Yeah, I’d want to talk about rotating cylinders and the possibility of global causality violation or time machines and the principle of self-consistency as a consequence of the principle of stationary action, or whatever mechanism he used to travel “backwards” in time and the relativistic and causal ramifications therefrom. I don’t want to hear any of this crap about prime directives and non-interference principles and that sort of nonsense, either. If you’re travelling back in time, either you’re prepared to deal with violations of causality that are an inevitable consequence of creating a retrograde temporal path, or you’ve established that causality is strictly deterministic and inviolate, and nothing the traveller does can alter the established path of action.
It’s not foolproof, but if I were planning to go back in time and have to prove myself, I’d study a list of solutions to (then) open problems in mathematics, and theories to explain (then) unresolved physical phenomena.
The math ones are better, because they don’t require any technology to prove, but there are also probably lots of theory-disproving experiments that are within our abilities, but haven’t been thought of yet.
I’d believe someone who claimed to be from the future and could tell us an O(n[sup]2.13[/sup]) matrix multiplication algorithm, a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, and a cohesive theory of quantum gravitation that matched our observations.
Better advice would be to avoid the authorities if at all possible. Try to land someplace where they still hang clothes out on the line. Memorize the outcaom of a few sporting events, and beg change. Find a bar with a bookie, spend the night in a flophouse, and come back with your marker. Take a small portion of your winnings and buy a sandwich, the rest let ride on the next event. Repeat until you have enough to buy a fake ID and a degree in physics from Phoenix University. Get a job in that field, at which you will excel, since your employers are still working out stuff you learned as an undergraduate. Save up enough to live on for six months. Then quit. After three months, patent some perfectly ordinary device that hasn’t been invented yet. Then you just need to open a bank account with compound interest…
Tell the agency (assuming government or Illuminati Conspiracy, here) to get a hunk of DNA from JoeNow and compare it to JoeMe.
It’s identical, we’re not identical twins (since I’m older than Joe2007)…so, either some superscience is involved (a baby cloned in the early '70’s with one of them cryogenically frozen?) or I’m from the future. And I can tell you who will win the 2008 series, the Dow Jones on December 31st, 2007, and the exact date that Andy Dick will die from an overdose.
I’d ask if I’m either going to (a) meet the President and become world-famous for my good works, or (b) die when a truck hits me while I cross the street.
If this is a planned trip and you know exactly when you will be coming in. Just memorize the next days closing prices of a dozen or so stocks. While you might conceivably guess one of them, hitting 10 dead on would be proof enough for me.
Oh, great. Now Diogenes is going to get out of town on that date, the you know what won’t happen to the you know where, altering the timeline, and bingo bango, I’ll never be born. Gee, thanks a bu
How about predicting something statistically impossible?
Go back to early March 2006 and show your perfect NCAA bracket from last year, complete with George Mason in the Final Four. Enter it in very public contests, like sports web sites, sports bars & shops, media outlets, and Vegas casinos.
Short of demonic contract or being an optomistic (delusional?) George Mason alum, time travel would be the only option. I think you could memorize the sequence of who wins after studying it for a while before your trip.
During your brief celebrity status, reveal you are a time traveler.
