Many scientists believe that time travel is impossible. Others believe unknown physics makes this possible. The debate on this subject has been going on for many years.
The authors of an article published on the preprint server arXivthat has not been peer-reviewed, decided to search the Internet for traces of time travelers.
In June 2009, while working at the University of Cambridge, famous physicist Stephen Hawking decided to conduct an experiment. The scientist came up with the idea of sending invitations to a party that had already taken place.
The essence of the experiment was that if time travel was possible, people who received invitations would come to the party, although they had no way of knowing in advance.
Unfortunately, none of the people Hawking invited showed up. Maybe the time travelers simply didn’t want to be in the company of the famous physicist, or maybe time travel is simply impossible.
But a group of physicists decided to conduct their own experiment to find potential time travelers. To do this, scientists decided to search the Internet for information about important events that appeared even before these events took place.
According to scientists, only those who can travel in time can write some kind of prediction about a certain event that will occur in the future.
The authors of the article suggested that even if people came from the future (and scientists came to the conclusion that they certainly could not create a time machine in the past), they could accidentally leave information on social networks for a certain period of time, when important information would be left behind on social networks. events were already known to scientists, but had not yet occurred.
Physicists actively viewed posts on various social networks and also followed trending queries on Google. But no references have been found to known events before they happened.
The scientists also placed a call on various social networks for potential time travelers to send them an email. The essence of the experiment was that the e-mail address was specified later than the message itself with the call for correspondence.
That is, the person from the future should have already known the email address at the time the message appeared. And again, no one wrote anything to the physicists.
Scientists believe that people from the future may not want to be known and therefore do not leave revealing information trails. But there may also be other reasons.
“Even time travelers who want to advertise their presence can do so ineffectively,” the team writes in their paper. “Those who wish to conceal their presence may make a revealing mistake, and those who are indifferent may or may not leave behind traceable Internet content.”
The paper’s authors write that it may be physically impossible for time travelers to leave lasting remnants of their time in the past, including social media posts. Or perhaps we cannot physically find such information, because this would violate some yet unknown law of physics.
“First, it may be physically impossible for time travelers to leave lasting remnants of their past stays, including even non-corporeal informational remains on the Internet,” they explained.
“Next, it may be physically impossible for us to find information that would violate some yet unknown law of physics, possibly similar to the presumption of chronological protection. Furthermore, time travelers may not want to be found and may be good at covering their tracks.”
