Mode 0 — Archive Replay
Surviving records are replayed with provenance and transformation history intact.
Passive Observation · Evidence · Causal Restraint
Temporal Viewer
A receive-only historical observation architecture separating archive replay, reconstruction, and canonical temporal-aperture modes while preserving provenance, privacy, uncertainty, and non-interference.
Receive-Only Doctrine
Observation must not become influence.
The Temporal Viewer is a governed observation service, not a generic window into the past. Every session identifies whether the image is archive replay, physics-based reconstruction, or a canonical aperture observation, and every mode carries provenance, uncertainty, privacy, and causal-coupling limits.
Mode 1 — Historical Reconstruction
Surviving signals and environmental evidence can constrain a reconstruction, but inferred content remains visibly labeled.
Modes 2–3 — Canonical Apertures
Fictional receive-only apertures require an authenticated event address, causal isolation, return-channel monitoring, and safe collapse.
Viewer architecture
Event Address Resolver
Transforms an authenticated historical target into the active reference frame and rejects ambiguous epochs.
Causal Isolation Layer
Prevents observation sessions from becoming communication, navigation, market, military, or warning channels.
Evidence Package
Records raw acquisition, reconstruction versions, uncertainty masks, operator actions, session mode, and closure telemetry.
Rights and human factors
Temporal observation can defeat ordinary expectations of privacy and can expose witnesses to grief, atrocity, lost family, personal ancestry, or earlier versions of themselves. Minimum necessary observation, cultural custody, clinical safeguards, and refusal authority are therefore part of the system architecture rather than afterthoughts.
Reality boundary: Present physics does not provide an operational historical aperture. The receive-only aperture is Chrono-Anchor canon constrained by real concepts from relativity, information flow, archival provenance, and human factors.