As you know, I have a soft spot for modern mythology of the sci-fi sort. I enjoy it much more than mythology of the supernatural sort because unlike stories about gods and ghosts that are simply impossible, it is possible to at least believe that the stories in sci-fi myths are at least possible to some extent. And I think that makes the stories a great deal more compelling and gives one much more to think about — and of course it also means that even if the myth is false, similar events could easily unfold in the future.
In addition to things like a secret mission to Mars that I talked about yesterday, a tale I enjoy is that of the Chronovisor, a time-viewer said to be capable of tuning in to lingering electromagnetic radiation and displaying any point in time on a television-like screen.
The story of the Chronovisor (if you speak Italian you can watch what appears to be a show about it here on YouTube) was first publicized by Roman Catholic priest Francois Brune, who had interviewed its alleged creator, scientist and fellow priest Father Pellegrino Maria Ernetti. Ernetti had a legitimate academic career as a respected expert in ancient music — so he had a lot to lose academically for telling crazy tales — and was also a prominent exorcist for the Vatican — so on the other hand, maybe crazy tales and Ernetti had always gone hand in hand. In any case, one day while working with Father Agostino Gemelli at the Catholic University of Milan working on hardware to filter harmonics out of Gregorian Chants, they thought they heard the voice of Gemelli’s father coming out of the device. Theorizing that just like a telescope allows you to “look into the past” by showing you light that was created many years earlier, or a “live” television broadcast may actually be showing you something that is not happening at that moment but seconds in the past because of delays in the electromagnetic signal reaching the viewer, that somehow their device had accidentally picked up on an “echo” of an event from the past, Ernetti began investigating the possibility of applying this phenomena in a more dramatic fashion. He claimed that he assembled a team of a dozen scientists and engineers including Wernher von Braun (presumably due to his alleged experience with the “Nazi Bell” machine, particle accelerator meets dimensional gateway generator, that some believe jumped through space and time from 1945 Germany to 1965 Pennsylvania) and Enrico Fermi (the Italian physicist central in developing the first nuclear reactor) to create the device, which worked as designed. However, the Vatican and the science team felt that the machine’s ability to completely eliminate privacy and to tune into any moment and any place put the world at far to much risk and dismantled it.
Before dismantling the device though, Ernetti claimed to have viewed many historical and biblical events, and when asked for proof of the device, he first provided the text of Thyestes, an unpublished play by Quintus Ennius from 169 B.C., which he said he transcribed while watching it in Latin on the Chronovisor. Most academics call this text a fraud, but it’s difficult to prove that absolutely. However, he followed this up with more dramatic proof, a photograph of the face of Jesus Christ as he was being crucified, which he said he’d created by photographing the screen of the Chronovisor!!! Of course, as an atheist, who does not even buy the notion of a non-supernatural historical Jesus, his is where the story breaks down for me. And unfortunately it also breaks down here for Ernetti, when in 1994 it was realized that the photo bore a remarkable similarity to a wooden sculpture of Christ for sale at the Sanctuary of Merciful Love in nearby Collevalenza, Italy. During his life he refused to comment on this matter, until on his deathbed — at least according to an anonymous letter sent to Brune’s publisher, from someone claiming to be Ernetti’s relative — he admitted that the photo of Christ was a hoax but that the Chronovisor was real and had worked.
Brune personally did not believe this letter, and as a devout Christian assumed that the similarity of the sculpture to the photo was due to the fact that the sculpture was said to be based on an actual vision of Christ, so “of course it looks the same, duh!”. I lean in the other direction, and my version of the conspiracy says that if the Chronovisor worked, it revealed the falsehood of the Christian religion — and of all religions — to Father Ernetti, who in a desperate attempt to hold onto his wavering faith, created the fake photo of Christ.
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Because of my enjoyment of the Chronovisor story, it was with great interest that I read a recent article in Popular Science titled “In New Quantum Experiment, Effect Happens Before Cause“, referring to a brain-bending article in Nature Physics called “https://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys2294.html“.
Using four photons, we can actively delay the choice of measurement—implemented through a high-speed tunable bipartite-state analyzer and a quantum random-number generator—on two of the photons into the time-like future of the registration of the other two photons. This effectively projects the two already registered photons onto one of two mutually exclusive quantum states in which the photons are either entangled (quantum correlations) or separable (classical correlations). This can also be viewed as ‘quantum steering into the past’.
In short, one team does something, and the other team checks its effect to see what they did. The brain-bender part comes in when you find out that the “results” part comes before the “doing” part, or at least appears to. There have been a few experiments that at first appeared to violate classical causality (the notion that cause must precede effect on the timeline) but were later shown to not quite be so physics-shattering. The jury is still out on whether this experiment involves actual “time travel” or at least Chronovisor-esque “time viewing” or not, but it’s possible, and every month a new experiment comes out that seems to take us closer and closer to retrocauality and viewing through time.
The part that made it really exciting to me was learning that defense contractor Lockheed Martin had patented and has been developing (with some DARPA funding) something they call Quantum radar (there’s a relatively accessible research paper you can read on it called “Remote-Sensing Quantum Hyperspace by Entangled Photon Interferometry“). As I understand it, it’s a viewing device that at a minimum allows you to instantaneously view any place — so a remote-sensing device that can over potentially massive ranges and through intermediate matter view whatever you’d like. In addition to the military applications that Lockheed Martin is investigating it is being considered for applications such as giving advanced warning of solar flares to better protect satellites and electrical grids. However, the research paper points out that using it as a geography-unlimited viewing device is only the tip of the iceberg, and that it should be possible to use it to “remote-sense distant quantum properties of past, present or even future hypersurfaces of spacetime … by exploiting causal and relativistic loopholes”. That is, it is quite literally the Chronovisor, a device that can show you any point in space and time. And Lockheed Martin wants to build it…
Oh what will the Vatican say about that?
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The cone of light leaves out the convective return path of what I call “potential matter” (neutrinos). The “big bang” placates the mindless masses who never thought to ask; “what made the big bang?” so it’s as ungrounded as saying “In the beginning God said let their be light” The beginning of what? Certainly it wasn’t the beginning of sound waves, or of God so it’s all rhetoric until you trace it all back to the source which given that space is curved means completing the loop.
All the Pope has to do is say something that sounds good, then steep it in that “doubting Thomas” phobia; they’ve kicked the can down the road for 2,000 years now, and given their success at selective breeding followers not to complete thoughts they really don’t have to give reasons, they can just say key words that people can feel without thinking much “Terror”, “Unborn”, “Salvation”, “Suffering” but never “42” because it’s too precise and 2-die-ish for the sheeple who would prefer to look down on creative and independent thinkers.
Quantum radar is a real thing — it’s basically a way to boost radar resolution over long distances — but the “Remote-Sensing” paper is crackpottery. You can’t use these kinds of effects to communicate information faster than light (or backwards in time, which is really the same thing). The eraser effect just modifies the probabilities involved, it doesn’t involve any influence propagating into the past. This article has a good description of the issue: https://arxiv.org/abs/1007.3977
That said, for an interesting fictional treatment of the idea, see the Clarke/Baxter novel “The Light of Other Days”. Among other things, it goes into detail about how the setting’s society changes when privacy basically ceases to exist.
Stop making the world less fun, Jim :)
But I will go read that paper, thank you.
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