Stone Tape

Quite some time ago, possibly as a teenager, I was doing that very common teenager thing of being interested in hauntings and ghosts, but I felt very dubious about the idea that supernatural spirits of the dead were responsible for them. I came across the idea that ghosts appeared to walk through walls because the walls weren’t there while the person was alive, and this triggered a thought in me that I’d never come across before. What if ghosts are like the footprints of people recorded in their surroundings? This idea had the appeal that although it did seem to evoke an unknown mechanism, it didn’t require me to accept that the mind and body were co-existing entities with the same ontological status. That is, I didn’t have to believe that souls existed independently of the body in order to believe in ghosts.

This is, it seems, what’s popularly known as the “Stone Tape Theory”, a name popularised by its use as the title of a BBC TV play broadcast in about 1972. I haven’t seen it but I want to, and it’s here if you want to watch it. The general idea is that something in the environment of an occurrence retains a trace of certain events which can be recovered, and in particular “play back” into the minds of certain individuals when they’re in the same place. Most people who interpret anecdotes of haunting who accept this idea also believe that it’s only one of two main categories of haunting, the other of which does involve currently conscious entities.

I have a vague recollection that I’ve covered this here before, incidentally. If so, I apologise but I have a new angle on this so it’s still worth reading. I think it’s interesting that this thought occurred to me independently, although this in itself isn’t evidence for it being true. What is rather surprising is the reputation of other people who have thought of and worked on it, because one of them was the respected academic philosopher H H Price, and another was none other than Charles Babbage! Papers have been written on this hypothesis, notably a chapter in Babbage’s own work ‘The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise’ and a 2005 article in an Australian parapsychological journal. My immediate response to this is that in the case of H H Price, who was born in the late nineteenth century, and Babbage, who wrote on this early in the same century, this reflects a different approach to the corpus of scientific inquiry. The scientific shift away from the idea that there might be psionic phenomena is relatively recent: I can remember a teacher in the 1980s telling our class that the chances were that some of us were actually psychic, and although he may or may not have been out of line to say this, it does illustrate how mainstream the idea of psionics was only a few decades ago. However, another aspect of this is that it isn’t inevitably an idea that the supernatural exists, although it does tend to be taken that way by many.

Babbage’s thought was along the lines that although sound attenuates rapidly, it never attenuates to complete silence. Hence a sound, once produced, moves air molecules (for example) ever less but they never reach total rest. This concept makes a lot more sense in a pre-quantum physics and pre-chaos theory era, because there is then the thought that the physical world is infinitely divisible. Hence a sound is dwindling constantly, below even atomic scale, but its effects are never completely absent. Part of Babbage’s claim was that if all the causative factors for the motion and position, my words by the way, of air molecules could be determined sufficiently accurately, it would always be possible to “wind back the clock” to the point where details of the sound could be recovered. This reminds me of the “octogram”, which is apparently eluded to in ‘Black Mirror’ when a guinea pig who witnesses a murder has their brain scanned to recover memories of that event. This is very like the idea that the last image seen by a dying human remains on their retina. Sadly, an experiment was once done on a rabbit where a photograph was obtained of the last image they saw, although the circumstances were artificial and involved the rabbit’s eyes being placed in front of a well-lit image for a very long time or something – I may be misremembering but I’m not keen on being that accurate about findings obtained via vivisection so I’m not going to put much effort into it. Less unethical is the situation which arises sometimes with the eyes of trilobites, those amazingly successful marine arthropods who lived in the Paleozoic Era, the lenses of whose eyes sometimes still work when their fossils are recovered, meaning that they are now “seeing” the world of the 21st century CE, more than 200 million years after their deaths.

The problem with Babbage’s idea is that even in effectively silent conditions, thermal noise would overwhelm any recoverable data. An exceedingly loud noise could be preserved on this planet if it could encircle it, lasting perhaps around seventeen hours and actually being concentrated in the antipodes of the event, as happens on some bodies with major asteroid impacts. This feasibly happened with the Chicxulub Impact which wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs, and earthquakes sometimes cause the whole planet to resonate for a relatively long period of time. There are also Schumann Resonances, which I’ll come back to. Besides this, it’s very obvious that events occur within chains of cause and effect, and therefore it’s trivially true that how things are now is the result of events in the distant past, all the way back to the Big Bang. However, a resounding echo is not the same as a recording on a wax cylinder or cassette.

There are certainly instances of phenomena which were not accepted by scientists because the conditions in which they operated could not be easily reproduced or observed. Will o’ the wisp is one of these which is particularly reminiscent of Stone Tape Theory. This is the appearance of lights above decomposition, sometimes of buried bodies, which was for a long time considered to be mere superstition but is now accepted as phosphorescence caused by bacteria acting on the body. Ball lightning is another one. I do have a bit of an issue with this, as I can think of at least three instances in Leicester of what seemed to be reliable reports of what seemed to be hauntings in old buildings or their grounds. With one of these, the witness described a woman in a pub cellar and they were completely unaware of the reputation of the building as haunted by this person but were told later of the details of what they were expected to have seen, so here I have to choose between not taking their testimony seriously and actually believing they observed something hard to explain naturalistically. I have chosen to trust them. It also seems that it’s better to opt for an explanation which doesn’t require evoking the spirits of the departed, and therefore I feel a lot of sympathy for this hypothesis.

