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The argument goes that if Time Travel were possible, we'd know about it, because we'd always be running into people asking " What Year Is This?". But who says time travel has to be a physical thing? An infrequent but recurring trope is that of Intangible Time Travel, in which people travel through time only as observers — as spirits or projections, but not as physical beings.
Because of the nature of the transport, this tends to happen more through magical means than scientific ones, although both have been used over the years.
Sometimes this isn't time travel at all; the "traveler" is having a vision or visiting someone's memory. Other times, the line gets blurred.
See also: Pensieve Flashback.
Examples:
Live Action TV
- In Quantum Leap, Al is able to project himself into the past, but he is invisible to everyone but Sam, who has to do the hard physical work of putting right what once went wrong. Even Sam has to partially take the bodyspace of someone already in that time, he can't just appear via a portal.
- In Torchwood a device exists that allows someone to be intangibly transported into scenes of strong emotion from the past. When put together with another identical device, it allows the same thing to happen with the future.
- In Heroes Peter sort of does this, but not intentionally as he couldn‘t control his abilities. He travels back in time but turns invisible, only one character knows he’s there and his past self isn’t aware of him.
Comic Books
- In 52, Ralph Dibny is shown his wife's murder through magical means, but is unable to stop it from happening.
- In The Invisibles, the team use The Hand of Glory, a mystical artifact, to fold time down to a point. At that moment, they receive Flash Backs and Flash Forwards of events in their lives and the lives of others. In each instance, they are literally invisible to the people around them.
- The Gold and Silver Age Superman comics had instances where Superman went intangible whenever he time-traveled under his own power. Of course, this was only in some issues; the writers changed the rules whenever it was convenient. This eventually calcified into a hard rule of time travel in the Silver Age — travellers heading to a time they already existed in would be reduced to intangibility, but would remain solid and able to interact with others if there was no other copy of themselves around (the idea being that by making it impossible to physically be in two places at once, the universe was preventing paradoxes).
- Used to heartbreaking effect in "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow" by Alan Moore, the last Silver Age Superman story — the Legion of Superheroes comes to bid Superman farewell, and Supergirl, being a member, comes with them. The story takes place after Supergirl's death, and Supergirl wonders why she didn't turn intangible and asks Superman what she's like when she grows up. Superman tells her that "Supergirl is in the past", assures her that she grows up to be beautiful... and breaks down sobbing when they leave.
- In the first collection of The Books Of Magic by Neil Gaiman, young Tim Hunter, a potentially very powerful human magician gets taken back in time in this manner by The Phantom Stranger as part of his education on magic. Later, unusually, he physically travels into one possible future, (which people generally tend to see as spirits rather than physical beings) with Mister E.
Film
- In the movie Constantine, John Constantine goes back in time and sees several scenes from earlier on in the movie, but remains intangible and invisible.
- In the movie Click, the rewind button on the main character's remote allows him to intangibly review earlier parts of his life.
- Roughly the first half of Deja Vu has the characters observing the events of several days earlier through a giant monitor in real-time.
Literature
- In A Christmas Carol and its derivatives, the protagonist is usually taken backwards and forwards in time to see the errors he has committed how they will leave him unmourned. He is completely invisible, inaudible and intangible through these scenes.
- Jacen Solo has this ability, called "flow-walking", in the Star Wars Expanded Universe books, in a universe normally devoid of "regular" time travel.
- At first, in Pastwatch: the Redemption of Christopher Columbus, a machine called the Tempoview allows researchers to view and record history, supposedly unnoticed. (Turns out this isn't the case, and the technology is developed to allow standard Time Travel.)
- The short story "The Men Who Murdered Muhammed" by Alfred Bester has a very confusing variant on this.
- In Kit Pearson's children's book, A Handful of Time, an old pocketwatch allows Patricia Potter to observe her mother's unhappy past - from when her mother was her age and lived in the same house Patricia is staying.
- In the Odd Thomas series, the titular character has come to the hypothesis that the insubstantial wraiths that gather when some really bad shit is going to go down are actually dicks from the future who enjoy watching human suffering. They aren't totally intangible, though, as upon knowing your knowing about them, they will rectify the situation by making sure you are no longer around to know.
- Peter F. Hamilton's short story If At First... takes Einstein's theory of not moving one single atom back. Somebody moves his mind back to his childhood years, overwriting the previous pernality, and using his knowledge of future events, alters time. One guy uses it to advance the technological level of society, and the other guy uses it to become a rock star, plagiarizing songs not written yet.
- In the short Philip K. Dick story Paycheck a "timescope" exists which gives people the ability to see into the future.
- The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter has technology to observe basically anything in the past (or the present).
- Harry Potter has both "real" time travel, in which Never The Selves Shall Meet, but it also has Pensieves, which allow characters to jump into others' memories and remain intangible.
- The basis of the short story, Nostolgianauts, in which people start freaking out at the "ghosts" appearing everywhere till they realize that they're tourists from the future. People start wondering when this technology will actually be invented, and the main character gets to witness her nerdy best friend's wealthy, future self coming back to gloat at the bullies who were picking on him in school.
Video Games
- Tomb Raider: Anniversary
- This is essentially what Ellone does to Squall and company in Final Fantasy VIII, although they're dropped within other people's bodies (which they can't control, but can get the attention of). A powerful enough sorceress can apparently override the "can't control the person you're inhabiting" restriction.
- The final dungeon of Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army has the eponymous protagonist literally traveling through time, climbing his way through a dungeon where every floor represents a later decade. Many of the NP Cs in this location are ghosts from their respective time periods, but a few are Intangible Time Travelers, and they comment on how dangerous it is to wander through time in corporeal form like Raidou is doing. The villain actually happens to be such a time traveler, having possessed a girl from Raidou's time period in order to change the past so that the events of the original Shin Megami Tensei 1 and 2 — which some of the aforementioned ghosts are a Shout Out to — never happened. More surprisingly, said villain turns out to be Raidou's successor from an unknown number of generations hence.
Real Life
- According to Einstein, this is how real time travel would have to work. He theorized that it could be possible to travel through time, as long as you didn't disturb even a single atom on the way, meaning you would have to be intangible and invisible.
- But that means you wouldn't be able to see anything, because light wouldn't interact with your retinas. How pointless.
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