Stephen Hawking Service: Possibility of Time Travellers 'Can't Be Excluded' (bbc.com) 199
Organisers of Prof Stephen Hawking's memorial service have seemingly left the door open for time travellers to attend. From a report: Those wishing to honour the theoretical physicist, who died in March aged 76, can apply via a public ballot. Applicants need to give their birth date - which can be any day up to 31 December 2038. Prof Hawking's foundation said the possibility of time travel had not been disproven and could not be excluded. It was London travel blogger IanVisits who noticed that those born from 2019 to 2038 were theoretically permitted to attend the service at Westminster Abbey. He said: "Professor Hawking once threw a party for time travellers, to see if any would turn up if he posted the invite after the party. None did, but it seems perfect that the memorial website allows people born in the future to attend the service. Look out for time travellers at the Abbey."
Everybody is a time traveller. (Score:5, Insightful)
At the breakneck speed of 60 minutes per hour.
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Well, so we are interstellar space travelers also, at the breakneck speed of the universe expansion.
So silly.
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I can assure you it's always 'now'. You just think you're travelling in time.
Re:But when (Score:5, Funny)
Colonel Sandurz: Try here. Stop.
Dark Helmet: What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the movie?
Colonel Sandurz: Now. You're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now.
Dark Helmet: What happened to then?
Colonel Sandurz: We passed then.
Dark Helmet: When?
Colonel Sandurz: Just now. We're at now now.
Dark Helmet: Go back to then.
Colonel Sandurz: When?
Dark Helmet: Now.
Colonel Sandurz: Now?
Dark Helmet: Now.
Colonel Sandurz: I can't.
Dark Helmet: Why?
Colonel Sandurz: We missed it.
Dark Helmet: When?
Colonel Sandurz: Just now.
Dark Helmet: When will then be now?
Colonel Sandurz: Soon.
Dark Helmet: How soon?
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Whatever... My wife didn't make coffee this morning. Now I can't watch radar. Time to play with my dolls.
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You're all traveling through the 4-dimensional spacetime continuum at c.
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"That means time should also slow down for the astronauts relative to people on the surface. You'd think that might even out, but actually their velocity time dilation has a bigger effect than their gravitational time dilation, so astronauts end up aging slower than people on Earth."
That's drawing the wrong conclusion. They age at the same speed; it's time itself that is elastic and dependent on the observer. If ten years passed on an astronaut's clock while your clock shows twelve years, he didn't age slower.
Being able to grasp how time is a local phenomenon only with no universal clock ticking time away for everyone is the great hurdle that separates those who understand relativity from those who don't. Use of words like "slower", "before" and "ago" in relativistic or big bang con
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There is a universal clock. It's the speed of light.
Re: Everybody is a time traveller. (Score:4, Informative)
There is a universal clock. It's the speed of light.
That is not a clock.
The speed of light in vacuum is 299,792,458 m/s for all reference frames, but that's a ratio. As distance (m) shortens, time (s) contracts so the ratio remains the same. But time changes.
If you travel at 99.5% of light speed, you might insist that you travelled one light year in a little over a year, yet someone watching your travel from the sideline might say you travelled ten light years in over ten years. Both of you are correct, because both distance and time changes depending on viewpoint.
Once (Score:2)
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We have to live through the timeline without time travel until it is invented.
Then it is invented, they go to the party and the memorial and shit gets weird. But it hasn't been invented in the future so it doesn't exist as a possibility now.
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Dr. Hawking's final joke... (Score:5, Interesting)
He had quite a sense of humor, and use it to cope with his condition. In 2009 when the threw a Time Traveller's Party [youtube.com] and no one attended, he indicated that this was confirmation that time travel was not possible.
And as far as we can tell, it isn't, to the point of ridiculousness, and our physics is validated and complete enough on this to be almost certain. Time travel introduces unresolvable paradoxes (ie sending a single particle backwards far enough in time would completely change future atmospheric patterns, weather events and thus affect who was born, including those doing the sending) and and would require unfathomable physics to carry out (on the order of constraining the energy of a hydrogen bomb in the volume occupied by a human such that no damage or radiation occurred.)
