jmpet,
Would you or anyone else be interested in presenting a John Titor acid test? The point being once we are past that we can move into truly new terriroty- time travelling without it being told to us by Ralph Nader. One thought is making up a "fact sheet" for time travellers to fill out as step one of their wacko "I am a time traveller!" theory. For example:
1. What time did you come from?
2. Why are you here?
3. Why did you pick this website?
4. How did you get here? How does the machine work?
5. Can you offer immediate proof that you're a time traveller? Lottery numbers, Super Bowls, etc.
That's an excellent idea - if we could only get the would-be time traveler to cooperate. It's been our experience that to get those questions answered they have to be posed as both leading questions and within some sort of "hidden agenda".
Asking them directly is always (read literally - I don't know of an exception) answered as follows:
1. Predictions: I can't answer that because it would (destroy, alter or disrupt) this "timeline" (the last term given without definition).
2. How does your gadget work: I'm not a physicist, and/or;
3. It's a secret and my life would be in danger from your government MIB's
4. Why are you here: To warn you about the End of the World, Death, Destruction and Civil War (and more recently), to tell you that John Titor was my friend, pal, partner or trainer.
Basically you get no direct answers to direct questions.
This doesn't mean that the situation is hopeless. Every time travel story, including Titor's, includes at least some basic "physics". And that's your acid test - the physics.
If the TT talks about ZPE's, magnetic monopoles, free energy or says that Einstein predicted time travel we know right off the bat that it's a hoax. If nonsense physics "techno-babble" is tossed out (like "Top-spin, dual-positive singularities that produce a standard, off-set Tipler sinusoid") you know that you're being had.
Beyond that you can look closely at the physics. It has to make some sense and it has to be based on what is already known about physics. If it isn't then its a hoax. Physics doesn't monitor opinion polls and alter itself based on what the alt.sci.physics community demands of it.
As I said in the previous post, when people like Dave Trott start asking questions that aren't so basic and the answers can't be found with a quick & dirty Google then the TT has to either put up or move on.
Titor never did directly answer Trott's question about proving: "If a spacetime contains a causality-violating time machine, but does not contain a chronology-violating time machine, then the only closed causal curves in the spacetime are closed null geodesics".
The implication (and solution) are really simple and, as I referenced above, it contains a "hidden agenda".
Titor brought up the subject of Tipler, CTC's and timelike vectors. Trott was spoon feeding him information to test his actual knowledge. If Titor had
any physics knowledge he should have been able to easily handle the scenario. Trott was parroting Titor but he was using real physics language rather than Titor's Internet techno-babble. Titor didn't recognize his own story in Trott's posed scenario.
And, in addition to that, when Trott posed his question Titor didn't recognize that he was being given the opportunity to refer to Li-Xin Li's paper (Phys. Rev. D 50, R6037–R6040 (1994) "New light on time machines: Against the chronology protection".
A time machine tech should be able to handle that simple scenario. It's a really simple solution. I think that anyone here, if they stopped, looked at the scenario and thought it through could figure it out.
Rather than show that he could handle a simple physics situation where the solution couldn't be found on Google Titor chose to return to "tomorrow".
That's your acid test...physics.
