Time-viewing device

Numerous alleged exotic devices have been described as capable of displaying visual or holographic representations of past or future events without physically transporting the observer through time, often described as using “Looking Glass technology”. These include the Chronovisor, the Looking Glass device, and the Orion Cube. They have been described as displaying a fixed past or future, one of several parallel timelines, or weighted probability distributions across alternate timelines.

Concept and terminology

A time-viewing device is defined by what it does not do: rather than move a person through time, it shows the viewer information about another time, and so is distinct from the transit devices with which such technologies are often grouped — the Montauk Chair, jump rooms, the Pegasus plasma-confinement tunnel, and the Einstein–Rosen bridge accessing device-based stargates that physically relocate a person through time or space. Earlier iterations of the Looking Glass device are said to have achieved physical mass transit before the apparatus was reconfigured as a viewing-only system by removing two components from the Einstein–Rosen bridge accessing device assembly, illustrating how closely the viewing and transit functions are held to be related.

The terms "chronovisor" and "looking-glass technology" are each used both for a specific device and, loosely, as generic labels for the whole class. Across the testimony traditions the devices are reported to show probabilities or interpretations rather than a fully objective record, and accounts disagree over whether the "past" and "future" seen are fixed, are one of multiple parallel timelines carrying distinct assigned probabilities, or represent a weighted average across alternative timeline realities — a property that, for the Looking Glass device, is tied to a multiverse framework in which multiple probable futures coexist until a timeline nexus collapses the distribution. Several accounts hold that the underlying principles were seeded in antiquity — encoded on Sumerian cylinder seals and later reverse-engineered — rather than being an independent modern invention.

List of time-viewing devices

Each alleged device is treated in full in its own article; the table summarises the distinguishing features attributed to each.

Uses in fiction

Time-viewing technology and devices having various differences from alleged real ones are a recurring plot device in science fiction, predating and paralleling modern accounts. T. L. Sherred's 1947 novella E for Effort turns on a machine that films any past event, and Isaac Asimov's 1956 story The Dead Past centres on a "chronoscope," a time-viewer that renders images of the past. Bob Shaw's "slow glass" stories, beginning with "Light of Other Days" (1966), imagine a material through which past scenes emerge as light crosses it slowly, a premise later developed at novel length in Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's The Light of Other Days (2000) and its "WormCam." The 2006 film Déjà Vu likewise builds its plot around a government system that appears to view days into the past.

Open questions

References

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