Time Travel Research

Recently I received several questions in a relatively short period of time asking my opinion on time travel. Before I had time to really cogitate on those requests, I stumbled across a report on time-travel research. According to the 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, 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."


• Robert J. Nemiroff, Teresa Wilson, Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers, arXiv, 2013, arxiv.org/abs/1312.7128