An old photograph from a British beach shows an idyllic, happy scene of people enjoying the sun during the summer of 1943.
Everything looks perfect, until one looks a little more closely. There’s a man in the picture, wearing a suit and standing alone. He appears to be sending a text message from his smart phone.
It’s an incongruous part of the photograph. Smart phone technology was still decades away in the early 1940s with the earliest small handheld units appearing in the first decade of the 2000s. How did this man acquire such a device in 1943?
One suggestion is that the man in the photograph is a time traveller, a visitor from the future.
If this sounds like a science fiction story, it’s because time travel is a recurring theme in science fiction.
Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story, A Sound Of Thunder, features time travel to allow hunters to go back in time to shoot dinosaurs. His 1950 short story, The Fox and the Forest, has people going back from the future…