Very similar, perhaps even the same, to this is the notion of “place memory”, which the Society for Psychical Research has used to explain ghosts. Here, quartz or limestone is hypothesised to form a suitable medium to be impressed by events in its vicinity. The paranormal enthusiast Thomas Charles Lethbridge, an archaeologist and graduate of Trinity College Cambridge, believed ghosts were impressions of living humans made on invisible fields. Clearly the point at which one utters the words “invisible fields” may be the stage after which one will not be taken seriously, but nobody would deny that invisible fields exist, such as magnetic or gravitational ones. The problem is that the assertion seems to involve the existence of an unproven form of energy. Lethbridge may have believed there was indeed such a fifth force of nature, although since he also rejected evolution I have to admit that I want to go ad hominem on him. He referred, however, to H H Price, whose talk, also published, ‘Haunting And The “Psychic Ether” Hypothesis’ is quite a methodical breakdown of the idea. Price was a respected philosopher who did a lot of work on perception and dreaming. He believed there were two types of haunting, one with physical effects and one without. It’s a little confusing that he describes them in this way because seeing something is a physical effect if that’s considered to be caused by light hitting the retina as opposed to an hallucination, and even if it is such a thing, the physical effects are presumably happening in the brain, but are still physical. Nonetheless there is a less precise sense in which his division is satisfactory to a casual reader. The second type is poltergeist activity and less relevant to the hypothesis. The first is where people experience odours, physical contact or noises, and presumably apparitions and chills. This is not a revenant, i.e. someone returning from the dead after a long absence, but rather a trace which is “developed” in a manner analogous to a photograph when a suitable person enters the room (for example). This is called the “Psychometrical Theory of Haunting”, since the idea is similar to psychometry in the parapsychological use of the word.

Just to explain this, I currently have my mother’s wedding ring on my finger. I transferred it from her ring finger to mine soon after her death. Clearly this ring has emotional significance to myself and her, although it’s worth mentioning that it wasn’t her actual wedding ring but one she wore in order to put men off harassing her after her divorce and it serves a similar purpose on my finger. Anyway, for whatever reason it seems to make sense to the sentimental mind that something so close and personal would be charged with some kind of energy, something which has been called “cathexis”. Psychometry is the idea that objects personal to someone carry such an energy which can be used by a psychic, for example to trace a dead body. This certainly makes sense psychologically. When I was training as a herbalist, I visited a herb garret where a saw which had been used to amputate legs was displayed. Irrational though it may be, I struggle to conceive of this piece of steel not being imbued with some kind of cathexis, either of hope or suffering. Sexual and spiritual fetishism may sometimes have the same elements, different in detail.

One version of place memory is the idea of a large object such as a room or building being charged with cathexis in the same way as my mother’s wedding ring might be. The sensations played back to someone while they’re there are similar to a person presumed to be sensitive to this kind of thing being able to glean information from such an object, although I imagine most people would say there’s a difference because I get the impression that haunted places are usually haunted for lots of people rather than a small set of talented individuals, as it were. Price’s view seems to be that there is a psychic “ether” on which impressions have been made. The use of the word “ether” refers back to the idea of a now-disproven medium pervading all space in which light, radio waves and other electromagnetic radiation is propagated like atomic and molecular matter is for sound. Price’s view is that there is a similar such medium which records events and can later be played back. He also believed that memories could become detached from individuals and inhere in the environment, so this may be part of the same belief system.

A more naturalistic version of this is also proposed. Place memory is further subdivided into active and passive forms. Active place memory is the result of psychokinesis, and I presume here once again the writers have poltergeist activity in mind. Its passive correspondent results from proximity, recency and repetition. In other words, it’s similar to magnetisation and this may not be coincidental. It does occur to me that some very prosaic activities could be preserved in this way, such as someone going to the toilet or making a cuppa, although it often seems that strong emotions should be involved. This is where Schumann resonances come in. This is the way lightning sends out extremely low frequency radio waves which reflect off the ionosphere, becoming a radio wave trapped inside the atmosphere with a frequency equivalent to the circumference of the planet, which would be around 1.4 decahertz. Hence it really is the case that for a while, the ionosphere causes a record of thunderstorms on Earth’s surface. The non-psionic version of the psi field theory is that geomagnetic storms record events like a hologram. Holograms are interference patterns between a reference laser beam and an identical copy of that laser beam which has illuminated an object, Earth’s crust being a recording medium in this similar process. This, however, completely bypasses the idea of emotional significance or psychometry.

It’s been noted that this idea has similarities to homoeopathy and the so-called memory of water, and this leads me in a direction I try to avoid because as a herbalist this subject is rather sensitive. That said, I will make a couple of comments about K-skepticism in this area. In order to test a homoeopath’s claims, it would probably be necessary for them to sit down with skeptics and negotiate a means of designing a test with good ecological validity, as the usual activities in this area lack that. Nonetheless I will “go there” without committing myself to belief or disbelief in the claims. There is an idea often connected to homoeopathy that the way it works is that the water receives an impression of the marc which can be replicated. I will just say two things here: there are moths who use pheromones over kilometres to locate their mates, whom they can then find by going in the right direction, and there are sharks who can find their prey with such little amounts of blood in the water that their chances of picking up a single molecule are very small. This I find interestingly similar to homoeopathy, but won’t be committing myself to an opinion on it.

Water is a very unusual substance which can maintain a structure even when liquid. It also forms cages of molecules around the likes of enzymes. This gives weight to the idea that placing a substance in water and then removing it does not return the water to the same state as it was in before the substance was introduce. Sometimes this is just crassly obvious. For instance, dropping an alkali metal into water and then taking it out will leave the water at a higher temperature. At other times it’s more contentious. I have an image in my mind which I will now describe without pledging allegiance to its veracity or otherwise. A marc is placed in water, say a particular protein molecule such as haemoglobin. This causes water molecules in the menstruum to bond weakly with each other, forming a particular motif which can replicate itself independently. After the haemoglobin is removed, this replication continues until it reaches the olfactory receptors of a shark’s nose, and the shark can then smell the haemoglobin in spite of the fact that it hasn’t encountered an actual molecule.

The situation with the moth, however, is somewhat different because the animal is smelling air rather than water, unless the “memory” is carried in water vapour. This particular trace would seem to have to work in a different way. The medium carrying the message is different, the message is different, and yet the message still gets through without the physical presence of the stimulus. In a way, this shouldn’t be very surprising because light and sound also work in this way. The controversy emerges from the problem of there being no known medium for the recording.

