Researchers from Michigan Technological University hunting for evidence of time travel within social networks have failed to find any.
That's not too surprising, really. But their methods are pretty interesting. Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson explain in their paper, titled "Searching the Internet for evidence of time travellers", how they scoured Google, Bing, Google+, Facebook and Twitter for a series of carefully-chosen terms.
The first was "Pope Francis'. As Jorge Mario Bergoglio is the first Pope Francis, the name is unlikely to have been used widely before March 2013. They found one result, but after inspection decided it was "overly speculative and not prescient". The second was "Comet ISON", which was only named in September 2012. No results were found mentioning this name before that date.
The pair then examined what people had been searching for on search engines during that time period. They speculated: "A time traveller might have been trying to collect historical information that did not survive into the future." They examined both search terms on Google Trends, but found nothing. Nor did they find anyone searching for "Comet ISON" in Nasa's website stats before it was named.
Finally, the physicists attempted to get tweeting time travellers to use one of two specific hashtags which had never previously been used - #icanchangethepast2 or
#icannotchangethepast2 - before August 2013. It was hoped that time travellers would choose one of the phrases to help solve one of the thorny questions about the subject, but neither were found. "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," write the researchers.
They postulate that potential sources of error in their study include a physical impossibiility for time travellers to leave evidence of their stay, a physical impossibility of finding that evidence due to an as-yet-unknown law of physics, time travellers not wishing to be found, or simply a search that was not comprehensive enough. "Nevertheless, given the current prevalence of the Internet, its numerous portals around the globe, and its numerous uses in communication, this search might be considered the most sensitive and comprehensive search yet for time travel from the future," they write.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
