The "Real Paper investigating Time Travel" involved Searching the the Internet for two terms.
The conclusion that these searches, even if they had been found, (which they were not) implied "time traveling Internet savvy people from the future searching for events in their past" is a staggering leap.
Might as well theorize fairies from another dimension materialized into ours to poke fun at internet search analyzers.
I am surprised this thing was even published, given that it was based off a monumental leap that ignored Occam's Razor, did not find anything the authors hoped to find and was failure both on the theorizing and the finding front.
"Might as well theorize fairies from another dimension materialized into ours to poke fun at internet search analyzers."
Good point!
Just to be clear, as far as I can tell this work wasn't ever published in a peer-reviewed journal. It was merely accepted as a preprint on arXiv.org, which requires little more than assurance that the author isn't an obvious crackpot (and it sounds like even they reclassified its subject area: almost like moving it into a journal with a different topic).
I mean how would you explain it if they would find something?
I guess this is another Bayesian vs classical statistics thing. In Bayesian thinking, absence of evidence is evidence (not proof, mind you, but it is information).
Sure, it's information. Thing is you have no idea how informative it is, because then you would have to know how likely it would have been that some time traveler would make one of the two particular search queries they tested. Since we know absolutely nothing about time travelers, I think the information content is negligible.
The conclusion that these searches, even if they had been found, (which they were not) implied "time traveling Internet savvy people from the future searching for events in their past" is a staggering leap.
Might as well theorize fairies from another dimension materialized into ours to poke fun at internet search analyzers.
I am surprised this thing was even published, given that it was based off a monumental leap that ignored Occam's Razor, did not find anything the authors hoped to find and was failure both on the theorizing and the finding front.
The system (flawed as it may be) worked for once.