If “stone tape” really happens, it could have an interesting side effect. The objects we see during a haunting are three-dimensional: “in the round”. The only way this kind of illusion has been achieved in the real world is via Pepper’s Ghost, where a large sheet of reflective transparent material, usually glass, reflects an actor or other objects. This has been made rather closer to a three-dimensional solid in the geometrical sense by using several panes at angles to each other, but this prevents entry to the virtual space where the object is located. If Pepper’s Ghost were to be replaced, as it were, by a real ghost, a science fictional three dimensional display may be feasible, though by currently unknown methods. It would mean that something is making three-dimensional kinetic recordings of events which include various sensory modalities, in particular odours, which have always escaped the grasp of media in anything like a realistic way. Even now, almost two centuries after photography was invented, we still have to have actors commenting on smells in movies and TV programmes because they’re irreproducible, in the same way as radio scripts have to take the visual into account via acting and description. Just maybe, there is something out there which can do all this. And it seems to be an analogue medium.

Maybe my open mind needs to be closed for repairs, but there is yet another aspect of this which would be interesting if true but probably isn’t. There have been rumours that the Vatican has a machine for viewing the past. The genuine sceptical position would be to hold no position on the truth or falsity of this, although of course it does really strain credibility that such a device exists. This is a particularly outlandish claim. In more detail, the Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti claimed that he worked with a number of scientists including Wernher von Braun and Enrico Fermi, to develop a time viewer consisting of a cathode ray tube, various antennae and metals to produce images from the past, including the Crucifixion, Cicero giving an oration and a performance of the lost Euripides play ‘Thyestes’. The Vatican’s interest in such a method was to verify Biblical events, presumably particularly those from the life of Jesus. There’s even a rather sketchy diagram of the device:

It seems a little far-fetched that any of this happened, by which I mean the Chronovisor. There is an alleged photograph of Jesus which is in fact just a photo of a painting known to exist before Ernetti made his claims public. The Vatican decreed in 1988 that someone using a chronovisor would be excommunicated, which is a little odd for a machine which doesn’t exist, but is probably along the same lines as the Chinese government making time travel illegal.

The thing that really got me about the Chronovisor is that it used a CRT. This is strange because it suggests there was an analogue video camera at the other end, or if not that, that a formatted signal of some kind could be received from the past. This assumes, of course, that the CRT is a scanning one as found in old television sets or computer monitors. There are other kinds of CRT, such as oscilloscopes and the Crookes Tube, which simply shows a shadow of the object permanently fixed inside it, but the picture of Jesus shown above is not just a shadow. If you take away the time travel element, how would this device work exactly? It has a television screen but no corresponding camera. Why would it pick up more than just static? That said, it clearly is possible to project images onto a screen, as with a camera obscura, camera lucida, or just a film viewer. The difficulty is that this seems to have an intervening mechanism.

Place memory seems to need a person in the present to produce images of the past. Entertaining the idea that it happens, would it be confined to specific events or need a specific psychological type to view it? Would it be possible to work out what it is about the people that see ghosts, simplify that and reproduce it in a machine or by other methods? Does it require a conscious mind, or perhaps a soul, to do it? As far as events are concerned, it seems that strong emotions embed the scenes or perhaps repetition, but what if everything leaves a trace and they could be tuned into by physical means, like focussing a lens or adjusting a tuning control? Ernetti did claim that this was possible, and he also said the machine worked like a television, capturing echoes that were floating in space. This sounds very much like the Psychic Ether hypothesis, which is not to claim that he was telling the truth so much as a way of tracing the ideas he based his chronovisor tale on.

To close, this raises another rather interesting possibility. Price claimed that memories sometimes become detached from individual minds and attached to objects. This is somewhat similar to two other thoughts. One is that of Gottlob Frege, who claimed that the concept was not present in the mind but existed in relation to it, so the idea was out there waiting to be thought. It’s also a little like Charles Fort’s “steam engine time”, where an idea’s time comes and is brought into consciousness because the time is ripe, not in a mystical way but because it’s the shape of the missing jigsaw piece. An example I’ve mentioned before is the plot of the novels ‘The Hermes Fall’ and ‘Lucifer’s Hammer’, which are very similar but apparently thought of entirely innocently without any plagiarism. What if the idea of Stone Tape Theory is itself one of these archetypal things? It might have an independent existence from the human mind and simply have waited for someone to think of it.

I don’t have a particular urge to believe this hypothesis as fact. I like that there is a non-supernatural explanation for ghosts which is, however, tinged with magical thinking and evokes unknown physical processes, and I must remain agnostic on this for the sake of sanity, but I also think it works well as an SF idea and has possibilities. Also, this is SF and not fantasy, because the technobabble around it is not actually that far from established science and is definitely closer than a lot of what, for instance, ‘Star Trek’ comes up with.

الروح تسافر بوتيرة الجمل

This is obviously from Google Earth. It’s approximately pentagonal and covers much of Western Europe. Most of it is within the territory of the Roman Empire at maximum extent, but not all. But what is it?

This is the polygon formed by the extreme points of my movements on the surface of this planet. It took around eight years to form this shape, and in fact I’ve just realised some of it is missing because I forgot Aberdeen, which extends the time period to nine years.

Here’s a revised version then:

Right, so now it’s a hexagon and it clearly shows the curvature of the planet because it’s slightly zoomed out. This, then, is the area I’ve occupied and visited in my life. I also visited all of it by travelling by road, rail or ferry. The westernmost point was actually by bike. The maximum distance within this area is between Rome and Inverness, which are 2 112 kilometres apart.

Although I have four times committed the sin of air travel in an heavier than air craft, which also occurred within this hexagon, I had already reached all these points overland and sea, and later on under the sea bed once the Channel Tunnel was built. It’s a modest area compared to many Westerners to be sure, but it has the virtue of having been experienced every step of the way on the surface. I didn’t have the dislocation one experiences of stepping into an airliner and off it again a few hours later without having witnessed the transition from, say, the green chalk downs and streams of Kent and Northern France to the near-desert of Burgos.

