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In A. C. Clarke's "light of other days"....
R.L. — (archived)

It wasnt so much time travel as it was 'time viewing' - A device is invented that can create a tiny wormhole that allows people to view past times- (Still a violation of causality, and still technically has all the same paradoxes and dangers- for instance what if the photon you capture from 3.9 billion years ago is the photon that was going to put an organic molecule in an excited states thus priming it to react with another molecule to create the first amino acid?). The book is a good read- the time viewer becomes as available to the common person as a home computer- privacy becomes nonexistant since you can view any time or place you want-- getting away with a crime becomes impossible- if you want to know how OJ did it just dial up the time and place and have a look- everyone can know anything about anyone- the book does a good job of addressing how such a device would change society at a fundamental level...

The crucifiction of Jesus is too popular a target, the event is unviewable because too many wormholes are sent there and they interfere with eachother- In one compelling scene one of the device's inventors sets it up to trace his mitochondrial DNA back through the generations- He sees generation after generation of his great^(N+1) grandmothers as he traces his lineage back while his search program keeps track of the slowly changing DNA pattern.... He keeps going back in time faster and faster- He sees a short ape like great grandmother in africa.... Even further and he sees a small lemur like creature.... he goes back hundreds of millions of years and discovers that one of humanity's most ancient ancestors was saved and preserved to survive the 'snowball earth' period by a race of technological creatures that evolved on earth first and then died out from planetwide change... all traces of them were wiped out by planetwide glaciation...

It was- almost- a great book- If you buy it you may want to throw it away when you reach the last few dozen pages, because it spirals off into the insanity of Tipler's 'Omega Point' cult...

I may be misremembering some of the details, so feel free to correct me if I am wrong- some readers may dislike that the book spends so much time on the sociological impact of the device, but I appreciate that sort of detail.... I winced at how the physics was too often glossed over- but hey, its fiction....

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