Not going to happen. If it ever did, being time travel, it already would have.
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Re:Dr. Hawking's final joke... (Score:5, Insightful)
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well if I were a time traveler I would never show up at a "party for time travelers". Just think about the problems I would have as soon as I proved to be a time traveler, at minimum I would end up locked in some secret government facility or worse.
Except the guy hosting the party was in no shape whatsoever to try to lock anyone up.
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well if I were a time traveler I would never show up at a "party for time travelers". Just think about the problems I would have as soon as I proved to be a time traveler, at minimum I would end up locked in some secret government facility or worse.
Pretty moot as you can go back in time and set the clock one hour back. .
This is what I usually do anyhow for continuing use of the limited timelines I visit.
Now, if only my interstellar cloud calendar (tm) syncs correctly.
P.S. time travellers are really easy to spot, they only use present tense.
Not so complicated (Score:2)
he indicated that this was confirmation that time travel was not possible.
All that would prove is that time travelers didn't come to the party.
Re:Not so complicated (Score:5, Funny)
he indicated that this was confirmation that time travel was not possible.
All that would prove is that observable time travelers didn't come to the party.
FTFY
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he indicated that this was confirmation that time travel was not possible.
All that would prove is that observable time travelers didn't come to the party.
Heisenberg showed up but it wasn't certain if he was observed there.
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he indicated that this was confirmation that time travel was not possible.
All that would prove is that observable time travelers didn't come to the party.
FTFY
It's really bad taste to make jokes about Hawking's blind spot.
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So you're saying that on top of navigating the currents of time these fuckers are fucking ninjas as well?
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he indicated that this was confirmation that time travel was not possible.
All that would prove is that time travelers didn't come to the party.
everyone knows that Time Travelers only attend the good parties...
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Time travel just an Engineering Problem (Score:2)
...and would require unfathomable physics to carry out (on the order of constraining the energy of a hydrogen bomb in the volume occupied by a human such that no damage or radiation occurred.)
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Or he partied hard, tripped to the future and the past with the time traveler that showed up and then couldn't possibly report any of that for fears of messing up the timeline. This is a smart guy we are talking about here.
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You're making the presumption that the quantum state collapses, but if it doesn't, then time travel doesn't cause any paradox. We are just living within a portion of the state space where it hasn't been significantly noticed. We may have diverged recently from a portion where it was noticed. No paradox, both exist.
This is one of the consistent solutions. The thing is, the ways predicted for inducing time-travel are sufficiently extreme that it's not really surprising that we haven't seen any, so absence
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The easiest data set I can think of to mine for evidence of time travelers is 23andme. In theory, with enough data points you should be able to detect a discontinuity in the gene patterns such that you could detect someone going back in time and having children. It wouldn't even be that hard of a query... I have to believe someone there has tried it...
Re: Dr. Hawking's final joke... (Score:3)
You don't need quantization to solve Zeno's paradox. You just need limits and a basic understanding of how infinity works in algebra.
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You've completely misunderstood Zeno's paradox. You've merely stated one of his premises. The question at hand was whether an infinite count of events can be packed into a finite time. The answer is still unclear.
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You've completely misunderstood Zeno's paradox. You've merely stated one of his premises. The question at hand was whether an infinite count of events can be packed into a finite time. The answer is still unclear.
Unless you've taken calculus and have been show that the limit of a sum of an infinite count of events as the time each one takes goes to zero, equals a constant.
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How do you complete an infinite number of action in finite time? That's the question. Zeno started with the premise that the sum converged to 1.
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It does not.
SUM[i = -1, -inf] 9*(10^i) would be represented in decimal notation by 0.999... or similar.
That infinite series has a LIMIT of 1. It will NEVER reach one. It is NOT EQUAL to 1. Understanding the difference is fundamental to understanding calculus.
1/3 has can be represented in decimal notation by 0.333... or similar. Multiplying that decimal result by 3 will result in 0.999... or similar.
This is NOT EQUAL to 1. The representation 0.333... is indeterminate. Every single "proof" attempting to
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Nope. It equals 1.