The earliest point on this map was laid down in August 1987 CE, when my brother and I visited Aberdeen. Aberdeen is Scotland’s third city, pretty isolated compared to Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and largely made of granite. Even though it was the height of summer, it was a grey, overcast day and pretty cold really. It was also really windy. Aberdeen kind of has a beach, but I get the impression there isn’t much sunbathing on it. To be honest, even Blackpool in England, 370 kilometres to the south, isn’t really suitable for sunbathing or swimming in my opinion. Remarkably, though, like many other coastal towns in Britain, Aberdeen has its share of seaside shops selling buckets and spades and inflatables for the water, so I suppose there are people made of sterner stuff than I.

Inverness is only 133 kilometres from Aberdeen and I’ve been there a few times. Once again it can be exceedingly windy but it seems to be warmer than Aberdeen. Aberdeen has been known to drop below freezing in August, although its average temperature is 8.8°C, whereas Inverness averages 9.2 and has never dropped below freezing in August. It’s also a lot smaller than Aberdeen and doesn’t look overwhelmingly grey, has the fastest river in Britain running through it, which is also very short and probably would’ve stopped any Nessie candidates from entering or leaving the loch. Being the capital of the Highlands, like many other Scottish cities and towns Inverness has a lot more in the way of facilities than an English settlement of similar size.

The next corner of the hexagon is Inishmore, an island off the coast of County Galway and almost as far west as you can go in Europe. Its western end is 9° 50′ west of Greenwich and is unsurprisingly the furthest west I’ve ever been. There used to be an incredibly competitive pair of ferry services to it who would frantically plead and cajole you talking nineteen to the dozen to get you to use their boat rather than the other’s, but this is apparently no longer so because one of them sank the other’s boat! Sarada, I and our daughter cycled the length of the island and encountered its frankly terrifying cliff edge that runs along the southwest edge, and in fact I wonder in a geologically naïve way whether this is connected to it being on the edge of a continent, but whereas that’s an appealing idea it’s probably quite fanciful. Even so, the nearest land on that latitude to the west is over three thousand kilometres away on the east coast of Canada, or rather it’s Double Island in Nova Scotia. I visited Inishmore in 1995. Inverness was the site of a terminal argument between my first girlfriend and me about free range eggs, and County Galway marked the point at which two close friends of ours, with whom we’d gone on holiday, split up, so maybe there’s something about extreme points which puts relationships under stress, like the sweater curse.

The next point is Madrid, where Sarada and I went on our honeymoon in June and July 1993 and have since revisited. Sarada used to live in Madrid, so she was revisiting it after some time away. Madrid is a number of things. It’s at the geographical centre of Spain and the first one of these points which is within the former Roman Empire although it isn’t actually a Roman city and it really shows with its very irregular street pattern. It’s hot and dry, and has a population of three million. The line between Inishmore and Madrid is almost 1 500 kilometres long and cuts across entirely Roman Catholic territory. Because it’s probable that the Gaels came from Spain, I’m likely to have an exclusively male-line connection with Spanish Celts living there in Roman times. I don’t feel a particular affinity with Spain but I do kind of wonder if the reason we got stuck in Burgos was that my ancestors were grabbing my ankles and pulling me down. Spain also hold the distinction of being the only place I’ve ever managed to get sunburnt, owing to being stuck outside in the midsummer Sun for weeks on end while we struggled to get back to England. This led to a flaky skin condition on my face which, surprisingly, resolved when I visited the next point of the hexagon.

Which is Rome, 1 300 kilometres or so almost due East, and once again the line cuts over exclusively Roman Catholic countries. Rome is just awesome. I first went there in July 1988 when I was interrailing with friends, and I was absolutely blown away by the place. Everything is still there! Well, not everything, but the layout of the streets and many of the buildings are ancient Roman. It was when I went back in about 2004 that my skin condition cleared up but unfortunately it returned once I went back to Britain and I was stuck with it for almost another decade. Rome is the furthest east I’ve been, whereas Madrid is the furthest south, but the two cities are on similar latitudes. Rome is 12° 30′ east, whereas Madrid is 40° 25′ north.

The last point is Innsbruck, the famous origin of the ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ and visited a few days before Rome in July 1988 on my interrailing session. It shares a number of features with Aberdeen and perhaps Inverness to a lesser extent. It’s in a mountainous area, it doesn’t mark any compass point extremities for me and it’s the third largest city in a Germanic-speaking partly mountainous Western European country. On my hexagon, it also shares a side with Aberdeen, and this line finally enters Protestant territory. This line is also the only one which cuts across countries I’ve never entered, namely Germany and the Netherlands. The interior of the shape, however, also includes the whole of Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Andorra, none of which are familiar to me. The whole northeastern line ventures into vagueness, but this is probably because the west side is mainly ocean.

Countries which are completely enclosed include Andorra, Liechtenstein, Belgium, the Vatican (just – I’ve walked round it so it has no exposed side even if I hadn’t been elsewhere in Rome such as Trastevere), Monaco, Luxembourg, Switzerland and of course France, the largest country which is entirely enclosed. The centre of the area seems to be Limoges (“Lions In My Own Garden – Exit Someone”). The total area is larger than any US state and all but twelve countries.

It doesn’t need saying that I have by no means covered every square centimetre of this area, but that brings up a more general issue about what it means to be in a place. If I counted countries instead, the area would stretch from Out Stack to La Restinga and Roque del Barbudo to Museo di Ecologia degli Ecosistemi Mediterranei in Italy (just). It’s also notable that I actually live in the northwest of this area and have explored mainly south and east, and that the northernmost point is still in Great Britain. The largest number of borders between me and home is three, in the Vatican and Austria. The perimeter is getting on for a seventh of the way round the world, a distance light would travel in a single frame of video. However, this depends on the accuracy of that perimeter, because depending on what counts as an area I’ve been to.

