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Time Crash: Difference between revisions
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''Now take that tree you've just drawn. Put it on a desk. And empty your inkwell onto it. That's what happens when a time machine blows up.''|'''Tycho Green''', ''[http://adamcadre.ac/if.html#Shrapnel Shrapnel]''}}
'''For the ''[[
It's already been [[Doctor Who
But what about universes where time is not quite so wibbly-wobbly or timey-wimey? What about those realities where time is a rigid, orderly, and above all ''fragile'' structure, and some well-meaning fool sets off with a time machine to change history?
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When you've gone and broken ''time'', [[Divide By Zero|all bets are off]]. More benign Time Crashes may take the form of a [[Groundhog Day Loop]] waiting for someone to find the magic key which breaks the cycle. In others, cause and effect itself may be shattered, resulting in a [[Fate Worse Than Death]] for all affected.
Garden-variety temporal wedgies need not apply in this trope. This is not about your usual temporal inconveniences, the kind that [[Ret
A Time Crash is not a simple thing to solve, either: usually, it involves either some serious [[Applied Phlebotinum]] or [[More Dakka|enough firepower]] aimed at the right [[Eldritch Abomination]]...if it can be fixed at all.
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== Fan Works ==
* In ''[[Methods of Rationality]]'', Harry decides not to experiment with the Time-Turner any more for fear of one of these (after a truly brilliant experiment that, if successful, could have used [[Stable Time Loop|Stable Time Loops]] to [
** Brilliant, maybe, but also fundamentally flawed - the idea was to test a potential solution, if it worked, cause a stable time loop by seeding the loop with that solution, and if it didn't, to seed the loop with the next solution. The trouble with the plan is that it only gets to the stable time loop if he hits the solution first time, while he planned to iterate through the potential solutions in a fixed order, starting with one that he knew wouldn't work... Rather than cause a paradox by producing the solution, the situation resolved in a safe stable time-loop instead - a Time ''Error Message''.
** While the likes of Harry are properly scared by notes in their own shaky handwriting, the likes of Dumbledore know what can happen if you push it. {{spoiler|Apparently, experimenting with time got Atlantis ''erased from the timestream''.}}
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* In the ''[[Back to The Future (Film)|Back to The Future]]'' movies, this is a major concern for Doc Brown, although more often than not he'll change the future (or past) for personal reasons. He believes, for instance, [[Never the Selves Shall Meet|that present!Jennifer meeting future!Jennifer could destroy the galaxy]]. {{spoiler|It doesn't happen.}}
** The reasoning is fear of paradox: what if Jennifer seeing her future self faints, falls badly, breaks her neck, and thus can't be there to go back in time to startle herself? If you're a dabbling mad inventor who ''doesn't know'' if paradoxes might do really quite unpleasant things to reality, advocating caution is almost uncharacteristically pragmatic. (How ''do'' you do a controlled experiment to see if some event X destroys the universe, anyway?)
** As a [[Shout
* ''[[The Philadelphia Experiment]]'' has this happen as an unanticipated side-effect of experiments in building an [[Invisibility Cloak]]. A Navy destroyer from 1943 and an entire Midwestern town from 1984 get [[Mass Teleportation|sucked into]] the resulting vortex, which has to be stopped (from within) lest it [[The End of the World As We Know It|destroy the entire world]].
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* An episode of the new ''[[The Outer Limits]]'' has a time travel experiment go wrong {{spoiler|after an attempt to weaponize it by a corrupt military official}}, which results in a [[Groundhog Day Loop]]...a rare [[Groundhog Day Loop]] with a time limit. Each iteration grows shorter, and eventually there will be no hope of preventing the Time Crash from destroying the world. {{spoiler|In the end, the disaster is averted, and the man responsible suffers a [[Karmic Death|Karmic]] [[Fate Worse Than Death]], as he's caught forever in the moment of his own annihilation by the malfunctioning time machine.}}
* Parodied in the (as-mentioned-above) "wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey" [[
** In a less humorous example, Rose causes a Time Crash in ''Father's Day'' when she saves her father from dying at a predetermined time. [[Clock Roaches|Flying Killer Time Monkeys]] [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|come out and eat everyone on Earth.]]
** Also, the mastermind behind the cracks in the time field in [[Doctor Who
** ''The Wedding of River Song'': The entire universe goes pear-shaped when River refuses to kill The Doctor, even though it's meant to be a fixed point in time. Her failure to do so results all of earth's history happening at once - people travel by intercontinental steam trains and cars tethered to hot air balloons; pterodactyls are a nuisance in public parks; [[Charles Dickens (Creator)|Charles Dickens]] is directing the BBC's big Christmas special; Winston Churchill is ''kaiser'' of the Holy Roman Empire, which is headquarted in London, has classical Roman trappings, and is fighting the Wars of the Roses, and his barber is a Silurian; JFK and Cleopatra are a known item, and the great pyramid of Giza has an American flag painted on the side and is known as "[[Area 51|Area 52]]".
* In ''[[Eureka]]'', the latest meddling with time causes one of these, causing 1947 and 2010 to merge at an exponential rate, which would eventually annihilate time itself.
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[[Category:Time Travel Tropes]]
[[Category:Time Crash]]
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