I've Discovered Time Travel

When I say that I've discovered time travel I mean a friend of mine has discovered time travel. Well, not exactly time travel, more a way to observe the past - a way to be present in the past.

A friend of mine (I can't say who) from a university (I can't say which one) has been developing a machine. He and I are the only ones on the planet that know about it. None of his peers wanted to be involved in the machine's developement so he has built it all himself and asked me to help him test it out. Not being of the scientific persuasion myself I can't really explain the inner workings of this machine but I can tell you that it allows you to travel back in time - or should I say it shows you what is happening on that very spot at a time of your choosing. It's a machine about the size and shape of an old Fender Twin electric guitar amplifier plugged in to a normal petrol powered electric generator. Across the top of the front, where the controls for the amplifier would be, are an array of  tiny parabolic mirrors with a small dot in the middle. Apart from the power lead there is a connection to a laptop from which the machine is controlled. This friend of mine told me it all works by picking up vibrations. He told me that all solid things vibrate. They are vibrating all the time whether we can feel it or not and everything that vibrates is affecting and being affected by everything else vibrating and this vibration is going on as time goes on. What the machine does is scan the area around it, measuring all these miniscule vibrations and the laser things that do the measuring also project back out what they are recording. I don't really understand all that it does so it would be easier for me to just tell you about the test we did.

OK, so we did this test at night. It had to be dark so that the projection part worked. We drove to an old steel bridge just outside town that has been bypassed by the highway so there would be no traffic. We carried the machine, generator and laptop to one end of the old roadway across the bridge. He got me to set up the machine facing on to the bridge and then he said to just walk out on to the bridge in front of the machine and walk back. We plugged it all in and turned on the power. He quickly tapped a few things into the laptop and, with a flash of red light the machine started. Shining out from all those mirrors on the front was an intense red light, kind of like the laser light shows from old rock concerts. It coloured the whole top of the bridge in red. The steel beams along the side of the bridge, the roadway, everything red. It was measuring and detecting as well as projecting.

"Are you ready?" he asked.
"I'm impressed with the light show as it is."
"Well," he paused for effect, "you ain't seen nothin' yet!"
He started pressing the back arrow on the laptop's keyboard but I saw nothing at first. After many more taps I saw a slight movement in the redness near the machine. More taps and the movement became a sort of red reproduction frame by frame in reverse of my walk out in front of the machine from a few minutes earlier. We both let out a "Whoa!" The machine was detecting the vibrations from the structures around it, including the air in between, picking the particular vibrations from a few minutes before and projecting them back onto those very structures.

He then started typing a few things into the laptop so he didn't have to keep pressing the back arrow. After a while we started seeing a fast motion replay in reverse of the happenings on the bridge from earlier in the day. People walking across the bridge, an old man and his grandson fishing over the side. More laptop typing and the scenes began to pass by faster and we just watched. After a while the view of the bridge changed a little, changing shape slightly. Then we saw workers on the bridge, fixing parts, then we started seeing vehicles passing over the bridge. There had not been cars or trucks over the bridge for thirty years. More vehicles blurred through the red scene.

"Can you stop it? Pause it I mean." I asked in the excitement.
"I think so."

More typing and then the scene paused like on an old black and white (red and white) video. We could see three cars and a truck on the bridge. The cars were seventies models or earlier and the truck looked like it was from the fifties. More typing and they started moving forward at normal speed. Cars and trucks moving along the bridge like we were there sitting in the middle of traffic forty years ago.
"This is amazing" I said.
"I have never gone further back than a couple of minutes before the gen....."
As he said the words the generator stopped. The red light disappeared and we were back to a normal dark unused bridge.

But we were exstatic. Think of what could be done. He could recreate historical events. Depending on available structures we could witness a small part from anywhere in history. The D-day landing, the grassy knole in Dallas, Woodstock. Crimes could be solved by just taking this machine to the scene of the crime. Arguments could be proved. The world as we knew it has now changed.