The distance to the horizon seems like a reasonable measure, and it might make a difference to my polygon because of St Anton Am Arlberg. While I was in Austria, I climbed the Arlberg, not all the way to the top because it did the usual thing of appearing to be entirely ahead of me every time I thought I’d managed to get most of the way up it. I took a stone from it home with me, which over millions of years might make it a bit shorter if everyone did it so maybe don’t. Therefore it would be cheating to say that the furthest I’ve got sight of on this planet would be the view of the the horizon from the peak of the Arlberg, or rather the Valluga, which is 2 811 metres above sea level, which could extend to a further peak in theory. This is 189 kilometres to sea level, which is at least as far as the Großglockner, which is in any case the highest mountain in Austria and therefore would be easily visible from the Valluga on a clear day. It’s 12° 41′ east, therefore beating Rome by eleven minutes of arc. Beyond that, it becomes rather indeterminate as, for instance, another peak twice as distant but the same height twice as far away would also be visible in the same conditions, and beyond that the refraction of the atmosphere becomes significant. It’s possible to see slightly further than the horizon would be in a vacuum because the atmosphere refracts light and makes distant objects seem higher up than they really are. On Venus this situation is extreme and the viewpoint seems to be at the bottom of a basin when it’s on a flat surface, but it still happens on Earth.

It’s odd that even though German is my second language, sort of, I’ve never actually been to Germany. The languages indigenous to the polygon are English, Irish, Gàidhlig, Welsh, Manx, Cornish, Breton, French, Flemish, Luxembourgisch, Alsatian, Italian, Castilian, Provençal, Latin (the Vatican), German, Dutch, various Swiss and Northern Italian Romance languages and Basque. That’s all surviving Celtic languages and one non-Indo-European language. As for population, it’s harder to work out but it’s above a hundred million people. It’s also large enough for the angles not to conform with plane Euclidean geometry and therefore also area. It covers more than 19° of the curve of the planet. From north to south, a degree of longitude at the latitude of Inverness is fifty-nine kilometres and the same at Madrid’s latitude is eighty-five, nearly half as long again. Most of the area is on land but the biggest area of water is the Celtic Sea and the Bay of Biscay.

I feel a sense of being at home within this irregular hexagon, but more towards the northwest than in other directions. Italy and Spain appeal to me but they don’t feel like my native land, but I think of myself as primarily a White Northwestern European, and by that I include the British Isles, Low Countries, northern part of France, Denmark and the German-speaking countries. I don’t get more specific than that, except that I feel duty-bound to learn Gàidhlig due to my heritage and the fact that it’s endangered. Through that, I feel I should make a connection with the musical tradition of the Q-Celtic areas. I think of Q-Celtic as a linguistic continuum stretching from southwest Ireland to northern Scotland interrupted by speakers mainly of Anglic languages historically. However, I also have it in perspective and am aware that there are many more speakers of Urdu and other North Indian languages in these isles than all of the Q-Celtic speakers put together. I’m also dubious about the idea of Celtic identity and about the idea that Celtic identity is dubious. Nonetheless, every living native speaker of a Celtic language has ancestry within this hexagon, and also every living first language Basque speaker. No other language family or sub-family is represented here in this way. It also contains an unusually large number of imperial capitals with all the dubiosity that carries with it: Rome, Madrid, Paris, London, Brussels and just barely Amsterdam, which is twenty kilometres from the line between Innsbruck and Aberdeen. The so-called “Golden Triangle” of wealth within Europe, which seems no longer to be recognised, is partly outside it.

That’s it really. That’s the area I have direct and contiguous experience of, not separated by air travel. I think this is important because it gives me some kind of inkling of the size of the planet, its shape and its connections. It would be increasingly difficult to grasp a larger area of this kind, and much harder to travel on the surface through it.

The soul travels at the pace of a camel.

The Chronovisor – A Porthole Into The Past

No, that isn’t a typo. The chronovisor was not a portal into the past, with all the causal paradoxes that appears to raise, but more like a viewing window into the past. Of course the other thing is that it stretches credulity near breaking point to accept that it existed, in spite of everything. Nonetheless, fictional versions of the device have been used many times in SF, and in one case the story was acclaimed as Asimov’s best work. When I get onto that I will post spoiler warnings, but before that I’m going to mention Ian Watson’s novel ‘Oracle’.

To me, Ian Watson is a very odd author, or at least my reaction to his writing is peculiar and distinctive. There are, incidentally, probably spoilers in this bit, so if you don’t want to know the score, look away in the next paragraph. He’s a critically-acclaimed English New Wave sci-fi author whose short stories are usually nothing short of marvellous. For instance, he’s responsible for ‘Slow Birds’ and ‘Mistress Of Cold’, both of which satirise Margaret Thatcher and the Cold War, but on the whole he isn’t a satirist. Most of his stories are based on thought experiments on the nature of perception, and although he does sometimes venture in the direction of what appears to be erotica in a manner I find disturbing, and that may be my issue, on the whole his short stories are masterpieces. I don’t want to give examples because they’re such a stimulating pleasure to read. Okay, just two. He considerably developed J W Dunne’s idea that dreams are the afterlife and occur outside time in two stories. In one of them, the key to immortality turns out to be swapping waking and dreaming experience so that waking experience becomes an interval over which one has no control and is moved from room to room in a kind of luxurious prison but dreams have continuity to them and are where life actually happens. In another, whether one is in Hell or Heaven is determined by whether one is able to dream lucidly or not, and an invasion of Hell is mounted by lucid dreamers to liberate the damned. The really odd thing for me, and I’ve never experienced this with any other author, is how I find his novels. He’s apparently best known as a novelist, which is news to me because I find his short stories much more prominent, and I’ve read a few of his novels and have one on the go at the moment, and oddly I find that I can’t persist with them, but in a strange way where I give up somewhere around the penultimate chapter. It isn’t a case of getting bored or irritated with his writing and giving up early on, which happens a lot. As a slightly similar author, Christopher Priest’s ‘The Affirmation’ I found easy to persist with even though I felt the author was too sympathetic to the idea of living in your head and too indulgent of what seemed to me to be malignant daydreaming, but there was no problem with sustaining my interest, and other books I’ve just found too heavy-going, boring, hard to relate to and so forth, but this would normally lead to me giving up early on or near the halfway point. That isn’t the problem with Ian Watson’s novels for me. The issue is, for some reason, that I can easily get most of the way through all of them but find myself giving up near the end. I can accept that some authors are simply better at short stories, and the fact that his writing is so strongly idea-based would suggest that that’s so for him, but I’d expect that to lead to novels which are either episodic because they consist of short stories stitched together, as it were, or ones which spread the initial idea out too thinly. Watson doesn’t do either of these things. It’s just a bit mysterious, and I get the feeling it says more about me than him, but I don’t know what it says. It doesn’t seem to link to the ADHD for example as that would lead to me giving up on them a lot earlier.

