The Time viewer is a fictional device occasionally used in science fiction. It is usually a device which functions along the same lines as a television, except that the picture depicts events in another time, either the past or the future. The device is also sometimes called a chronoscope, but this name has also been used by the Victorian scientist, Charles Wheatstone.
An apocryphal device called a Chronovisor is believed by some to actually exist, and features in certain conspiracy theories.
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The "Chronovisor" is a time viewer whose existence was alleged by Father François Brune, author of several books on paranormal phenomena and religion, in his 2002 book Le nouveau mystère du Vatican ("The Vatican’s New Mystery").
Brune claimed that the device had been built by the Italian priest and scientist Father Pellegrino Maria Ernetti (1925-1994). While Father Ernetti was a real person, the existence (much less the functionality) of the chronovisor has never been confirmed, and its alleged capabilities are strongly reminiscent of the fictional time viewer which features in T. L. Sherred's 1947 science fiction novelette "E for Effort".
In the early 1960s Ernetti stated to François Brune, himself a Roman Catholic priest and author, that Ernetti helped to construct the machine as part of a team which included twelve world-famous scientists, of whom he named two, Enrico Fermi and Wernher von Braun. The chronovisor was described as a large cabinet with a cathode ray tube for viewing the received events and a series of buttons, levers, and other controls for selecting the time and the location to be viewed. It could also focus and track specific people. According to its inventor, it worked by receiving, decoding and reproducing the electromagnetic radiation left behind from past events, though it could also pick up sound waves.
Ernetti lacked hard evidence for these claims. He said that he had observed, among other historical events, Christ's crucifixion and photographed it. A photo of this, Ernetti said, appeared in the May 2, 1972 issue of La Domenica del Corriere, an Italian weekly news magazine. However, a near-identical (though mirrored left to right) photograph of a wood carving by the sculptor Cullot Valera, turned up, casting doubt upon Ernetti's statement.
Through the chronovisor, Ernetti said that he had witnessed, among other scenes, a performance in Rome in 169 BC of the lost tragedy, Thyestes, by the father of Latin poetry, Quintus Ennius. Dr. Katherine Owen Eldred of Princeton University, the translator of an English rendition of the text, included as an appendix to the American printing of Peter Krassa's book on the Chronovisor (see below), believes that Ernetti wrote the play himself. According to the alleged "confession" (purportedly kept anonymous on the request of the person, said to be a relative of Ernetti's) included in the American edition, on his deathbed had Ernetti confessed that he had written the text of the play himself, and that the "photo" of Christ was indeed a "lie". According to the same "source", however, Ernetti also affirmed that the machine was workable.
Brune does not believe Ernetti's "confession" and is convinced that the authorities had coerced Ernetti into making a false confession.
The alleged existence of the chronovisor has fueled a whole series of conspiracy theories, such as that the device was seized and is actually used by the Vatican or by those that secretly control the world.
In stories where time travel is a major plot element, the ability to view the happenings at another time is simply a side effect of the technology, and is rarely noted. An exception is "Millennium" by John Varley, where the time viewer's behavior (or misbehavior) is an important plot element. For reasons of "temporal censorship" the viewer cannot see into times where the travellers have been or will be, even if the location was far away. Also, the creation of a paradox results in progressive blurring of the image as alternate futures overlap.
Robert A. Heinlein's seminal time-travel story "By His Bootstraps" (1941) features a "time portal" with viewing capability, created by a future race of aliens which reduced humans to docile servants, ripe for exploitation by a 20th century go-getter. The protagonist eventually uses the viewer to see the aliens before they left Earth, but the experience almost unhinges his mind. It is while idly viewing his own home time period that he sets into motion the paradoxes that lead to him attaining his new life.
Other stories feature the time viewer, or some similar technology, as the principal plot element. The best known is "The Dead Past", by Isaac Asimov (1956) which concerns the clandestine creation of a time viewer when research into the subject is mysteriously suppressed. The reason for this is revealed at the end - the mere existence of a time viewer destroys all notions of privacy, since the device can be used to view events happening only a fraction of a second ago. A similar outcome features in Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's "The Light of Other Days" (2000). This aspect of the device is almost a "plot killer", because of the profound effects it has. It becomes impossible to use it as a "normal" feature of a society which we can understand.
"Private Eye" by Henry Kuttner (1949), writing as Lewis Padgett, dramatized for BBC Television as "The Eye", envisions a murder in a society where time-viewing makes it virtually impossible to commit one and escape punishment, but also which allows pleas of temporary insanity and self-defense. The protagonist instead schemes to get close enough to the victim, who has married the woman he thought he loved, that he can provoke an attack by the victim and kill him in self-defense. The murder weapon is an antique scalpel used as a letter opener, whose presence between them is carefully orchestrated by the murderer.
"E for Effort", a novella by T. L. Sherred (1947), details a time viewer built by a poor genius who cannot get people to take him seriously, so he uses it to create historical movies which he then shows in his decrepit theater. He is discovered by a Hollywood producer, who is able to exploit the viewer to create first movies, then historical reconstructions, and finally political documentaries. The last part is his undoing, as he exposes every crime committed in the name of patriotism and ideology by world leaders, resulting in the collapse of government, and nuclear war.