Scientists Look for Evidence of Time Travel on Internet

 Time Travel  

One of science fiction's greatest tropes, time travel has great possibilities for story telling.  Now, researchers at Cornell University have seriously examined the Internet for evidence of travelers from the future.  This time, they found none.

Michigan Tech physics professor Robert Nemiroff and grad student Teresa Wilson recently published a study of their three attempts to search the Internet for evidence of time travelers. For this study, the researchers only looked for evidence of travelers from the future.  They found none.

Nemiroff told NBC News the idea of looking for time travelers arose during one of the poker games he organizes for his students at the university. "My summer students and I said, 'Why don't we start looking for this, just for fun?'"

From their scientific paper abstract:


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,

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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.



SOURCE  Cornell University

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