What was the experiment that caused Doc's clocks to be 25mins slow?

edited December 2010 in Back to the Future
Was it a malicious attempt to make Marty late for school?

Comments

  • edited December 2010
    I always wondered that too
  • edited December 2010
    I think that he made all the clocks go at a different speed but calculated it so they would get to the 25 minutes slow mark at the same time.
  • edited December 2010
    I previously thought that Doc meticulously sent each clock back in time with the DeLorean, but he says "If my calculations are correct" before he sends Eistein through time. It sounds like he doesn't know for sure it would work and that makes my idea bogus.

    Farlander's idea seems plausable. Maybe Doc was trying to make sure he was an expert on calculating times before he made his first test on Eistein. Possibly some last minute finishing touches to the time circuits needed such calculations to help them direct the time machine to specific times?
  • edited December 2010
    yeah, i always wanted to know this also. It must have had something to do with the time travel experiements, you dont just build a time machine and hope it works lol.

    Just a simple thing like this could be fun to explore, or maybe here from the Co creator of BTTF :P
  • edited December 2010
    You know it was probably some really sciency thing that would need a blackboard full of algebra and long division.
  • edited December 2010
  • edited December 2010
    Doc is crazy and decided to set all his clocks back 25 minutes.
  • edited December 2010
    That also seems entirely possible, lol.
  • edited December 2010
    Did you know that there is one clock that reads a different time in that scene?
  • edited December 2010
    Maybe he bought some clocks and decided to set them by sending them back in time.
    It's just retarded enough to work.
  • edited December 2010
    ^


    Owh..I think you hit the jackpot!

    Ofcourse! Before sending Einstein for safety reasons he has to see what happens to the matter inside the car. He probably put all his clocks in the time machine and see if they'd all make it back in once piece. Because current Doc knows his future self will send back the clocks he hung them back. See if they were all slow the exact same time.
  • edited December 2010
    Perhaps he found a way to influence time within a field, but he needs to move 88 mph to actually travel in time. So his entire house was surrounded in a field that slowed time down, but only slightly, like 25 minutes over the course of several days, perhaps to calibrate the flux capacitor, to ensure that the one minute Einstein skipped would not be 27 years.

    I tend to overthink stuff like this.
  • edited December 2010
    I don't think he sent each clock through time. It would be a waste of Plutonium!
  • edited December 2010
    Maybe he bought some clocks and decided to set them by sending them back in time.
    It's just retarded enough to work.
    Origami wrote: »
    ^


    Owh..I think you hit the jackpot!

    Ofcourse! Before sending Einstein for safety reasons he has to see what happens to the matter inside the car. He probably put all his clocks in the time machine and see if they'd all make it back in once piece. Because current Doc knows his future self will send back the clocks he hung them back. See if they were all slow the exact same time.
    I like this idea. However, it's obvious from the scene that sending Einstein one minute into the future was Doc's first time sending the DeLorean through time (you can tell this because he says "If my calculations are correct...", he's geniunely excited that the experiment is a success, and he's surprised that the DeLorean returns covered in ice). One would hope that Doc would've used the DeLorean before testing it out on a living creature, but this doesn't appear to be the case. :)
  • edited December 2010
    On his first test why couldn't Doc have just sent the clock in the DeLorean without Einstein. It would still be one minute behind with or without Einstein.

    But I guess he needed to try a living subject.
  • edited December 2010
    If he had sent the clocks through time in the DeLorean, he wouldn't have reacted as he did when he heard them chiming over the phone, since he would have seen that they were slow when he took them out of the time machine and hung them all back up.

    Whatever his experiment was, it must have run over the course of the week during his absence... maybe he set up a big magnet or some other device that caused the mechanisms in the clock to run more slowly.
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