What’s the Straight Dope on Father Ernetti and his chronovision? According to the legend, this Catholic priest (an exorcist by trade) supposedly invented a device that worked like a television to watch past events as they occurred. He claimed to have watched the crucifixion of Jesus, as well as a tragic play lost to history. Okay, it sounds like a bunch of baloney, and supposedly the drawing he made from watching the crucifixion looks a lot like a famous painting of the crucifixion, and supposedly it is, although a relative claims that chronovision did work. My questions are as follows: if it’s all a bunch of baloney, why would the priest make it up? What would he possibly have to gain from it? He allegedly had a “good reputation” as an exorcist so why would he lie? If it is true, then why would the Vatican destroy such a device and deny its very existence? How would such a device be a threat to the Vatican (or anyone else for that matter, provided that it worked)? I appreciate all serious answers.
a) Of course it didn’t exist. There’s no mechanism by which it could work. The photons that bounced off the crucifixion are 2000 light years from here by now. Even if you could find a few still bouncing around (and statistically there would be), there wouldn’t be enough to show you a clear image of anything.
b) If the best evidence you have for something is “why would they lie?” you can be pretty sure you’ve got woo on your hands. People lie because it gets them respect, admiration, authority, money, sex, fame, prestige, or because of a variety of mental illnesses, some of which have no other symptoms. In this case I’m going for “fame” as the most likely.
I’m NOT saying that the device was real; I am simply wondering to what purpose such a lie would benefit the priest. Supposedly he already had a good reputation as an exorcist; why would he tarnish it by making up bullshit? NOTE: Okay perhaps he did make it up, but then this begs the obvious question of WHY. You mention “Fame” and maybe it’s just me, but why would he NEED Fame? He already was respected by his peers, and Catholic priests are supposed to shun wealth and personal glory, and yeah I know they’re human and I know about all the other things that they are supposed to avoid as well; but I don’t see how claims of inventing chronovision (which cannot be verified) helps him achieve fame or glory or money or sex.
How many fifth century exorcists can you name? Fame is fleeing, particularly the kind of fame that just comes from “doing your job well.” Inventing impossible devices is basically a miracle – that’s the sort of thing that gets you sainted.
Seriously, people lie all the time for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes for no reason at all. This guy is claiming a literal impossibility; “he’s lying” is clearly the right answer even if Occam’s razor needs a blade replacement.
Also, I just looked him up. This guy claimed to be literally exorcising demons…in the 1950’s. That makes his credibility pretty low to begin with.
Yeah, seriously! You think the fact that he had a “good” reputation as an exorcist somehow makes him less likely to be person given to making up wild stories? :dubious:
Beat me to it. Damn! First thing I thought of when reading the OP.
People make up fantastical stories for all sorts of reasons.
Face it, the Italian religious community of the 1950’s is not as technologically discerning and scientifically knowledgeable as the average young urban North Americantoday. This was the time of wonder, when they went from donkey carts to bombs small enough to fit in a plane and big enough to flatten huge cities. People could fly. You could suddenly talk across the oceans, you could watch moving pictures in living colour, trains ran on time (or they used to) and whisked you from one end of the continent to the other in a day or two… Anyone born 50 years ago, this was an age of marvels, who knew what was next. Flying cars were only 20 or 30 years away, so were wrist radios.
So if some deluded compulsive liar decided to make himself look good to the gullible widows saying their rosaries in the main chapel, how likely that they would say “impossible!”. Instead, suddenly he was miraculous and twice as big a swinging… oh wait … twice as important as before.
The real problem with this device even if you suppose current understanding of physics is flawed, and there is a way to do this. So you have a “magic box” that can see the state of the universe at any arbitrary time in the past. The problem is that even if it were possible, the way the device would have to work is that it would show you the photons that were at the location the device is at, at the time the device is at. The earth is constantly moving, so you wouldn’t see much - even microseconds ago, either your “camera” would show a view from the upper atmosphere, or it would be stuck under the ground, depending on which side of the earth you built the device at. Most images would show empty space.
So, let’s suppose we have ANOTHER magical technology (after all, we have one physics violating device, why not two?) that lets you magically choose the PLACE as well as the time you are going to be observing from. This is still a very difficult thing to setup : the earth is constantly moving on several axes, the whole solar system is traversing laterally with some vector, and so on. There’s a lot of difficult math to figure out both the place and time to aim your magic camera at the past.
Although, I suppose if you did have such a magic device, you could probably just aim it in the immediate past, and keep adjusting the date and time and you would just “follow” the earth into the past until you were at the date and time you wanted, and then you could zoom in on the location.
Such a device would be interesting, it would make death meaningless, for one. You could theoretically bring back any person you wanted at any time (you would stick the camera lens into their brain and copy their neurons one at a time)
Serious answer; if he made up exorcisms why not make up magic TV?
(You do know that possession isn’t real, right?)
Worse, in order for any of the above to be possible, there would have to be an absolute frame of reference, against which any object would be judged to be in motion or at rest - so our current understanding of physics is violated on that front also.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am a practicing “Cafeteria Catholic.” (I realize that’s a derogatory statement, but l tend to call a spade a spade, even when referring to myself). Possession may or may not be real; I will not be arrogant enough to declare it one way or the other. That being said, since my desire to make myself look impressive with claims that were impossible to back up ended in junior high, the idea of an elderly adult male doing the same thing is difficult for me to comprehend, especially since it doesn’t appear that he experienced any type of tangible or spiritual profit as a result of such claims. I also have to wonder if the Vatican ever commented on his claims. If anyone knows, i would be curious.
First I’ve heard of this particular case, which is odd since I happen to enjoy collecting Christian mythology. But, since it is only a few years old, I assume there has not been time for any stories to adhere to the incident.
Given the lack of “official” response to it, it seems that his bishop and other superiors placed him in the “harmless nutter” column and promptly ignored anything he had to say.
I thought it was nine-tenths of the law.
Can we get a cite for this? :dubious: I’m not sure how you’d prove a negative like that.
This isn’t necessary, if we assume that the other end of the chronoscope is also a fixed point in time and space, for instance a wormhole mouth. In the case of a wormhole, you have one frame of reference connected via geometry to another frame of reference, and you can move freely from one to the other; in this case space-time is multiply-connected, so you don’t have to worry about connecting with empty space where the Earth used to be years ago - you always connect with the same location.
That would work, yes (I mean, assuming everything else about the idea was possible).
But once you start on the ‘Earth has moved since yesterday’ thing, you can’t really resolve it without a reference frame.
^^^ yeah, you always stay on your worldline, that’s axiomatic to time travel.
Although you could still find yourself in the wrong place with respect to local/temporal ground level, I guess.
Especially over longer periods of time. You don’t want to be in a basement laboratory when time traveling.
But I’m going to assert that there is a Temporal Anthropic Principle: if time travel is possible at all, it has to be somewhat forgiving.
If being off by a tiny fraction of a femtosecond results in a world-shattering catastrophe, we’re all doomed from the start.
Edit- on second thought, this might be the answer to the Fermi Paradox. Time travel is possible, and it’s *not *friendly.