L
And the inventor of Captcha codes would have no eyes.

Of course they weren't found...

[Anonymous Coward]

They are all in different threads of the Multiverse now.

I have a working time machine....

[Lumpy]

It currently is only capable of moving forward only at normal speed.

Adapted Obfuscation

[halexists]

Silly researchers. Don't they know that Time Travelers take a course on Adaptive Obfuscation in their junior year of Time Traveler School in which they are taught all the methods history has every come up with to detect time travel? All they've done is added an inset to the course textbook in the chapter on the late 20th/early 21st century.

But wait, maybe they SUSPECT this is the course of history, and the researchers have invested heavily in industries that will be involved in time travel textbook publishing!

kidding or genuine woo woo? why not both?

[Thud457]

Let's not forget the episode of the X-Files spinoff "The Lone Gunmen" about a government conspiracy concerning an attempt to fly a commercial aircraft into the Twin Towers.
The episode title was, coincidentally enough, called "Pilot".

Reality is not just stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine.

Re:I didn't meet myself yet

[Jason Levine]

Or it proves that, in the future, you think of the possibilities of time travel as too cool to waste on something as mundane as meeting your younger self.

Or, you remember not seeing yourself and if you now go back and meet yourself, you risk changing the timeline to such a degree that you won't have access to time travel. Therefore, you continue to not meet yourself.

There are lots of possibilities with time travel.

*steps into a blue box that is bigger on the inside*

Thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

The research just disproved time travel as proof would be instantly available by the time the team published the message. Provided the message lived long enough to see time travel becoming a reality.

wait, "Titanic" really happened?!

[Thud457]

holy crap, context please.
I mean, I know there are people that don't like the GCC compiler, but I never knew there where people who just refused to admit it's very existence.
Oh wait, you're talking global climate change.

re: (#45854281) :
There's a lot of dumbasses on teh intarwebs.
THAT'S THE JOKE.

simple work around

[Xenious]

Wouldn't they have known about this article from the past and then just used counter measures to avoid detection?

Mess with their heads

[Anonymous Coward]

Find events with P(.9) or higher that they WILL occur. Post articles that about them, but that are vague enough to be accurate. One would be a birth (you know the approx date and sex of the child, post a congrats note). Another might be an election, for example it was nearly 100% certain that Obama would win so something about how happy folks are after his election (or how upset some folks are) would have been a "future" article....

Re:Mess with their heads

[hubie]

Better go with higher than P(0.9). Mitch Albom tried what you suggest and got busted for it.

Follow the money!

[Anonymous Coward]

If I were looking for Time Travelers I would start with a very detailed background check on anyone that's ever won a major lottery.

Re:Follow the money!

[Guido von Guido II]

If I were looking for Time Travelers I would start with a very detailed background check on anyone that's ever won a major lottery.

...or anyone who made money betting on sporting events or through the stock market.

Isaac Asimov

[Forty Two Tenfold]

Isaac Asimov didn't use twitter.

It seems kind of silly, but great plot device

[swb]

...for a movie or a novel.

Some search engine software engineer testing a new search algorithm somehow starts finding information in search results that contradicts the dates information was actually known. Engineer thinks its a bug in his algorithm, but can't find the bug and starts investigating the anomalous results and using them as a starting point discovers time travelers/time travel conspiracy/aliens/whatever.

what a weird thing to look for

[Anonymous Coward]

This is hilarious. Time travel is probably the most totally fucking impossible thing human beings have ever conceived. Well, that is, traveling backwards in time. The only time we think that could happen, you happen to be falling into an inescapable black hole in the fabric of spacetime that will crush you to an infinitesimal point.

I love to read stories about it but the fact is, I do not think it can ever, ever happen.

I scan wikipedia looking for changes

[Anonymous Coward]

Every now and then I check entries on wikipedia to see if they are consistent with my memories of events. For example, things like what year a movie came out, or what the entry on Mike Myers says to see if the universe has entry has changed. I found some evidence that things are not as I remember them, but it's not been major changes (yet).

Re:I didn't meet myself yet

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was 11 years old I left messages to future time travelers in the walls of my house.

I was very specific as to when I was to be met, and where. They didn't show up.