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That's neat, except that you can construct the real numbers as equivalence classes of convergent sequences of rational numbers, where two sequences are equivalent if and only if their difference converges to zero.
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> It is NOT EQUAL to 1.
*facepalm*
False.
You are confusing presentation and representation.
Proof:
Q. Why?
Q. The same way there are TWO different way to present 1/3 (integer fraction) and 0.333 (repeating decimal) which represent the SAME value there are ALSO two different way to present 1 and 0.999.... which represent the SAME value.
1/3 IS EQUAL to 0.333...
1 IS EQUAL to 0.999...
I
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Zeno's Paradox: In theory you can infinitely sub-divide space, in application you can't. Answer: Both time and space are quantized.
We do not know that. It's certainly plausible but unless you have a working theory of quantum gravity that you have been keeping to yourself, with experimental evidence to back it up, we have literally no idea how space-time works on incredibly small scales.
You can't violate the Law of Causality no matter how hard you try. It would _instantly_ cause you to cease to exist. Ergo, there is no paradox.
By its very nature, a time machine violates the law of causality so, if one exists clearly the law of causality can be broken and how to resolve paradoxes is then a legitimate question. If you believe the law of causality to be unbroken then you have t
Need to understand causality (Score:2)
No, a time machine does not violate causality any more than a car does.
Unless that car can travel _really_ fast, faster than light in fact, that's not true. Causality in physics simply stated is that if event A causes event B then A must always occur before event B. If event A is the time machine departing and event B is the time machine arriving at its destination then, unless you have a really boring one directional time machine that only travels to the future (like a car!), the moment the time machine travels to the past it has violated causality. No fancy temporal paradox
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Going back in time and killing your ancestor, an alleged paradox, isn't. You can't violate the Law of Causality no matter how hard you try. It would _instantly_ cause you to cease to exist. Ergo, there is no paradox.
You're assuming a single universe and the Copenhagen interpretation. If, as some think, the universe branches at every possible probability because they're all true, there's nothing that logically prevents you from going back in time to kill your grandfather without violating the law of causality, because there will be countless universe branches where you didn't.
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Where is the mass of these other universes?
Your question does not make sense.
It's like thinking that the Schroedinger's cat box would have twice the mass because there would be one instance with a live cat and one with a dead cat. That's the case for neither the Copenhagen nor the Everett interpretation.
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Going back in time and killing your ancestor, an alleged paradox, isn't. You can't violate the Law of Causality no matter how hard you try. It would _instantly_ cause you to cease to exist. Ergo, there is no paradox.
You're missing the point of the paradox, which is that by killing your ancestor you would never have existed at all, so therefore you couldn't have gone back in time to kill your ancestor, so therefore your ancestor must still be alive, so therefore you can go back in time to kill him and so on in an infinite loop.
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Not necessarily. Depending on how the device used to enable time travel is created, energy could be used in our time to create the portal to the past while not sending energy to the past. Think wormhole. It's simply an opening.
As to the mass, the person going back in time would be the mass but they would eventually return (assuming they weren't killed in the past
Can't be excluded (Score:2)
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dcollins117 confided:
Jesus exists. He's the Mexican fellow that mows my lawn.
Man. I wish I had mod points ...
Stupid is as stupid does (Score:2)
To say that Time Travelers might exist opens the door to a lot of stupidity.
Only to those already likely to be stupid. No lack of those no matter what anyone actually says.
Then people will say that Jesus might have existed
It's almost certain Jesus existed or at least someone who filled the role. What is in doubt is that Jesus was anything more than an unusually successful cult leader who convinced people he was a deity. Happens all the time even today. See Joseph Smith [wikipedia.org] or L Ron Hubbard [wikipedia.org] for modern day examples of cult leaders founding churches. Christianity and Islam are just examples of the same thing several centuries earlie
Re: Can't be excluded (Score:2)
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There I thought that there was undeniable proof via the genealogy and taxation records of the Roman Empire that Yeshua bar-Yosef existed,
"Jesus is not mentioned in any Roman sources of his day" [huffingtonpost.com]. (Article then goes on to make numerous highly specious arguments in favor of the existence of Jesus Christ, like this one:
This is the usual level of thinking involved in trying to prove the existence of Jesus. It's pathetic. What does that h
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This is the usual level of thinking involved in trying to prove the existence of Jesus. It's pathetic. What does that have to do with anything? Nothing. Jews were regularly being crucified at the time, so it makes all the sense in the world that they would invent a crucified messiah.
