stunt_muppet

I also swear that I'll complain about it the entire way. Physics is a fascinating field, don't get me wrong, but not when someone's actually testing me on it.

Anyway, the reason I bring up physics and my need to take a class therein is because I have a bit of Who fanon I want to bounce off you all (who may know more of the intricacies of Fiziks than I) because I don't know if it makes any sense, is causing Einstein to roll in his grave even more than he already was, is pulling physical principles completely out of my ass, etc.

The fanon that Time Lords can somehow control time, independently of their TARDISes, has never sat really well with me. It's made some amazing fics possible, yeah, but if they can travel through and manipulate time all on their own, why don't they just do that instead of hopping into shapeshifting potentially volatile semi-conscious machines? Plus it would make it really hard to found a society because the minute Time Lord A did something Time Lord B didn't like Time Lord B would just go back and unhappen it and then Time Lord A would possibly be aware of the time disruption and unhappen whatever happened that and pretty soon they'd have de-evolved themselves or something*. It's possible that Time Lords are just too boring and over-regulated to think of that more recently, but at the beginning? 

*Quite possibly I'm entirely misinterpreting what they can and can't do to each other, but frankly I'm not that imaginative and thinking too hard about time travel physics and causality for extended periods of time gives me a headache. I am a stereotype, c'est la vie.

But what about relative time? If we accept that Time Lords exist somehow outside our own linear time, they wouldn't be subject to relative experience. Days, weeks, years - all time divisions based on a planetary cycle would be meaningless to them. They presumably have some sense of time relative to themselves, since they do indeed have a concept of "before" and "after" (i.e. the multi-Doctor episodes, where one regeneration clearly happened before another even in the context of the Time Lords), but it doesn't correspond to ours. Let's call their time "objective time" for now.

Now, existing outside of relative time - but not necessarily being able to manipulate it - still covers a few of the Time Lords' abilities in canon and fanon. The Doctor stating that he sees all the futures that could be - well, from an objective standpoint, he's not limited to a single human timeline, and thus might be able to see divergences. His greater temporal inertia in, say, Invasion of the Dinosaurs - he's not bound to the timeline the way humans are, thus if it suddenly changes he won't be affected by it immediately even if he's in the middle of it. The talk in "Rose" about "feeling the rotation of the Earth"? Of course he can. We can't, because it's so slow in comparison to us; it's how we regulate time via increments of days. To him it's an exterior circumstance, another feature of a particular timeline.

So instead of Time Lords being able to manipulate time itself somehow, possibly they can influence each other's (and especially human's) perception of relative time? Since they don't do it all the time to achieve super speed or whatever, let's assume it's one of those handy fingers-to-the-temples tricks; it requires fiddling with someone's brain in a more direct fashion. But when they do, a person's perception of how time flows would be one of the features they'd see in their mind, and might potentially be able to influence. In the case of humans, they could, say, cause a person's perception of time to speed up or slow down, because the Time Lord themselves is outside that perception and could convey part of that...meaninglessness of time increments to the other person, thus allowing them to percieve time as slowly or quickly as they like? I'm searching for words and none are coming up, blah.

Possibly Time Lords could do this to each other as well, but while I can understand how that works if they're inside a timeline, I have no idea how it'd work if they were on their own, objective time.

Also while the easy explanation of why the Time Lords are Time Lords - Gallifrey and their star system operate outside the standard spacetime continuum, in a sort of super-continuum that encompasses the theoretically-infinite alternate timelines of the universe as well - I have recently become rather attached to the fanon that Gallifrey orbits multiple stars in the constellation of Kasterborous, making its orbit more of a wobbly outline of bits of the constelation than any kind of ellipsis, to the point where depending on where Gallifrey is in its orbit its distance from and orbital speed around each star varies greatly. (E.g. at a certain point in its orbit of one star, the gravity of another star catches it and it begins orbiting that star instead, until it passes near the gravitational field of another star, etc.) Thus, at any given time the temporal markers (rotation and the time it takes for an orbit to complete) are different; quite possibly the laws of physics are different, especially gravitation, and nothing is consistent. They would learn to think outside time because they would have no consistent marker with which to establish relative time; they would learn the absolute physical laws because their own varied so wildly; they would have to become very technologically advanced very fast if they hoped to survive such a shifting landscape; they built the citadels to block out the constantly changing physics and the radiation of some of the closer stars.

I have to admit I mostly only came up with this one because the Doctor always mentions that Gallifrey is in the constellation of Kasterborous but never mentions which star it actually orbits, leading me to think that maybe it orbits a lot of them. But I'm sure that gravity/physics/stars/planets don't work that way, and I've basically just beaten physics about the head and shoulders, stolen its lunch money, and run away.

In fact I don't even know why I'm thinking about this that hard. SURELY THERE ARE OTHER THINGS I COULD BE DOING.
Really must get back to work now. See you later, flist.