Obligatory Time Travel / Hitler XKCD Reference

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/1063/

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[squiggleslash]

Recently had a thought you could totally f--- up much of modern Christianity, and alas give more ammunition to the ultra-rich, if you went back in time and, a year before Jesus's birth, built a giant Las Vegas style luxury hotel and entertainment complex (with, for reasons that'd be unexplained at the time, an adjoining hospital with a substantial maternity wing) in the middle of Bethlehem. making it absolutely impossible for his parents to arrive and be forced to sleep in a stable.

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL this is so funny. So many stupid people in the world. lol lol lol lol

Hey, my Alma Mater!

[TripleE78]

I graduated from Tech. in 2000. The CS dept. was in the same building as Physics. It was in the basement (yes, I know that's normally reserved for us programmers). Nice guys, but yeah so not surprised.

I mean, most of the physics majors had beards that would put both a Civil War general and most UNIX sysadmins to shame, and yet had a prescient idea of quantum things I still don't understand (and can't spell according to my browser). I think they're doing this to look for their fellow stranded time travelers. Or to stop their parents from sleeping with grandma or something.

Or maybe they're making sure nobody's breaking The Code.

Nikola Tesla

[jfalcon]

This one is a shoe-in for time traveler. He's like Dr. Emmett Brown stuck in the 1890's...

Hey

[Anonymous Coward]

Ive traveled back in time to tell you that you're wasting yours.

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as this story is clearly a hoax, especially since most of what he said never happened, it sure is entertaining

Re:I didn't meet myself yet

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried that with every birthday since I was 7. "Right, I'll come back and visit myself on this birthday..." - it's yet to yield verifiable results.

Rank idiocy.

[RightSaidFred99]

Time travel is not possible. But if the point is just theoretically interesting I guess the work is valid on its own merit.

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[wonkey_monkey]

You cannot go backwards in time. Once you do, your alteration of that timeline is permanent.

That's assuming any alteration could be made.

The mere existence of time travelers immediately and irrevocably inflicts an alteration of that timeline which is cosmic in scale

Why? They could have always been there, contributing to but not altering in any way the events of the timeline.

We Aren't Morons

[Anonymous Coward]

Those of us who travel aren't morons. It takes a lot just to be able to get here in the first place, and that tends to filter out the morons. So those of us who do make it understand that exposure would be far too dangerous.

I'm not talking about paradox, of course (many worlds makes this a non-issue). I'm talking about the danger to ourselves that would manifest, once one of your power brokers or governments got wind about one of us.

Re:We Aren't Morons

[PPH]

And then there's that 12 digit Slashdot ID. You'd get modded down so far by the old timers nobody would ever see your posts.

Niven's law of time travel

[russotto]

One version of this law states that in any universe which permits time travel to change the past, time travelers will change the past until time travel is no longer possible. Whether sexy brunette time policewomen are part of this are not I do not know.

"Only time travelers from the future"

[Floyd-ATC]

Ofcourse they won't find anything with arbitrary limitations like that.

Pope Leroy would like this article.

[Anonymous Coward]

He also loved the one I sent him about finding Comet Beiber in the night sky.

Re:I didn't meet myself yet

[tocs]

I have done time travel experiments in coffee shops. Unfortunately, I have only managed to travel forward in time and now I am stuck here.

This submission is from the future

[davidwr]

I think it's from April 1, 2014.

Seems like ...

[PPH]

... they should be finding evidence of a lot of con artist prognosticators plus some people whose PC clocks are set incorrectly.

The con artists make a whole batch of 'predictions' and then disavow responsibility for those that don't come true. This is made easier by the anonymity of the Internet. Make predictions, each under a pseudonym. And then only prove ownership of the names that made the correct guesses.

I am a time traveler

[Anonymous Coward]

I travel through time in a "forward" direction at a rate of 60 minutes per hour.

Do lucky guessers appear to be time travelers?

[Anonymous Coward]

What if someone makes a really lucky guess about the future?

What if they make 10 lucky guesses in a row?

If 1024 people each make 10 guesses about the future -- with each guess having a 0.5 probability of coming true -- then on average one of them will get all 10 guesses right. Would such a person be considered a "time traveler" by these search techniques?

Time travel

[BringsApples]

Ok, ok... I know this is a hokey article and it's a funny idea to search for time travelers on the internet. God knows there are always people out there willing to 'say' things to indicate that they're something that they're not. Many of them actually believe themselves. Probably because they have not found their true Self in life. However...