Anyway. . .

Spoilers for ‘The Oracle’ follow

RIght. Marcus, a centurion fighting against Boudicca in the year 807 AUC suddenly finds himself transported down into the late 1990s of the Common Era and is encountered by an Irish Republican, who takes him home to Milton Keynes and accommodates him with his also Irish Republican sister. He initially believes him to be a reënactor who has become delusional but it quickly emerges that he’s the real deal and that he was pulled forward into our time by what I would call a Chronovisor operated by MI-6, which can view both the past and the future, but needs to do both at the same time and is being used to view and prevent violent attacks by the likes of the IRA. It’s also, unusually for science fiction, substantially set in Belgium, and the question arises of whether viewing the future creates paradoxes and in fact causes the attacks in question, and it also turns out that Marcus was a young private in Judæa at the time of the Crucifixion and reports a very different story than that recounted in the Gospels regarding the death of Jesus, and that he visited an oracle in the ninth Roman century who told him what was eventually going to happen to him in our day, but he treated it with scepticism because he didn’t believe in oracles at the time.

Spoilers for ‘The Oracle’ over

This book is probably unique for me in being the only Ian Watson novel I’ve been able to finish, so he must’ve done something right this time. I mention it here because of its use of a chronovisor.

The other story which sticks in my mind involving a chronovisor is Isaac Asimov’s ‘The Dead Past’, which is, frankly, awesome.

Spoilers for ‘The Dead Past’ follow

A professor of Ancient History whose daughter died in a house fire some years previously asks a physicist the use of his chronovisor, which can view any location on Earth in the past, in order to prove that the Canaanite god Moloch, to whom babies were sacrificed by burning them alive, was made up by the Israelites to malign the Canaanites. He isn’t supposed to do this because he’s living at a time when demarcation between academic departments is strongly enforced. While the two are engaged in this clandestine project, they become aware that they are being spied upon by the CIA or NSA, and it turns out that the professor’s real motive is to prove to himself that he didn’t accidentally start the fire by leaving a cigarette burning. It then emerges that the secret police’s motives are benign. They have realised that if the chronovisor is set to view a location only a fraction of a second in the past, it constitutes a device for spying on anyone anywhere, and in developing and publicising the device they have destroyed privacy forever, and the agency were trying to prevent this. It’s an unusual story for Asimov, because of his theme of criticising authoritarian paternalism, at least in his earlier works, and unusual in general in that the clandestine government agents are for once unequivocally on the angels’ side, although it seems to me that they could just as well have wanted to keep the chronovisor to themselves in order to spy on people. It also, like his other most acclaimed story ‘The Ugly Little Boy’, has quite a bit of emotional engagement in it, which is again unusual for him.

Spoilers for ‘The Dead Past’ over

Asimov also uses a chronovisor in his time travel story ‘The End of Eternity’, although there it’s just a practical device for spying on timelines which would lead to undesirable consequences for humanity and altering them for our benefit and doesn’t constitute a major part of the plot. Regarding ‘The Oracle’, the chronovisor is similar in some ways to the device in Watson’s early story ‘The Very Slow Time Machine’, which works by sending someone an equal interval into the past as the time into the future they are supposed to reach in the end, and they are forced to live backwards over that period. This also may or may not create paradoxes, but the story ends before the protagonist in question reaches his destination. This is similar to the chronovisor in that it involves a kind of equal and opposite reaction idea, where you have to slide back in time to leap forward. The question of paradoxes is for once not explored fully in this story, although it is mentioned and they seem inevitable.

They’ve cropped up elsewhere of course, for instance in both the film and written versions of Philip K Dick’s ‘Paycheck’ and various other places. It’s notable that in both stories mentioned above and the PKD story, chronovisors are associated with espionage. In a sense, a chronovisor is indeed a form of surveillance but it still seems odd that they so often seem to have this association, as archæology, history and palæontology seem to be about the same basic idea and are not particularly associated in my mind with spying, although there is definitely a sense in which they invade privacy. For instance, as far as I know the first recorded event in human history took place at Laetoli in modern-day Tanzania about 3 700 000 years ago, when a woman and a man Australopithecus afarensis were walking side by side near an active volcano, the woman apparently carrying a baby on her hip, and wandered off to one side for a bit before returning to the man’s side. They left footprints in volcanic ash which was then covered by a layer of lava. The individuals in question were fully bipedal. I don’t know, does that seem like an invasion of privacy to you? Does it make a difference that they weren’t Homo? I’ve no idea what to think. On an earlier occasion, about two million years previously on Crete, a bipedal primate left footprints near the village of Trakhilos, but it isn’t clear whether they were closely related to us because there seems to have been some convergent evolution with humans in that region at the time, which is actually pretty intriguing and was, slightly strangely, alluded to in Olaf Stapledon’s ‘Last Men In London’, published in 1932 in spite of them not being discovered until decades later. It also took place during the Messanian Salinity Crisis, during which the Med completely dried up into a vast salt flat with a possible surface temperature of 80°C, so the primates concerned may have been confined to the plateau which became Crete.