No, it doesn't really make any sense at all. The messiah (Hebrew mashiach, "anointed") was simply the descendant of King David who would be anointed king of Israel. Kinda tough to do that if you're dead.
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Jesus most certainly existed. There is plenty of documented proof of that. Now, whether He was the omnipotent Son of God, that is what is usually the subject of debate.
You're right, Jesus does exist, has existed for a long time and will continue to exist way past man but, surprise ending. Jesus isn't the son of god, he's the sun god. As in, literally the sun. Look it up.
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and is very obviously tainted -- either comes from Christians themselves or is a copy of their works.
Not really, there is stuff that is generally considered reliable [wikipedia.org].
If a preacher leading a popular movement of anything of the scale postulated in the Bible happened,
You might want to reconsider that the scale mentioned in the bible mostly isn't very big, at least until later when they came to the attention of Nero.
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Tacitus' work was written AD 116; he himself wasn't even born decades after Jesus' alleged death. The passage in question reads:
Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus
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"Christus", a common biblical term that means "anointed one" -- which required far less chutzpah to claim than "messiah"
"Anointed one" is exactly what the Hebrew mashiach means.
Re: Can't be excluded (Score:2)
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You are disagreeing with most historians. When did you get your PhD?
You mean, the vast majority of Bible scholars are Christians and thus have a strong belief Jesus existed?
Note my words earlier in this thread: "Any documentation comes from 2nd century, and is very obviously tainted -- either comes from Christians themselves or is a copy of their works.". To which, the answer was Tacitus... who wrote in AD 116, had no knowledge about Jesus at all -- merely about some "Christus" whose name obviously came from the group itself. Additionally, the only surviving copy is medie
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Any documentation comes from 2nd century, and is very obviously tainted
That's a judgment call, isn't it? What qualifications do you have?
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My qualifications here are not any higher than those of an average Slashdot reader -- ie, basic reading comprehension -- but that already puts us above the vast majority of humankind.
What I'm claiming here, is that Bible scholars who are Christians are about as authoritative as cancer scientists who are sponsored by a tobacco company. The vast majority of available literature is produced by such scholars, and additionally, there's no mark of of the author's belief -- nor of who really paid for a given canc
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The vast majority of available literature is produced by such scholars, and additionally, there's no mark of of the author's belief -- nor of who really paid for a given cancer study -- and even if there was, a Christian is capable of being honest,
Then link to your expert who is not a Christian.
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In the 1800s it became popular to question the authenticity of ancient historical characters, naturally the Bible was a prime target, but also people like Bodhidarma, or King Ashoka seemed to legendary to be real (and of course, there are many legends about him, so it seemed natural to consider him as unreal as the great flood). Over time however, a lot of the bible turned out to be real. We found external corroboration of many events. For example, there was a war me
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Any documentation comes from 2nd century, and is very obviously tainted -- either comes from Christians themselves or is a copy of their works. If a preacher leading a popular movement of anything of the scale postulated in the Bible happened, it would be mentioned in secular sources, which have quite detailed records of those times. Yet, any such mentions are conspicuously absent.
Convincing forgery is tricky to do. Most would be scribe-forgers altering documents they copy to insert things they would like to be there rarely, if ever, sophisticated at who do construct forged passages that would state out from sophisticated textual analysis (consideration of context and textual flow, writing style, word choice, etc.). So modern scholars have a pretty good handle on when passages in ancient texts by one author are altered by insertions of others.
We have Antiquities of the Jews written b
Re:Can't be excluded (Score:5, Funny)
The next day he returns to the bar, orders a beer, and offers a beer to the stool next to him before finishing his drink and leaving.
This continues on for a week before the bartender finally asks, " Why in the world do you keep offering that stool a beer?"