The next time you have a lucid dream, and think about how cool it is to fly around in the sky, or underwater, or whatever else you may think to do; try time travel instead.

They're all dead

[PPH]

They forgot that when they stepped back in time, Earth was no longer in the same position as it was. Having moved through space in orbit around the sun and galaxy center. So they appeared in the vacuum of space and promptly expired.

If you want to find time travellers,

[oscrivellodds]

start looking into the lives of lottery winners or big sports gambling winners. I suppose if one could travel backwards through time there wouldn't be much need to cash in big when you could simply cash in small as often as you need money for anything. Still, there are some very expensive things one might want that would require large cash outlays.

Re:If you want to find time travellers,

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember a bunch of years back that one guy won the big jackpot lottery twice in a one year period. I always wondered what he was doing to achieve that. My guess was either playing hundreds of thousands of numbers with huge $$ investment, or he was channeling from himself or somebody else in the "future".

Also, people don't understand what "time" is I think. Saying you can't travel in time is like saying you can't cross the street. We just don't have the necessary organs to understand how we move through multi-dimensional space, or how to affect our path.

osit.

Check out this Book About Time Travelers

[socz]

What a coincidence or premonition of my buddy, McGrew, who wrote a book about this exact subject! He says it was inspired by Slashdot itself so what perfect timing. I'm hooked on reading it and recommend* it... Check out here to purchase or read online as he is releasing a chapter a week on-line for free.

http://www.mcgrewbooks.com/

On Sale Now
Hardcover $24.95
6x9 168 pages
ISBN 978-0-9910531-0-0

*I am not being paid or compensated in any way to promote his book and have no direct ties to it other than having "friended" McGrew on /.

Did they search for purchases of time travel gear?

[bi$hop]

Such as this purchase made by Uncle Rico?

Wanted:

[captjc]

WANTED: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 322, Oakview CA 93022. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[bill_mcgonigle]

Time travelers from the future are historians....

A confounding factor is that good historians also sometimes appear to be prescient.

Wouldn't Time Travelers ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Know about this technique and take step to circumvent it?

not so quick there

[Anonymous Coward]

A future time traveler would already be aware of this study and of course disguise their tracks if they were seeking to remain obscured. As evidenced by Dorai and Hawking, future time travelers do wish to remain low key and do not show up for the parties in their honor, probably aware of what happened to the initial time traveler who in 2018 was imprisoned an later executed for the murder of a mathematician who he believed held the secret to time travel. It was in fact the daughter of the man who broke the code, so to speak. The rest is, as the say future-history.

Re:I didn't meet myself yet

[Black Parrot]

with the idea that you will travel back in time to meet yourself there

Wouldn't that violate the laws of conservation of matter and energy?

Re:I didn't meet myself yet

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

Oh great, so now we're going to accept dating advice from Mr. I'm-My-Own-Grandfather?

The problem...

[WillyWanker]

With time travel that most people overlook is that the Earth is constantly in motion, both around the sun and through space as our solar system and the Milky Way travels. So if one where able to travel back in time you'd end up someplace in space, not on Earth, as the Earth is not going to be anywhere near where you emerge.

One would need to not only traverse time but also space, and be able to calculate precisely where the Earth was at the moment in time you are attempting to travel to. And it needs to be *really* precise, because you need to arrive in a location that's not inside the Earth, or high in the atmosphere, not underwater, or within either a man-made or natural structure (such as a mountain or building).

In other words, you need a TARDIS -- a vessel that can travel both thru time and space and provide you with some level of protection.

Could your experience have been the actual earthqu

[Anonymous Coward]

Could the "force" or "energy" you felt perhaps have been some seismic phenomena related to, but prior to the earthquake?

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[Anonymous Coward]

... since most of what he said never happened ...

Thats because we had forewarning of the events, and thus could prevent them. Also, he was from a parallel universe, so his past isnt necessarily our future.

Assuming they understand current technolodgy

[Soulcat]

The study assumes that a time traveler is able to interface with out current computing technology, which could be horribly primitive, to the point unless they are a historian or archaeologist they may not comprehend how to use it.

Did you not read the rules?

[Anonymous Coward]

The rules forbid time-travelers from intentionally communicating with the future through non-fiction in any medium other than printed text.

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[Anonymous Coward]

If we assume the time travelers are human, both mistakes and abuse will be made.

