Researchers from the Department of Physics at Michigan Technological University have concluded a study in which they scoured the far reaches of the Internet for evidence of time travel.
“Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers” was submitted on December 26 on ArXiv by authors Robert Nemiroff, professor of physics, and Teresa Wilson, a PhD candidate. They stated that the modern universality of the Internet lends itself to in-depth analysis methods to search for time travelers, and that the study they conducted is by and large the most comprehensive to date.
For those out there who believe time travel to be a dismissible concept, the authors argue that it “stands on firm scientific footing. Special Relativity has clear sub-luminal solutions that correspond with time travel to the future. A famous theoretical example is the twin paradox. Such future time travel has been experimentally verified, for example, using a pair of clocks one of which was taken on an airplane. The flying clock recorded a relative time delay of order 10-7 seconds, in comparison to the more stationary clock.”
Nemiroff and Wilson’s approach started with a hunt for information about anyone who might’ve jumped forward in time; this, as opposed to focusing on those who had traveled to the past.
Their reasoning: individuals who traveled to the past would not be able to leave any evidence of their presence on what would’ve been an otherwise not-yet-developed Internet.
Specifically, in looking for the forward-leaping individual(s), Nemiroff and Wilson searched for blog posts, tweets, and search results that were posted ahead of any major occurrences actually taking place.
“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,” the authors explained.
The result of their efforts: no time travelers were discovered.
“Unfortunately, as of this writing, no prescient tweets or emails were received,” they stated.
Nemiroff and Wilson aren’t deterred by their results, though. “Although the negative results reported here may indicate that time travelers from the future are not among us and cannot communicate with us over the modern day Internet, they are by no means proof.”
One reason they suggest is that it may be physically impossible for them to leave remnants of their stay in the past, and it may be physically impossible for us to find such information, violating “some yet-unknown law of physics, possibly similar to the Chronology Protection Conjecture.”
They also suggested that the time travelers may not want to be found, and that they’re good at covering up any evidence they created.
A third reason: maybe the time travelers didn’t leave the specific event tags that the authors searched for. “Finally, our searches were not comprehensive, so that even if time travelers left the exact event tags searched for here, we might have missed them due to human error, oversight, incompleteness of Internet catalogs and searches, or inaccurate content time tags.”
Story via phys.org
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