Time Travel in Painting? Art Lovers Spot iPhone in 1882 Artwork 125 Years Before Smartphone Hit the Market
(Photo: Pexels/Anna Shvets)
Time Travel in Painting? Art Lovers Spot iPhone in 1882 Artwork 125 Years Before Smartphone Hit the Market

Art lovers noticed what appears to be an iPhone in various paintings, sparking time travel theories. A new report revealed the artworks in question.

Modern iPhone in Old Paintings

Time travel speculations have been triggered by a 19th-century artwork that seems to depict an iPhone. The painting "Marriage of Burns and Highland Mary" showed the famed Scottish poet Robert Burns and his sweetheart Mary Campbell. The couple publicly proclaimed their love for one another in the artwork completed by R. Josey and James Archer around 1982.

The image depicts a couple holding onto a dark-colored rectangle with rounded corners that seems like an early iPhone as they stand over the banks of the River Ayr and look at one another. However, the artwork dates back 125 years before the iconic smartphone hit the market in 2007. Some art enthusiasts have wondered if Scotland's national poet had hidden time-traveling abilities, Daily Star reported.

However, there might be a straightforward explanation for the enigmatical object. Burns and his fiancee famously met to announce their engagement across a river in west Scotland in 1786, and they commemorated the event with an old Scottish custom by exchanging Bibles over a flowing stream.

Therefore, it would appear that the enigmatic black rectangle may represent a holy text and not just a strange hint at the future after all.

However, it is not the first instance when smartphones seem to have appeared in ancient paintings. In 1937, about 70 years before the first Apple smartphone was made available, Umberto Romano created Mr. "Pynchon And The Settling Of Springfield." Fans, however, insist that the man in the bottom right corner of the mural is holding what appears to be a very modern piece of technology to his face and even grips it in his palm while keeping his thumb on one side of the item, like how most hold their smartphones.

Many people have made assumptions about what the object, which resembles a smartphone, might be. Some have suggested that it might be a knife or a mirror, which are everyday trade items, or that he might be looking at an axe head.

Romano's other painting, "Worcester Mass," also seemed to feature a woman holding an iPad. The same was observed in another artwork, where a naked woman lying on a couch appeared to be watching Netflix on her iPad, per e-Discovery Team.

Romano's other artworks also have names seemingly associated with Science, such as follow:

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Is Time Travel Possible?

We are time travelers! For instance, we move forward in time by one year between birthdays. And we are all moving through time at about one second per second.

Our ability to travel in time is also made possible by NASA's space telescopes. We can use telescopes to glimpse distant stars and galaxies. The light from distant galaxies takes a very long time to reach us. So, when we use a telescope to observe the sky, we actually view the appearance of those stars and galaxies millions of years ago.

However, when we use the term "time travel," we typically mean moving more quickly than one second each second. That kind of time travel seems to be reserved for science fiction films and books. Could it really exist? Science affirms this, according to NASA Science Space Place.

With his theory of relativity, Albert Einstein proposed a concept for how time functions, arguing that space and time are interconnected. Additionally, he asserted that the speed of light is the maximum that anything in the universe can reach.

According to this belief, time passes more slowly the faster you travel. To demonstrate that this is true, scientists have conducted some experiments.

One experiment, for instance, utilized two clocks that were set at the same time. While the other clock went in an airplane in the same direction that the Earth spins, the first one remained on Earth.

Scientists compared the two clocks after the plane had completed its global journey. The fast-moving airplane's clock was a fraction behind the timepiece on the ground. As a result, the airplane's clock was ticking slightly slower than once every second.

We cannot go hundreds of years into the past or future via a time machine. Only in novels and motion pictures does that kind of time travel occur. But the math of time travel impacts the things we use daily.

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