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Chronovisor (Father Ernetti's Time Travel Viewer)

theres already a thread about this, moderators! clean up! (not srue where)
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I'm sure you're right, Faggus, but I can't find it either!
Anyone know the link?

The other substantial thread on this subject has been merged into this one.
 
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While reading The Infinite Hive a personal account of ESP experiences by SPR member, Rosalind Heywood, I came across this footnote on page 217:

Since this was written the USA Department of Defence is said to have reported the development of a camera capable of photographing the immediate past.

The book was first published in 1964 and if there is any truth in the existence of this camera, it makes one wonder how much more advanced the technology must be by now.

Does anyone know anything at all about this subject ?
 
There's a good article in the new FT that goes into depth about this. It details the adventures of Father Pellegrino Ernetti, and his forays into time with such a device. He allegedly saw images of Mussolini from wartime Italy, images of Napoleon, and even further back in Ancient Rome, where he claims to have captured images of Jesus. I suppose camera isn't the right way to describe it, as he reckons to have caught sights and sounds as well.

I found an article here
http://www.rexresearch.com/time/time.htm
but there's loads more links if you Google away with keywords like Ernetti, time, camera etc, you get the jist.

It's interesting because many people hypothesise that ghosts are electromagentic imprints which are left in buildings or areas, and I wonder if Enretti (if it's true) managed to find a way of capturing these long lost energies. It would certainly seem feasible to tap into all the electromagnetic jiggery that envelopes the Earth, after all, all those standing stones on ley lines can't have been there for nothing.. maybe they were electromagnetic storage or distribution nodes?

Anyway. Snowman out! :)
 
I guess every camera photographs the "Immediate past." (Finite speed of light, etc.) :)
 
I too read the Ernetti article with interest. I wonder if it is feasible? Now that would be a method of 'time travel' which would hold few hazards either for the traveller or those in the past. Would it be able to 'film' the future, though?

Carole
 
Hmm.. probably not. The future hasn't happened yet, but the past has, so you could pick up the remnants. But this idea is kind of freaky in a way. If someone from the future was looking back at US now, does that mean that we're already remnants who don't realise? Maybe this is how it feels to be ghost! :(
 
Well, they say that a ghost is someone who doesn't know he's dead . . .:eek!!!!:

Carole
 
I am sure I mentioned this before, and it may have been in the article in ft, but I recently read Arthur c Clarke and Stephen Baxter's the Light Of Other Days which deals with the moral/psychological implications of this kind of thing rather well ....
 
I guess every camera photographs the "Immediate past." (Finite speed of light, etc.)
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No no no. Cameras invariably photograph the immediate future.
 
What annoyed me about the Ernetti article in FT was that he claimed to have images from (when was it?) 69 B.C. and 175 B.C. or something like that. But of course, there was never any such year as 69 B.C. or 175 B.C. Nobody was ever alive in 69 B.C. so you could hardly have a time-portal device relaying a speech or whatever from that year.
What am I on about, I hear you say. Well, obviously, you can't have a year before something which you don't know is going to happen in the first place. It's a bit like the old chestnut "if you found a coin with the date 69 B.C. on it, how much would it be worth? The answer is nothing - it must be a fake. 69 B.C is not a year but an idea . I apologise if you think this is a bit of a pedantic point.
Cameras do in reality photograph the past. I suppose the proof of this is from astronomy, where photos are taken of distant galaxies - you are then looking at them as they were billions of years ago. If you can photograph objects which are sufficiently far away, you are looking almost right back to the Big Bang (assuming there was such a thing). But this is due to the sheer distance involved and the finite speed of light, rather than any "time portal" effect.

Big Bill Robinson
 
Big Bill Robins said:
What annoyed me about the Ernetti article in FT was that he claimed to have images from (when was it?) 69 B.C. and 175 B.C. or something like that. But of course, there was never any such year as 69 B.C. or 175 B.C. Nobody was ever alive in 69 B.C. so you could hardly have a time-portal device relaying a speech or whatever from that year.
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I understand your point, but years are only our human way of measuring time. Ernetti could have guessed what year he was at after arriving there, from things he saw and heard.