Of course time paradoxes poof in a vapour of logic thought when you think them through. If I went back in time and killed my father before I was born, I would never have been born and consequently could not go back to prevent it because a) there wouldn't be a me to go back, and b) there wouldn't be a birth to prevent. Consequently, it is proven beyond a doubt that I will not go back and kill my father before I was born. The reason why is not that important and left as an excercise for phylosophically minded physicists to theorize about. Sometimes you don't need carefully executed series of explosions to demolition something, a good whack with the mallet of common sense is quite enough.

Only one question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who paid these guys to waste time on this? The state of Mich. or the U.S. Taxpayer? Might as well spend money on finding Bigfoot, or finding where and when the zombies are coming.

Sigh. time travel...

[Ralph Spoilsport]

1. All of us time travel into the future.
2. You can travel farther into the future using relativity - get a space ship, go REALLY fast for a a good long while and then come back. Time dilation will have occured - you will have aged little, but the earth will have relatively accelerated its time in your absence. While technologically not presently possible, it is trivial in terms of theory.
3. You cannot go back in time. Why? Because space. To go back in time, even if it was possible, means going someplace else in space. Listen to the Monty Python Galaxy song and it will give you the numbers you need to calculate, because even if you go back in time, you have to go back in space as well. If you went back in time now, you would appear in outer space and die very quickly. And that place you need to be would be millions or even billions or trillions of miles away from your present location.
So, no time travel. Sorry.

Re:Sigh. time travel...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does going backwards in time mean you have to travel in space, but going forwards in time does not?

Consider a small amount of forward time travel done by a small object in deep (e.g. intergalactic) space, far from any sources of gravitation that might cause the object to accelerate in any direction. Is it moving in space if time-travelling a short amount futureward or pastward compared to easily visible "clocks" like the apparent recession of galaxies, and other long-period or even aperiodical visible phenomena?

Relativists often draw spacetime diagrams for events with only timelike separation. Such a diagram might track the worldline of an object that sits still relative to a chosen set of spacelike coordinates, but which (usually) advances in time at the rate of one second per second clocked by the observer. There's no space travel there, and nobody considers such a thing to be fundamentally unphysical, just not regularly seen (since visible matter piles up into galaxies and nebulae, as there are lots and lots of sources of gravitation and other accelrators that interact with ordinary matter, but not so much with e.g. isolated patches of dark matter, and the thin gas and dust in intergalactic space).

its fairly common belief that time travel ...

[Anonymous Coward]

is impossible because we have no evidence for time travel...

To elaborate.. if there was ever going to be time travel , and time is linear (IE changes do not branch into new timelines based on actions done in the past by a traveler) then the moment that time travel is created.. evidence of said travel would appear all over history.. (finding a an ipad buried in Pompeii for example) immediately leaving evidence that it is possible..

IE since we have no evidence, then Time Travel is impossible and will always be impossible..

To counter the naysayers.. the idea that Time travel tech where invented and perfectly controlled from that moment until the end of time is basically impossible.. it may be heavily controlled for a time.. but it is inevitable that it will escape control at some point after it is invented.

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[Anonymous Coward]

^^^That. As I recall, he made it very clear that he really didn't care what happened to this timeline, since it wasn't his.

Pay no attention to this paper

[SethJohnson]

Ignore this paper or continue to be victimized by imperialist time-travelers.

1. If this study had found examples of prescience, are we expected to believe that time travelers wouldn't have looked at the results of the study and then zipped back prior to the study and expunged the evidence?!?!?

2. You know, if I were a time traveler looking to hide my existence, I would probably publish a study just like this.

None of you actually read the paper

[Anonymous Coward]

Just looking at the paper, it says that the study started in 2006.
One of the event that was used to detect the travelers (explanation in the document) was "Pope Francis"

Figure what, I found one!
There was three searches for Pope Francis on April 2005.
(Pope Francis was elected on Feb 28th, 2013)
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Pope%20Francis&cmpt=q

So maybe there are some of them after all...

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[Jeremi]

You cannot go backwards in time. Once you do, your alteration of that timeline is permanent. The mere existence of time travelers immediately and irrevocably inflicts an alteration of that timeline which is cosmic in scale, paradoxes can and will (and have) happened.

The paradoxes are neatly avoided if the jump back in time causes a copy of the universe to be made -- as a time traveller, you land in the newly-created duplicate universe, and you're free to kill Hitler or whatever without causing a paradox, because your own past remains safely unchanged.

