LillyPip

Took me a while and an AskLemmy post to figure this out, since I initially thought Lemmy was auto-modding commenters (which kinda made me panic), but this is what I see:

I am the only mod in this community, and others aren’t seeing this flag everywhere, so commenters aren’t actually modded.

Is this a bug with Voyager or with my instance?

Is this a Lemmy thing? Something with lemmy.ca? Something about Voyager?

I tried looking it up but found nothing that might explain this. I have a community that’s super niche and I don’t post there much, but I do on occasion. I don’t care that it’s not that active – it’s enough for me.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve had a tiny amount of interaction, and everyone who posts seems to be automatically flagged as a mod. What’s happening?

e: this is what I see:

This relativistic, time-travel spacetime is everywhere metrically flat, excepting a conical singularity. Observers following timelike geodesics can eventually encounter their past selves, aging in the opposite time sense. The spacetime is not time orientable.

“A conical singularity is unlike more familiar curvature singularities,” said Norton. “No matter how close you come to the singularity in this spacetime, the spacetime geometry remains flat and regular with no indication locally of something pathological.”

A spaceship, traveling in a well-behaved region of spacetime, might then encounter this singularity and find its timelike geodesic to be deflected into its past. It would then return to the earlier, well-behaved region of spacetime and the spaceship occupants would encounter their past selves aging in the opposite time sense.

The author anticipates this model being a useful tool for teaching technical aspects of relativity theory.

“The full geometry of this spacetime model can be recovered using rather simple methods,” said Norton. “In addition to seeing the nature of the conical singularity, the analysis requires that students treat spacetime coordinates with extreme care, since they do not have their usual default physical meanings.”

Source: “A simple Minkowskian time-travel spacetime,” by John D. Norton, American Journal of Physics (2025). The article can be accessed here.

I’ve officially looked at the word ‘valuing’ enough times in trying to spell it that it doesn’t look like a word anymore.

Just look at it Valuing Valueing? Valuing VALUING

This word has broken my brain today, how are you?

It looks like they’re actually tier 1 (they seem to be standing on a white platform), but what, if any, weight is each layer above them? I can see narrow platforms, but are they all taking most of the weight?

I’m not sure whether this was meant as an athletic or purely aesthetic display – since they’re billed as ‘acrobats’, I assumed skill was involved, so what would be the best and worst case scenario those 8-10 in the narrowest tier would be supporting?

e: was there any kind of structural support in this? I’m not finding much about it.

Here’s a Snopes article about this event at the 1980s Olympics in Moscow.

1011

Excerpts:

The acceptance of Einstein’s general theory of relativity made time travel physically respectable, because it allows spacetimes in which the timelike curves of observers can form a closed loop. While some theories suggest exotic physics that open wormholes, author John D. Norton has proposed a simpler model in which observers, tracing out timelike curves, might meet their past selves.

An interesting difference between author Norton’s model and that of others is that the model presented here is not time-orientable, which means that it does not have a uniform, forward definition of time. Furthermore, it is matter-free and flat everywhere except for a two-dimensional singularity analogous to the singular point of a paper cone.

“A conical singularity is unlike more familiar curvature singularities,” said Norton. “No matter how close you come to the singularity in this spacetime, the spacetime geometry remains flat and regular with no indication locally of something pathological.”

A spaceship, traveling in a well-behaved region of spacetime, might then encounter this singularity and find its timelike geodesic to be deflected into its past. It would then return to the earlier, well-behaved region of spacetime and the spaceship occupants would encounter their past selves aging in the opposite time sense.

The source paper on AAPT from 1 Mar 2025: A simple Minkowskian time-travel spacetime