Article Summary
Robert Nemiroff, a physics professor at the Michigan Technological University, along with one of his students Teresa Wilson, through this article titled ‘Searching the Internet for Evidence of Time Travelers,’ explain the extensive effort that they had invested for crusading the internet and find evidence pertaining to time travelers. They continue to detail that there was hardly any evidence that they could find on the internet, either through google searches, tweets, or any other form of evidence, regarding any incident related to time travel. Actually, there was not a single evidence related to this on the internet, at the time the authors posted this article. Due to the practical restrictions in terms of data verifiability, the authors had clearly mentioned that only time travelers from the future have been studied as part of their research.
According to the authors, time travel as a topic has been existence since the evolution of the humankind. The very first mention about time travel can be traced back to as old as the 9th century BC in the ancient Indian Sanskrit epic ‘Mahabharatha.’ However, research notes that time travelers were believed to be able to visit future only until 1733 and not any further than this. While time travel into the future can certainly happen as it is based on special relativity, the more controversial thing is travelling into the past. Though there is a possibility for the same with the help of special relativity, the speed of travel is really demanding as it has to be faster than the speed of light.
Nemiroff and Wilson used two phrases as the keywords to search the internet. They are namely Pope Francis and Comet ISON. The authors chose these two phrases because religion, especially Catholicism, and incidents related to comets are the most popular and interesting contemporary issues. But to their surprise, they could hardly find any evidence to support their research. Even Google plus and Twitter were not helpful to them as they could not find any precise information.
Finally, the authors concluded that there is really no trace of any evidence on the internet about time travelers.
References
Robert J. Nemiroff, T. W. (2013). Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers. Houghton: Department of Physics, Michigan Technological University. Retrieved August 28, 2016, from https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1312/1312.7128.pdf
