A Brief Note on the Chronovisor

The Vatican's Alleged Time-Travel Device

The Chronovisor, devised by Italian priest Father Pellegrino Ernetti in the 1960’s, allegedly allowed for the viewing of past historical events, with Father Ernetti claiming to have viewed Christ’s crucifixion and one of Cicero’s speeches, for example. The invention is shrouded in the arcana typically associated with the Vatican and its vast library, and no doubt the subject of numerous conspiracies since little is known of the invention, or at least confirmed (here is the video that influenced this post). However, what is most intriguing to me are the points of impossibility surrounding the device.

Differing from most conceptions of time travel devices which transport you to a particular time and place, so that you are embedded in the spatiotemporal fabric of the period travelled to, this device which lets you view the event as an observer introduces a variety of problems; the principal among them perhaps being optical and spatial. Where, for instance, is the phantasmatic eye located? Where is the viewing subject, in their spatial and temporal/historical remove, situated with regard to what is being viewed? How would the viewer be able to orient and alter their view to glimpse, for example, the figure of Christ rather than the soil below him (presuming we are viewing from the perspective of an historical subject who was present at the crucifixion who has the audacity or the wherewithal to look upon Christ in His agony and not instead hang their head in shame)?

Furthermore, there is the problematic of observer effects as recorded in physics, which is significant here because Ernetti claims the Chronovisor is able to detect and decode the remnants of electromagnetic radiation left from events in the past. Observer effects - the double-slit experiment being perhaps the most famous example - underline the fact that there is no objective position from which the physicist (or viewer of the Chronovisor) is able to view the phenomenon under question. Any instance of observation occurs within a subjective position, because the observer’s viewing of the system - for one, owing to the tools and methods used to observe a system - influences the system itself. A simpler way to say this is that the observer is situated within the same reality as the phenomenon under question - a fact that is obvious once stated, but which science seems to miss. Because the scientific conceit is that the scientist, or observer of a phenomenon in question, inhabits an objective position outside of the phenomenal frame or system being observed. But this outside position is impossible. This is, to be sure, God’s position - one which is not open to us.

There is undoubtedly a similar conceit characterizing the Chronovisor and the position of viewer - they believe they are able to view the event itself, that they are witnessing an objective record of the event, but again the question must be asked: where is the observing eye in this historical past situated? from where or through whom are we, in our temporal remove, viewing? and what is the event itself outside of, in this context, how and from where we are viewing, and what exactly it is that we are viewing? The fact that the Chronovisor is forming images from residual electromagnetic radiation places us in the subjective sphere: the Chronovisor’s work is an aesthetic one, transcribing or translating these physical, atomic phenomena into a sequence of images. How is it possible that this radiation is able to be translated into a showing of the event itself (and how is such an event itself - an objective record of an event unstained by subjective considerations)?

We are of course dealing with a process of deciphering, translation and reconfiguration. The viewer is of course in the position of the subject - that is, viewing the historical event from a subjective position which will have been made available to them by this process of reconfiguration, of translating radiation residue into images (and, presumably, into sound - what significance is the spectacle of Cicero’s speeches if its content cannot be heard?). The alleged invention of the Chronovisor shares a similar conceit as that of the Tower of Babel. However, instead of endeavoring towards the heights of God, or towards a universal, objective and divine monolanguage, it endeavors towards the omniscience and objectivity of God’s own observation. In other words, the viewer or inventor of the Chronosphere believes they are able to peer into reality from a position entirely outside of reality’s fabric, to view the event itself as it exists independent of any subjective or aesthetic judgment.

Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist, writes that “any observation of atomic phenomena will involve an interaction with the agency of observation not to be neglected.”¹ What this means is that we cannot disregard the fact that the very act of observation is an interaction occurring within the same phenomenal system being observed. The act of observing, recording or measuring atomic phenomena is a phenomenon all its own, which, by taking place within the phenomenal system under observation, therefore interferes to some degree with this system; in other words, observation influences the behavior of the phenomenon under observation. Ultimately, this means that the potential to observe such phenomenon from an objective position is impossible. There is no way to observe the phenomenon itself outside of a subjective position - a position in/from which the subject’s observation, occurring within the so-called phenomenon itself, thereby influences the phenomenon. This subjective interference is something of a law of atomic/physical observation.

To cite Kant’s (negative) conception of the noumenon as what prohibits and impedes our knowledge of an object or phenomenon insofar as it may be said to exist independent of us and our observation, the Chronovisor is the concretization of an impossible, but tragically common ideal: gaining knowledge of the thing in itself. What we have access to, according to Kant, is only what is given to us through experience, and what is given to us through empirical experience - e.g. through observing the past through the Chronovisor - cannot bring us any closer to the thing in itself, or the event in itself.

The Chronovisor is, at the very least, an entertaining concept because of its fantastical nature, but it falls prey to the same epistemic impediment that characterizes our knowledge of reality in general.

1. Bohr, Niels. The Quantum Postulate and the Recent Development of Atomic Theory. Nature 121, 580–590 (1928). p. 580. https://doi.org/10.1038/121580a0