Footprints are of course a long-lasting trace of activity which tend to preserve soft parts and activity better than other kinds of fossils, or potential fossils. England is known for its ghost stories, having more ghosts per unit area than any other country. I’m aware, for example, of three places in Leicester where acquaintances of mine claim to have seen ghosts, in two cases when they were previously unaware of an established reputation that a particular place was haunted. I do actually believe in ghosts, although I don’t believe they’re conscious or spirits. There are a number of examples of phenomena which were not accepted as real by scientists or natural philosophers for a long time until it was finally firmly established that they were real, including meteorites, ball lightning and ignis fatuus. There are also, of course, numerous instances of apparent phenomena which are now completely refuted. The difficulty is often that they’re difficult to reproduce in controlled conditions. In any case, I conjecture that when people see ghosts, they are sometimes experiencing something which is not just subjectively observable. A ghost is like a footprint or a natural recording of an event, perhaps impressed in some way on the material present in the vicinity at the time, and possibly reinforced by repeated similar events, in my opinion, and yes, I could be wrong. This is, for instance, why they seem to walk through walls – those were built after the events took place. They’re more like three-dimensional video recordings which occur in accidentally ideal circumstances than the spirits of the departed, but they do exist. If you want to build either a “holographic” recording and display system or perhaps a chronovisor, you need to study the phenomenon of haunting, is my hunch.

Back to the chronovisor then. One of the really weird things about time travel, and for a moment here I’m talking about travel back in time, is that although practically all scientists in relevant fields would completely reject the possibility, in spite of thoroughly established and detailed theories about space and time, it always seems impossible to rule it out. This is despite the fact that if it is possible, it would seem to wreak havoc with cause and effect and mess up the Universe. It’s been suggested as a solution to the Fermi Paradox of why we don’t have observable evidence of aliens in spite of the Universe appearing to be a hospitable place for them. It could be that before they begin to visit other solar systems, aliens stumble across time travel, use it and their timelines get “pruned” due to being destroyed by paradoxes, so at any one time there are loads of fairly advanced technological civilisations which will shortly discover time travel and turn out never to have existed as a result. However, that’s travel back in time, and most people do in fact consider that impossible. A chronovisor which can be used to view the past is not subject to these major problems or paradoxes because it’s simply a porthole into the past, and we come across information from the past all the time without that causing any major headscratchers arising from the mere fact that it happened. There is no apparently absurd barrier to the invention of a chronovisor even though there is also no known set of principles which could be used as the basis for building one.

It’s rumoured, though probably not in any reputable sources, that such a device has existed. The French Roman Catholic priest and writer François Brune has made this claim. I should mention that there are in fact two authors by this name, the other using it innocently as a pseudonym. Anyway, Brune has made the claim that a Benedictine monk called Pellegrino Ernetti had managed to construct a device resembling a CRT-based television set which he used to view the Crucifixion and the Passion, a speech by Cicero to the Roman Senate, the performance of a lost play in Rome called ‘Thyestes’, and also, and this is a hard one to take, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Ernetti was a respected physicist and musicologist as well as a monk and claimed to have assembled a team of scientists, mainly anonymous but including the Nazi rocket scientist Werner von Braun who was involved in the US space program, and the top physicist Enrico Fermi (the second time I’ve mentioned him today). At this point, it’s tempting to conclude that he was lying, because he mentions Sodom and Gomorrah, and it’s hard for most people to believe that that event actually happened, unless it was, for example, a volcanic eruption. Let’s deal with that then.

It follows from the story itself that traces of the cities concerned would be poor or absent, which makes it difficult to verify. According to the Ancient Greek historian Strabo, i.e. an independent source, they were the largest cities in the vicinity of the Dead Sea. One hypothesis is that an earthquake in the vicinity caused tar to cover them, and there is a rift valley along the Jordan. Hence it is possible, whatever spin is put on it, that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed in a manner similar to the way specified in the Tanakh, and the homophobic interpretation put on it recently doesn’t appear to have been how it was interpreted earlier, when it was seen as to do with lack of hospitality. Later interpretations in the Tanakh itself attribute the cause to the sins of pride, adultery and lack of charity, but the Rabbinical interpretation is unequivocally homophobic. Therefore although the event does seem far-fetched at first, it could’ve been a natural disaster which was interpreted morally either at the time or later, and in fact from my own theist perspective, although I have a major problem with the idea that it was a punishment for the “Sin of Sodom”, I can accept that there were divine reasons for it to happen such as lack of hospitality, but you don’t have to be theist or consider it a punishment if you are in order to accept that it’s a plausible description of their destruction.

Once again, back to the subject of the Chronovisor! I don’t even have secondary sources regarding Ernetti’s account on the matter, but I have managed to glean the following bits of possibly very inaccurate or falsified information. Ernetti made the claim to Brune in the 1960s that the Chronovisor had existed. He later retracted that claim. Brune then claimed that the retraction was made under pressure from the Vatican, and on his death bed, Ernetti once again claimed that the Chronovisor was real. Nowadays many people would be prepared to accept that the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy is not an entirely marvellous organisation, but that can lead to a lot of spurious mud being flung at it, not all of which sticks. That said, the Church did issue a rather remarkable proclamation in 1988 CE explicitly forbidding the use of any device able to view the distant past under pain of excommunication. This seems at first to be an odd thing to do until you remember that it also has a policy on first contact with aliens, which doesn’t imply that they know extraterrestrials exist. The trouble is, once you hear an account where the Vatican is involved in hushing something up it feels like you’re in Dan Brown territory, although certain people found hanged under bridges come to mind here too, along with the death of Pope John Paul I. It also sounds like the Vatican has got something to hide about events as recorded in the Bible, whether or not such a machine existed or is possible. It suffices that they believed it to be possible for this to be significant, although it’s oddly specific as well.

How reliable are death bed confessions though? Under US Law, deathbed confessions are admissible as evidence and are considered more than mere hearsay, which is the reporting in court under oath (or affirmation I presume – do they have that in America?) of a statement by another party which was not made under oath (et cætera?). The trouble is that not only is there a question of lucidity, but also that the point at which a person is near death is quite possibly that point when their memories are the most confabulated, unless perhaps they have recovered from a psychotic episode in earlier life. Therefore the simple fact that Ernetti made this statement in those circumstances is not enough to base a reliable hypothesis on.

