Many scientists believe that time travel is impossible. Others believe that unknown physics could allow it. The debate on this topic has been going on for many years.
Authors of the article published on the preprint server arXivwhich has not yet been reviewed, decided to look for traces of time travelers on the Internet.
In June 2009, the notable physicist Stephen Hawking, while at Cambridge University, decided to conduct an experiment. The scientist came up with the idea of sending out invitations to a party that had already taken place.
The essence of the experiment was the assumption that if time travel were possible, the people who received invitations would come to the party even though they could not have known about it in advance.
Unfortunately, none of Hawking's invited guests showed up. Perhaps the time travelers simply didn't want to be around the notable physicist, or perhaps time travel is simply impossible.
But a group of physicists decided to conduct their own experiment to find potential time travelers. To do so, the scientists decided to scour the Internet for information about significant events that happened before they happened.
Scientists say that only those who can travel in time are able to write a kind of prediction about a specific event that will take place in the future.
The authors of the paper suggested that even if people came from the future (and scientists have concluded that they certainly could not create a time machine in the past), they could have accidentally left some information on social networks at a certain time when certain crucial events would already be known to scientists but had not yet occurred.
Physicists actively reviewed news on various social networks, as well as monitored popular queries on Google. But no references to known events before they occurred were found.
The researchers also posted a call on various social media sites for potential time travelers to send them an email. The gist of the experiment was that the email address was provided later than the message itself with the call for correspondence.
This means that the person from the future should already know the email address when the message appears. And again, no one wrote to the physicists.
Scientists believe that perhaps people from the future do not want to be known, so they do not leave traces that would reveal information. But there may be other reasons.
“Even time travelers who want to advertise their presence may do so ineffectively,” the team writes in their paper; “those who want to hide their presence may make mistakes that reveal their presence, and those who are indifferent may or may not leave traceable content online.”
The authors of the paper write that it may be physically impossible for time travelers to leave any lasting traces of their time in the past, including even social media posts. Or perhaps we physically cannot find such information because it would violate some as-yet-unknown law of physics.
“First, it may be physically impossible for time travelers to leave any lasting traces of their time in the past, including even intangible informational remnants on the Internet,” they explained.
“After that, it might be physically impossible for us to find information that violates some as-yet-unknown law of physics, perhaps similar to the chronology protection hypothesis. In addition, time travelers might not want to be found and might be good at covering their tracks.”
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