But having said that, I agree - the definition of the year is a bit fishy.
Assuming time is linear, you could time travel to a point on that line, but you'd have to 'translate' the line into human years - and you've have to be pretty precise to get a particular YEAR.

Doing that before you travel to the point in time might not be so difficult, mathmatically, but for some reason I can't help thinking it would be quite complex in practicality - basically you'd be choosing where you went in time.
And I don't think Ernetti's time machine could have been that advanced.


pinkle
Edited to make sense
 
quote:
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Originally posted by simonsmith
No no no. Cameras invariably photograph the immediate future.
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how's that then?
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Reference to the time taken between deciding to fire the shutter - and actually firing it. Photographers often deliberately try to anticipate the next moment - and in that sense actually attempt to photograph the future..

Then, of course, there is the debate re how much time the camera actually compresses and records in that moment. How long is a moment? Depending on the shutter speed.

This debate has gone on for years. And I still love it. 'Camera Lucida' by Roland Barthes touches on this subject in places. And is fantastic - unless, of course, you hate Roland Barthes' writing. Some do!
 
simonsmith said:
Reference to the time taken between deciding to fire the shutter - and actually firing it. Photographers often deliberately try to anticipate the next moment - and in that sense actually attempt to photograph the future..
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Not if they're taking a phot of the night sky they don't... ;)
 
the past future

eh that's true
especially for fast moving objects
even in the night sky
saw a beautiful meteor two nights ago -
to catch that it would have been necessary to anticipate where it was going to be in the future
damn thing even changed course by about a degree or two

spooky

steve b
 
You might anticipate where something will be but the photograph taken is of where it actually is when the shutter opens. We cannot do anything physically that is not in the present. We can anticipate what our actions might be but the action taken has to be in the present even though that action might not be instantaneous.

Ok I'm not sure I'm speaking English now so I'll leave it at that! :eek:
 
it all depends on when you think the picture is "taken" and what kind of camera you use -- Kodak, digital, normal.

there is a whole process in which the picture is taken within the camera and it takes a certain amount of time. is the camera taking a pic of the past/present/future when you click the button? when when the film is exposed? when the shutter closes? when it is developed and given to you at the counter? when the photo-tech sees it or you do? when the Kodak paper produced from the camera falls out the slot and develops? when you upload the pic digitally? or...for that brief moment your eye is behind the lense and the camera becomes your eyes, is it seeing the future for you? or the present?
 
camera becomes your eyes
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Henri Cartier Bresson said something very like that. He said (of the camera) .. "it became the extension of my eyes".

Post modernist writers later attempted to shoot down his statement but it was IMO a fair thing to say. What, I think, he meant was that when photographing - then he saw the scene as a photograph.
 
I read a very small article about the Chronovisor and it's links to the Illuminati. A device said to be able to see through time that was developed by various people including the germans prior to WW11. The device ended up in the hands of the vatican and then apparently vanished. Dose anyone know anymore on this?
 
There was a good FT article on this subject but, frustratingly, it doesn't seem to be in the online archive.

Regarding the chronovisor itself, there seems to be no evidence that it ever actually existed, let alone worked - the photo of Christ on the cross which purported to be 'proof' was shown to be a dramatically-lit image of a wooden carving.
 
There was an article about it in Fortean Times a while back, I can't find the issue at the moment. It was supposed to have been invented by a Catholic priest a Father Emetti, rather than the Nazis. although I think some German scientists were involved. He's supposed to have produced some photos of Christ which turned out to be almost identical to illustrations from a prayer book or magazine or something similar (i.e. were fake).

If it existed and anybody did possess it and its ability to see through time has proved to be spectacularly useless as far as dominating the world is concerned...


