How to Avoid the Time Wars
I&#x27;m a bit astounded that the author has a PhD and is seriously proposing that time travel is the source of the correlation in an Arduino-based &quot;time machine&quot; and hasn&#x27;t really explored any other options like the pseudorandom number generator being inaccurate.<p>How does this get on HN and does anyone actually believe it?<p>EDIT: I&#x27;m looking through the preprint PDF and it looks like they selected the future action (how long to expose for) using the last bit of the previous observation as a random seed (see page 9).<p>That will of course create a correlation from the past event to the future action, and they use that correlation to try to claim that the future action is impacting the past observation. It&#x27;s 100% bogus and terrible science.<p>I don&#x27;t know how they could possibly not see an issue with using the very measurement they&#x27;re trying to find a correlation with as the source of randomness for deciding the future action instead of literally any other pure RNG available. It really seems like they were maliciously creating that correlation for academic clout, job prospects, etc.