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"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done and why. Then do it."
- Robert Heinlein
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| Chronoscopy | ||
| Using a device to view different points in time. |
| "They’re not interested in chronoscopy. I've come to you, sir, because for two years I have been trying to obtain permission to do some time-viewing — chronoscopy, that is — in connection with my researches on ancient Carthage." |
| Technovelgy from The Dead Past,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1956 Additional resources -
|
Still a worthwhile concept to explore:
For the government to encourage chronoscopy would have meant that everyone’s past would be visible. The government officers would be subjected to blackmail and improper pressure, since who on earth has a past that is absolutely clean. Organized government might become impossible.”
Compare to the time dredge from Time Dredge (1942) by Robert Arthur.
You saw the way my wife reacted to the news of a chronoscope in the basement. I had envisioned a chronoscope used for research purposes. All she could see was the personal pleasure of returning neurotically to a personal past, a dead past. The pure researcher, Foster, is in the minority. People like my wife would outweigh us.
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'Provision had been made to meet the terrific cold which we knew would be encountered the moment we had passed beyond the atmosphere.'
'You are who we say you are, Dr. Dakin,' Turner said.'
'It's area, and its consequent light-gathering capacity, was many times greater than any rigid mirror...'
'Tell me your torments,' the Padre said, in an elderly voice marked with compassion.
'...a slender-legged tripod surmounted by a spherical body no larger than a football.'
'... making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted.'
'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'