As to whether making an automatic copy of the universe is a reasonable thing to do, I won't speculate, but there are hints that such a thing might not be completely implausible. (or at least, no less implausible than reverse-time-travel in the first place ;))

Vaguely possible scientific explanation

[PraiseBob]

While it doesn't directly correspond to your story, it seems that people near an earthquake have sometimes reported unusual lights: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mysterious-light-associated-earthquakes

I thought you might be interested in the article.

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[mysidia]

The paradoxes are neatly avoided if the jump back in time causes a copy of the universe to be made

That theory only makes sense, if there are multiple "identical" mirror images of our universe, that are just behind us or ahead of us in time; for example, a pre-existing universe that is identical to ours in every way, but started 1 year after ours --- so the Earth calendar today would read Jan 3, 2013..... and of course, another existing universe at every offset between 1 second and 200+ trillion years behind us, and ahead of us.

New Star Trek Directives

[Anonymous Coward]

Kirk, try not to mate with any of locals.
Jim, don't go healing anyone with advanced medicine.
Spock, keep the ears tucked in.

And Scotty, stay off of Facebook and Twitter.

Re:I didn't meet myself yet

[Anonymous Coward]

what if in the future that coffee shop doesnt exist anymore? or what you died next month? or what if timetravel happened after your lifetime?

Re:I didn't meet myself yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Just remember to refill the coffee maker when you take the last cup!

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[Jeremi]

That theory only makes sense, if there are multiple "identical" mirror images of our universe, that are just behind us or ahead of us in time; for example, a pre-existing universe that is identical to ours in every way, but started 1 year after ours --- so the Earth calendar today would read Jan 3, 2013..... and of course, another existing universe at every offset between 1 second and 200+ trillion years behind us, and ahead of us.

Why not create the required universe "on the fly"? I don't see any particular reason why every possible destination universe would need to be pre-created in advance.

Not to mention that a fixed set of pre-created universes would still suffer from paradoxes as soon as the second time traveller jumped into the same destination universe as a previous time traveller, so it wouldn't really solve the paradox problem...

Just read Fortune 500

[Cyrgo]

Want to find out if there are any time travelers? Just read the Fortune 500 list of most wealthy people. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Carlos Slim, etc.

Had I traveled back from the future, I would certainly bet all my money on the stock market or raise a technology company with future knowledge. Gathering resources are essential to any kind of mission they were sent to, or if they have no mission at all, who wouldn't like to live comfortably and rich.

Oddly

[romons]

I was thinking about this this morning, before I read the article. Spooky!

However, the clear answer is that this is the reason we never see aliens. They invent time machines, and then some alien schmuck goes back in time and prevents life from existing on their planet.

We are almost there. Watch for strange gravity waves from Neptune. Oops, spoilers.

Spelling

[Anonymous Coward]

I see Americans are just as illiterate in the future as they are now.

Re: Spelling

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes and in the future all arrogant foreign pricks will continue to come to the US for higher education.

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[mysidia]

Why not create the required universe "on the fly"? I don't see any particular reason why every possible destination universe would need to be pre-created in advance.

Because, tunneling to an existing universe might be feasible some day. Constructing a new universe would require way too much power output --- requiring essentially an amount of energy output greater than all the potential energy sources available in this universe

Not to mention that a fixed set of pre-created universes would still suffer from paradoxes as soon as the second time traveller jumped into the same destination universe as a previous time traveller

If the traveller is tunneling through universes that are mirror images running at different times --- then there is no time paradox, as nobody has travelled through time from the perspective of either universe.

The traveler loses their "identity" though, since the universe arrived at -- the traveller will either be an identical-appearing clone of someone else, or someone arriving in this parallel universe, whom will be completely unknown to it

We All Got Crazy Excited No Doubt

[tingentleman]

The first version of this experiment had positive results.

Help! Help! Help!

[Dabido]

Please, help! I am trapped in 1985. Please send a DeLorean with a Flux Capacity quickly.

Been done

[IwantToKeepAnon]

Rose and Mickey use the internet and find out about the Doctor.

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[johnsmi55947787]

But what if time traveling back is only possible to the point when the time machine was invented. So there are no time travelers because the machine has not been invented yet.

Re:Time travelers not allowed to post prescient in

[mysidia]

What's so special about the invention date, that it should affect all future time travelers?