Edits. There's articles out there about it;

For example; http://www.unmuseum.org/chronovisor.htm

And a book: http://www.amazon.com/Father-Ernettis-C ... 1892138026
 
Its also mentioned in robert rankins great book, The Brightonnomicon, which you can hear on bbc radio 7 all this week, as far as i know (not listened at all, but i did read the book a while ago) its called a "chronovision" there and is more tv like.

a thought occurs to me, but i am just dashing off to work so no time to google it. (7am start, on a sunday!!:evil: ) that along with the "griffin sightings" in brentford, perhaps he has another, slightly less famous contribution here...
 
searinglight2 said:
Its also mentioned in robert rankins great book, The Brightonnomicon, which you can hear on bbc radio 7 all this week, as far as i know (not listened at all, but i did read the book a while ago) its called a "chronovision" there and is more tv like.

a thought occurs to me, but i am just dashing off to work so no time to google it. (7am start, on a sunday!!:evil: ) that along with the "griffin sightings" in brentford, perhaps he has another, slightly less famous contribution here...
Click to expand...

It's also briefly mentioned in Robert Rankin's 'Retromancer', which I'm reading at the moment.
 
Anonymous said:
While reading The Infinite Hive a personal account of ESP experiences by SPR member, Rosalind Heywood, I came across this footnote on page 217:

Since this was written the USA Department of Defence is said to have reported the development of a camera capable of photographing the immediate past.

The book was first published in 1964 and if there is any truth in the existence of this camera, it makes one wonder how much more advanced the technology must be by now.

Does anyone know anything at all about this subject ?
Click to expand...

Heat signatures, acoustic traces and other environmental residue?

I can think of half a dozen examples, but they all tend toward the 'living thing creates micro changes in environment' type. If these effects could be effectively modelled, the original cause might be able to be implied and 'photographed' (simulated), but I can't begin to imagine that the DOD is anywhere near this level yet.
 
Yithian said:
Heat signatures, acoustic traces and other environmental residue?
...
Click to expand...

In a certain - arguably trivial - sense, all photographic images are of the immediate past (where 'immediate' may be measured in tiny fractional parts of a second). Whether you're referring to 'chemical / classic' or electronic image capture, the act of recording light requires some finite (though quite short ... ) span of time. When you take a photographer's reaction time into account, there's an even longer (though still possibly near-infinitesimal) delay between 'seeing' the shot and what gets captured.

Having said that ...

Certain photographic modalities (e.g., in the infrared rather than visible range) permit capture of visible images representative of past states in a scene. For example, it's entirely possible to capture an infrared (IR) range image of a space within which someone has moved so as to reveal the path(s) the subject(s) followed during the period of latency for the IR 'data'. Naturally, the film / processing translates what are ordinarily invisible heat traces into visible images / traces. The result is an image representative of the past, but not literally an image of a scene preceding the act of triggering the camera.

More exotic analogies are possible in other wavebands, but these typically involve (a) sensing measurements or traces other than visible light and hence (b) quite a bit of post-capture processing to generate a representative translation of the scene into a form that we can 'see'. For example, it's possible to trace someone's footsteps outdoors using UV-range traces of chemical residues or traces caused by someone's physical steps modifying the specific points on which they stepped (e.g., something akin to artificially-mapped (pseudo-)fluorescence effects). These typically involve capturing trace images under additional artificial illumination.

Finally - though perhaps trivially - it can be possible to reconstruct (though not literally depict) the past state(s) in a scene if the imagery had been captured across multiple wavelengths. An example of this would be simultaneous capture of visible and IR data correlated so as to illustrate (a) the subject's instantaneous position at the time of capture as well as (b) his / her IR footprint (etc.) traces to indicate movements leading up to the visible light image.
 
...there was never any such year as 69 B.C. or 175 B.C. Nobody was ever alive in 69 B.C. so you could hardly have a time-portal device relaying a speech or whatever from that year...

Wrong thinking here.

You just set your camera to go back 2080 years and you are in 69 BC.

Of course that isn't what it would be called.

INT21
 
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