Steve Hollinger's Ice Analyzer

"He... had begun work on... a device that could resolve images recorded in ice, based on his theory that light leaves visual information in the crystals as they form.... A piece of ice could be treated with a chemical so it could hold an image just the way photographic paper does, so if you had a piece of ice outside that had been prepared with the chemical, you would be able to see a sort of movie of everything that had ever happened to the ice, or near the ice, or maybe everything that had ever happened, ever."

"The only far-fetched part is the assumption that diffused sources of light recorded without a lens could somehow be analyzed and reconstructed."

Susan Orlean, in her article entitled "Thinking in the Rain," in the current issue (February 11 & 18, 2008) of the New Yorker.