This is a summary of Ernetti’s claims as reported by Brune. In the 1960s, Ernetti, a respected physicist, monk and musicologist (you’ll see why that’s important in a moment) with a reputation for honesty, is said to have told Brune that there was a machine called the Chronovisor which he had personally designed and built in conjunction with a team of scientists including Von Braun and Fermi, on which he had been able to view and hear the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Passion and Crucifixion and a scene from the life of Napoleon, among other events. It was said to have been developed thus. Ernetti and his colleague Gemelli were attempting to clean up old recordings of Gregorian chants by removing certain harmonics, and in the process of doing so, Gemelli claimed that the voice of his dead father became audible despite it not being on the recording of the chants. Clearly thermodynamics requires that energy is never destroyed, and that sounds as if it means that sound and light will continue forever, but in fact they seem to be rapidly swamped by thermal noise once they get sufficiently dim or quiet unless some kind of technological intervention is made to preserve them, such as laying them down on photographic emulsion or wax cylinder. Ernetti’s claim appears to be that photons always bear identifiable information regarding their time of origin, and by selecting the photons which came into existence at a specific time, scenes from that time can be recreated. Most visible light on this planet is of course from the Sun, but also reflected off various surfaces after it hit us. Even so, such light would usually have been expected to have travelled about two thousand light years since the time of Jesus, though not necessarily in a straight line. That doesn’t imply that it’s now two thousand light years away. Otherwise this account would appear to suggest that only directly emitted photons created at the time would be detectable, but that is actually still possible. It just means that the image of Jesus gained would be like a heat map rather than a visible light photograph, and again the moment of his death would be detectable as the point at which his body started to cool.

At this point it’s starting to sound like that bit in ‘The Vicar Of Dibley’ where Jim Trott suggests that the reflection of a stained glass window off a dog’s eye in a photo would be enough to reconstruct a picture of said window, except a lot worse because in that case less than a microsecond would’ve passed since the sunlight had reflected off the glass. However, there’s a bit of a caveat here because of a certain technique called luminescence dating used in archæology and geology where it’s possible to determine when an object was last exposed to sunlight or considerable heating. Radioactivity in the soil causes subterranean objects to lose electrons which are then trapped in defects in the crystal lattice. These can then be detected according to how much light the object gives off when heated. Hence there is at least a way of detecting how long it’s been since an object was exposed to daylight.

Ernetti further claimed that the Vatican ordered the machine to be dismantled in order to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands, and at this point one might be forgiven for wondering what they meant by “wrong”, since they probably didn’t mean themselves. The idea was that an oppressive régime could exploit it as a means of spying on people’s past. Clearly this machine is more like Asimov’s version than Watson’s, because Watson’s can only detect local events but Asimov’s has global range. Since light can travel 40 000 kilometres in less than a seventh of a second, it isn’t entirely silly to suppose that this is possible but the question of being swamped by entropy and the likelihood that the photons concerned would have long since dissipated into deep space seem to make the whole idea completely impractical, although if that was the principle it’s based on, it isn’t actually less impractical for it to work for any location on Earth, and perhaps even beyond it. It was further claimed, and we’re back with Dan Brown now, that although the machine was dismantled, the Vatican built another one and it’s now hidden in their secret archives.

It’s also been claimed that the Nazis attempted to construct a Chronovisor, although it also seems that this could act well as a form of propaganda at the time which would make people feel even less secure about what they were getting up to earlier. Nowadays of course many people have social media records catching up with them which do the same job. However, one interesting thing about that claim is that it nicely fits Von Braun being involved, because he was also said to be involved in the Nazi attempt to do the same thing.

Of course, the mere fact that this doesn’t seem to have a ring of truth about it doesn’t mean such a machine isn’t possible. We have only had photography for almost two hundred years and have deliberately recorded sound for rather less long, and prior to those inventions it might have seemed impossible. We can also now retrieve audio information from the more distant past. For instance, the formation of grooves on a wet pot before firing with a trowel might have led to sound being recorded in a very similar manner to a wax cylinder. This idea turns up in the ‘X Files’ episode ‘The Lazarus Bowl’. In the 1970s, the Ariadne column of ‘New Scientist’ suggested jokingly that sound might have been recorded in prehistoric caves because of stalactite formation preferentially crystallising magnesium or calcium carbonate from water due to variations in air pressure, and went on to suggest that since drops of water were involved, it would probably largely consist of complaints about the weather. The ceramic idea is not taken seriously by most people, but there is a much older example which does in fact work.

165 million years ago in the Jurassic Period, a katydid, belonging to the order also containing crickets and grasshoppers and like them known for making noise by rubbing their legs against their wings, was fossilised unusually well, to the extent that the organs used for stridulation were almost perfectly preserved, and it was possible to reconstruct the sound they made. Unlike today’s katydids, whose noise is ultrasonic in order not to be heard, perhaps by bats, the noise made by these Jurassic insects was only at six kilohertz, which as a fifty-three year old human with fairly average hearing I have no trouble hearing. It’s also possible to work out what noises non-avian dinosaurs were attuned to hearing by examining the shapes of their cochleæ. For instance, Brachiosaur hearing peaked at 700 Hz and they couldn’t hear sounds higher than 2.4 kHz and Allosaurs’ peaked at 1.1 KHz and they were unable to detect anything above 3 Hz. T. rex is thought to have made deep, rumbling menacing sounds. Meanwhile, the ornithopods with their elaborate entubulated headgear like trombones also have predictable voices based on those, which would’ve been deep and loud, and also vary according to species. Another sound would’ve been the loud cracks produced by the sauropods’ whip-like tails.

As far as anyone can tell, none of this has been recorded. It’s also not true that any kind of telescope could be used on a distant planet or in space to image how objects as small as that would’ve looked in the distant past. Certain things are in theory possible but not to that degree of resolution. Consequently, I don’t believe the Vatican has a chronovisor or anyone else, but I do think the possibility of them being invented one day can’t be ruled out. They don’t violate causality the way visions or sound from the future would seem to, whether or not that’s possible (and I think it is but that’s for another time), although entropy is a major obstacle. It also seems less likely that they could be used to image distant events. Nonetheless, it doesn’t seem beyond the realms of possibility that one might some day exist, which means that even what we’re doing right now might be visible to our descendants. I find this a little disconcerting.