# Viewer of past events? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [December 2, 2012, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/viewer-of-past-events/642794 "2012-12-02T22:47:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 1:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/viewer-of-past-events/642794/21 "2012-12-04T01:40:10Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > “E for Effort” by T.L. Sherred is another classic science fiction story based on this idea. And Damon Knight’s “I See You” ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 1:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/viewer-of-past-events/642794/22 "2012-12-04T01:50:58Z")
> [@](#): > > Could you give some examples of how such a time viewer would work? Trivial example: A dinosaur steps in some mud, and encodes information in the particles of mud. The mud stays put relative to the surface of the Earth. Millions of years later, we unearth the fossilized mud, and can view the shape of the dinosaur’s foot. Now, obviously, that’s not very much detail, and we’re sorely limited in how many coordinates we can observe that way. This does not really get us any closer to a device where you can punch in arbitrary coordinates and see whatever it was that happened there and then. But such a device, if it existed (and again, I do not know how to make it) would no more violate the laws of physics than the fossil footprint does. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 2:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/viewer-of-past-events/642794/23 "2012-12-04T02:07:20Z")
Well… maybe. It depends on how time viewing works. If every event in the universe is somehow “recorded” in some sense, and we discover a way to view that record, then time viewing would be a snap. If you’re somehow opening a “window” to the past, then you have question of your observation influencing the past, with all the paradoxes that entails. And if you’re somehow “reconstructing” the past- that is, you can somehow by viewing the totality of all available information in the present calculate or infer the past with limitless resolution, then there may be limits based on the theory that the universe is ultimately based on information. That data from the past might be effectively unrecoverable if it requires an amount of calculation unimaginably greater than the information that would be yielded; like trying to reconstruct sounds years later from the random thermal vibration of air molecules. ---
**Author:** ![Regallag\_The\_Axe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/regallag_the_axe/32/445_2.png) [@Regallag\_The\_Axe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Regallag_The_Axe)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 2:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/viewer-of-past-events/642794/24 "2012-12-04T02:25:43Z")
It’s music, but it’s definitely science fiction. [Arjen A. Lucassen](http://www.arjenlucassen.com/)’s Aryeon plays around with this idea in a few albums. The plot of ‘The Universal Migrator’ has the narrator using a machine called a dream sequencer running ‘the universal migrator program’ to relive the past. It begins with him reliving his own childhood and goes back to the first man on earth, and beyond. In ‘Ayreon: The Final Experiment’ the idea is similar, but reversed. Scientists in the Twenty-First Century have developed a technology that they call ‘time telepathy’ and they use this technology to send images of a dying Earth back in time in an effort to prevent mankind’s extinction. The one who receives the message is a minstrel in Sixth Century Britain (named Ayreon, hence the name of the band and the album) who sings about his visions. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 3:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/viewer-of-past-events/642794/25 "2012-12-04T03:03:27Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Trivial example: A dinosaur steps in some mud, and encodes information in the particles of mud. The mud stays put relative to the surface of the Earth. Millions of years later, we unearth the fossilized mud, and can view the shape of the dinosaur’s foot. But this is not a time viewer. Not in any way, not slightly, not by the widest possible definition. Defining a time viewer as a pumpkin doesn’t make time viewers possible, even if pumpkins exist. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/viewer-of-past-events/642794/26 "2012-12-04T03:42:06Z")
Like I said, it was a trivial example. But if you insist, one could postulate that there exists some hitherto-unknown subatomic particles called “mudons” that are all over the place and take impressions of objects in much the same way that macroscopic mud does, and that we can read the impressions in the mudons. ---
**Author:** ![JohnClay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c37758/32.png) [@JohnClay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnClay)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 3:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/viewer-of-past-events/642794/27 "2012-12-04T03:48:40Z")
BTW in “The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead” > **[Frank J. Tipler | The Omega Point cosmology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Tipler#The_Omega_Point_cosmology)** > > The Omega Point is a term Tipler uses to describe a cosmological state in the distant proper-time future of the universe. He claims that this point is required to exist due to the laws of physics. According to him, it is required, for the known laws of physics to be consistent, that intelligent life take over all matter in the universe and eventually force its collapse. During that collapse, the computational capacity of the universe diverges to infinity, and environments emulated with that c Ti... Frank Tipler “states that a society far in the future would be able to resurrect the dead by emulating all alternate universes of our universe from its start at the Big Bang” If that could be done then the universe we’re currently in could be emulated up to a specific point in space and time… ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 4:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/viewer-of-past-events/642794/28 "2012-12-04T04:13:09Z")
“The universe is a computer simulation” is a popular theme in recent years, mostly because it allows for any number of popular science articles. Whether any of them have any meaning or are even science is more questionable. Maybe that’s an answer to the question in the [Shouldn’t physics theories declaring themselves to be unprovable be dismissed out of hand? Faith|Sci](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=674291) thread. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/viewer-of-past-events/642794/29 "2012-12-04T04:51:05Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > But this is not a time viewer. Not in any way, not slightly, not by the widest possible definition. Defining a time viewer as a pumpkin doesn’t make time viewers possible, even if pumpkins exist. Well, how about this: Assuming every minute movement of matter is deterministic (not too far out there a notion), and assuming mankind had found the deepest “building block” or most common denominator of energy/matter and accurately decyphered every law governing its movements and properties, and provided a dead on balls accurate accounting of the state of every last elementary particle at a given instant (position+vector+speed), AND with infinite computation/modelization power ; there’d really be no obstacle to moving up the chain of causality of each particle and reconstructing the entirety of every historical state of matter instant by instant from the now to the Big Bang (and possibly even beyond). Child’s play ! Then an intern or an undergrad gets to sift through all of it for the relevant bits and report back by Monday. Fun fact: that system would double as a future viewer, too. Or, yeah, as \*\*JohnClay \*_says it could be easier to start from the Big Bang and watch the determinism happen from there I suppose. But that would imply having exact data on the state of matter at the point of the Big Bang (or very shortly thereafter), which in my mind is harder to come by than the utterly trivial exhaustive mapping of all present data_. \*(which is obviously impossible to gather, all joking aside - it brings to mind Umberto Eco’s amusing essay about the perfect 1:1 map from… I think it was _How to Travel with a Salmon_ ?) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/viewer-of-past-events/642794.md?page=1)