Tesseract,
"...that 10 years later you still cannot grasp that Titor was a hoax..."
Twighlight,
I have to ask - why are you so sure about that..?
Twilight will have his own responses, to be sure, and they will likely cover ground that mine does not. But let me relate the single biggest piece of evidence (IMO) that sends up the "hoax" red flag:
The story is concoted to be unfalsifiable, and not just in one way, but in many ways. If you are fully aware of the scientific method, then no theory or proposition that is unfalsifiable can be considered scientific. Rather, it is pseudoscience, at best. And the Titor story does not even rise to the level of pseudoscience, IMO.
The primary plot tactic that ensures the story is technically unfalsifiable is multiple worldlines and the concept Titor, himself, introduced but never scientifically quantified: Worldline Divergence. No matter what predictions Titor makes about our future, and no matter what he tells us about our (alleged) future, this plot tactic always "allows" him to be flat-out wrong... which the vast majority of his predictions most certainly were (we just had yet another Olympic games for chrissakes!).
But the funny thing about using this as the CYA plot tactic is this: An astute scientific observer to the story (I like to think I am one) can begin to falsify the story through induction. Namely, he said two things that caused his downfall. Paraphrasing both of these statements: (1) Things might not happen the way I say because your timeline can diverge from the one I experienced, and (2) My instruments told me that this timeline I share with you has about .002377 percent divergence. Clearly, as time ticks by on our worldline, both of these statements cannot hold up. As we have progressed through this decade, we have indeed witnessed the vast majority of Titor's predictions come up flat-out wrong. Hence, with major events like US Civil War and an end to the Olympic Games
NOT coming to pass, it is awfully hard to claim such an extremely low divergence, however you measure it. Titor tried sooooo hard to make his story unfalsifiable, he didn't realize that by pursuing the Divergence theme as far as he did, he ensured it would eventually be falsified.
But that is just the main reason I see for it being total bunk. When you sniff around the periphery of the story, especially with respect to scientific discoveries that have come to pass in the interregnum of Titor, we begin to wonder why Titor never talked about certain things. In fact, you pointed out one such scientific discovery which rose to prominence after the NASA WMAP probe returned measurements of total energy in the universe: Dark Matter and its stealthy alter-ego Dark Energy. Why did Titor never, EVER speak of these things? Heck, using either of them in his "dual top-spin micro balck hole" alleged design of his time machine would have made it somewhat more believeable, yes? Well, the reason he did not use them in his story was because a discussion of them was
NOT readily available on the internet. No one was really talking about these types of energy until WMAP came back with its results... and that was AFTER Titor's time. Interesting, no?
1) Titor told us that "in the near future" that Cern would discover the basis of time travel technology. Not only was it NOT in the near future, but even today in 2010, Cern is not pumping out ANY major discoveries...yet. So Titor=wrong.
2) On June 30, 2001, NASA launched the
WMAP Probe. But it wasn't until 11 February 2003 that NASA published the first set of measurements that told us the relative percentages of the major types of energy: Dark Energy, the biggest, Dark Matter, the next biggest, and the matter we are most familiar with, Baryonic, as the teeny-tinyest! This is perhaps the single largest cosmological science discovery of this past decade, and Titor said absolutely NOTHING about it.
Titor was baloney, and I think you are smart enough to see that.
RMT