The physicist replies " The laws of physics dictate that there is a slight possibility that at some point the matter above this stool could reform into a beautiful woman, who would then accept the drink."
The bartender is puzzled for a second before replying " The bar is full of beautiful women. Why not see if they will accept your drink?"
The physicist quickly laughs before saying " Yeah, but what are the odds of that happening?"
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It's not called POSTUS in this timeline.
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Imagine when Hawking himself shows up! (Score:2)
Didn't Hawking send a message to himself on his deathbed back to the point in time he created time travel?
"Dear Steve, they'll have a memorial service for us in a couple of months. Love Steve"
Seems more like an inside joke to me.. (Score:5, Interesting)
2038 is when a 32-bit time_t overflows.
Or maybe the software they wrote for the application process is just buggy. Wouldn't be the first time that ever happened.
Re:Seems more like an inside joke to me.. (Score:4, Informative)
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32 bits is all any universe will ever need.
What about -invisible- time travelers? (Score:2)
Possibility of werewolves and vampires... (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone went back in time and changed history, you wouldn't even know it. It's pretty much an impossible to falsify argument. So yeah, it could be true, but then Big Foot could be real along with werewolves, vampires, the Loch Ness Monster, etc. Or how about those sightings of pterodactyls in Papua New Guinea? I mean FFS, if you're going to seriously entertain the time traveler hypothesis, knowing it probably can't be falsified, you can't dismiss things like cryptids either.
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If someone went back in time and changed history, you wouldn't even know it. It's pretty much an impossible to falsify argument. So yeah, it could be true, but then Big Foot could be real along with werewolves, vampires, the Loch Ness Monster, etc. Or how about those sightings of pterodactyls in Papua New Guinea? I mean FFS, if you're going to seriously entertain the time traveler hypothesis, knowing it probably can't be falsified, you can't dismiss things like cryptids either.
So you're saying that Nessie was a time traveler? OMG! It explains so much!
I couldn't attend, (Score:2)
My assistance dino, was excluded from the venue.
They're busy elsewhere (Score:2)
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sabbede explained:
Drinking at a small bar on Long Island.
Where it's policy that they don't get to run a tab ...
pseudo science (Score:2)
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Until either side can formulate a series of observations or tests they can perform, they have not really progressed more then asking a simple question. Nei
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According to the common accepted theories, the laws of physics work in both directions. That's the null hypothesis. That the arrow of time can only point one way is the anomaly here, and the extraordinary claim.
It may be that we can only observe in one direction, but as of yet, there's really not much except subjective observations that support the claim that time and entropy can only work in one direction. Measuring data objectively might be impossible without begging the question.
That doesn't mean we c
Maybe we are just not very interesting (Score:2)
Going back in time changes polarity (Score:2)
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Is it worse than being drunk?
Time is one way.... (Score:2)
It's pretty clear that time is a vector that can only go one way...
You can "slow" time, maybe even "stop" time for a specific observation of events, but it doesn't go backwards, always forward, always advancing. So you cannot go BACK in time, only forward at varying speeds.
I look at time as being the same concept as entropy which is always increasing, always going one direction...
The only fly in this ointment is from Hawking himself. Black Holes emit Hawking radiation... Which is not easily explained w
We have a few (Score:2)
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Re:2038? (Score:5, Funny)
That is when the world is destroyed by the paradoxes caused by the time traveling device :(
Those of us here are trying to undo the damage.
Re:2038? (Score:5, Funny)
Why the year 2038?
They want someone with a primitive enough time machine they can reverse engineer after beating the time traveler to death for it.
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They don't want refuges from the post-2038 hellscape.
Re:If it were possible to time travel (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: If it were possible to time travel (Score:2)
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Maybe time travelers went back in time and saw him performing various miracles and now Islam is recognized as objective fact?
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I don't know why people would vote down such a devoted follower of Thor.
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Well it was a stupid article anyways, because a lot of systems don't bother checking if Date of Birth is before today date.
Also to note Javascript (normally the first line of data validation) Ints are 32 bit
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Well, that's only a Unix time limitation on a 32 bit machine. But perhaps it's an old box, or perhaps they're using an old framework. More likely it's a joke based on that traditional limit.