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    Anime & Manga 
Take the calibration and reset the zero moment point and the CPG. Connect the control module to quasi-cortex molecular ion pump. Rebuild neural linkage network. Update meta-motor cortex parameters. Restart feed-forward control. Transfer functions, correct for Coriolis deviation... Online!
Kira Yamato, Mobile Suit Gundam

    Audio Plays 
Jacobi: So, what do you do?
Maxwell: Oh, I uh, I do machine computational thought experiments and hyperconductive artificial nervous design.
Jacobi: I'm gonna ask you that again, and we're gonna try that one more time, okay?
Maxwell: Okay!
Jacobi: So! (clears throat) Alana Maxwell! What do you do?
Maxwell: I do cool stuff with robots! You?
Jacobi: I make very big things blow up!
Wolf 359, "Brave New World"

    Comic Books 
Technician 1: Ready to begin speaking in technobabble, sir.
Technician 2: Oh, Shut up, it's just us. Turn it on!

I bet I just need to calculate the relative orbits of Argo and Earth. Then, if I can fly high enough to make it into orbit, I can probably use the gravitational forces of this planet to slingshot me back into quasi-space! It's foolproof!

Cosmic Boy: Looks like the Sciente Police and the pyro-nullifier team have everything under control.
Superboy: "Pyro-whatsis?"

Superman: How do you did it?
(Fake) Linda: Simple! I figured that the gas released by the fusion of the chemicals in the rock could reactivate the super-energy of my body-cells!

"According to my calculations, the stellar energies captured in this canister— combined with a few precious grains of the element Illium 349— will reverse the effects of Brainiac's Shrink-Ray—"
Superman, Let My People Grow!

    Fan Works 
Doctor Akagi was deep into some lecture about the Angel. Shinji tried to listen, hoping she'd offer something to give him hope, but the advanced mathematical diagrams and jargon-laden explanation went mostly past him. The Angel was three nanometers thick? Inverted AT-Field? Imaginary space? The floating sphere was its five-dimensional shadow? What the Hell was a 'Sea of Dirac'? He shook his head.
Shinji, Advice and Trust

It was for moments like this that Anna had spent endless minutes strapped into Brain chairs at the Space Academy. She leapt to her feet. "Adjust the interspacial temporal effectance frequency to a non-covariant ratio immediately! Set the port parallel thrusters to interlinked harmonistic bursts! Broadcast our space/time index on a rotating subspace transmodulation! Dump the linear convection fluid from the hyper-xoduliser's primary core! Bring the secondary astrogation sensors out of their cryogenic storage tubes and deploy them to a quasametric spread! Raise the gravity repellence shields to a nonuple setting of 9.7835 megacomputations!"
Tom was still trying to decypher all this garbage when they slammed into the planet's surface.
B'Elannarella

"Yes, definitely held up by wantum superstrings," babbled Johnny. "I'd postulate a Handwavium Drive generating a Flangium Field of pure Gaffleblab suspended in Piller Filler, drawing its power from a cubic foot of Buzzwordium__"
"You're just making that shit up, aren't you?" snapped Constance.
"Err...yes."

'Twas quantum, and the gravitons
Did flux and fracture out of phase
All temp'ral were the chronitons
As the verterons decayed.
Babbletechy, with apologises to Lewis Carroll.

She held her breath to dull the pain, and for the second day there was light, oh so much light, and she heard the technicians babbling their coded language of feedback loops and neural connections and the Eva went dark, overwhelmed.

"My Implausible Translator doesn't do technobabble!"
Commander Willing Piker, Sev Trek: Pus in Boots

Slinging B'Elanna's unconscious body over her shoulder, Seven climbed the ladder to the next level to escape the slowly rising flood of technobabble.
No Ordinary Spoof

Paris listened politely as she spoke of 'exotic matter' and 'negative energy density' and 'non-spinning wormholes'. It was a matter of faith among space-jockeys that the technos babbled on like this to make everyone believe they understood things they had no explanation for.

A TASTE OF TECHNOBABBLE: When Enterprise falls through a plothole in subspace, the problem is solved with the help of a powerful yet benevolent alien called Technobabble. The alien is eager to join the crew in their exploration of the universe, but T'Pol warns of the danger of becoming too dependent on Technobabble as an easy way out of difficult situations.
Next Week on Enterprise

    Film — Live-Action 

Lucius Fox: I analysed your blood. Isolated the receptor compounds and the protein-based catalyst.
Bruce Wayne: Was I supposed to understand any of that?
Fox: Not at all. I just wanted you to understand how hard it was.

Rogers: Does Loki need any particular kind of power source?
Banner: He'd have to heat the cube to 120,000,000 Kelvin just to break through the Coulomb barrier.
Stark: Unless Selvig has figured out how to stabilize the quantum tunneling effect.
Banner: Well, if he could do that, he could achieve heavy-ion fusion at any reactor on the planet.
Stark: Finally! Someone who speaks English.
Rogers: [mumbling to himself] Is that what just happened?

Do you guys just put the word 'quantum' in front of everything?
Scott Lang, in response to Bill Foster and Hank Pym still doing this trope, Ant-Man and the Wasp

    Literature 
Yuki Nagato: A localized, non-corrosive amalgamation of asynchronous space is independently occurring in restricted condition mode.
Kyon: It almost sounds like you're flipping through a dictionary, pulling out words at random.

"Explain all that," said the Mock Turtle.

"No, no! the adventures first," said the Gryphon in an impatient tone; "explanations take such a dreadful time.

Michael: Johann, I've got to ask. How much of that little speech made any kind of sense?
Gauss: Michael-lan, it wasn't just nonsense, it was demented nonsense. It sounded good though, yes?
The Salvation War: Pantheocide

Smith, to me, represents the last of a valiant but doomed race—the writers of the Buck Rogers-Flash Gordon school. The time is fast disappearing—at least in the better science-fiction magazines—when the author, in a difficult situation, can, "—turn to his micro-ultra-philmeter, he rapidly tore out a dozen connections, spot-welded twenty-seven busbars, and converted the machine into an improved von Krockmeier hyperspace lever, which bent space like the blade of a rapier and hurtled him in a flash from hilt to point—" My apologies to Theodore Sturgeon for that quote.
— Fan letter to Astounding Stories, Feb 1942

If you ask me how to shine in the science-fiction line as a pro of luster bright,
I say, practice up the lingo of the sciences, by jingo (never mind if not quite right).
You must talk of Space and Galaxies and tesseractic fallacies in slick and mystic style,
Though the fans won't understand it, they will all the same demand it
with a softly hopeful smile.

As you might remember from our last adventure, George and Harold had recently made the horrifying mistake of trying to pass through a synthetic time warp without letting the C-2X906 super-bimflimanatrix drive of their beebleflux-capacitating zossifyer cool down, thus creating a sub-paradoxical, dimensionalistic alternicon-shift, which opened up a hyper-googliphonic screen door into a sub-omnivating ultra-zintacular bio-nanzonoflanmarzipan. To put it in scientific terms, they screwed up.

    Live-Action TV 
"Activate the supersonic deccelarating contrarotating turbines vertically, we're getting a little too close to the Sun. Depress the aerothermic thermoreceptors! Accelerate the isothermal axio tractor beam value of parametres! Invert the compressor radio ratio. Energize the tandem of elerons vertically while I turn up this interplanetary microphone."
Joker, Batman (1966), though probably a mondegreen

"No 'if'! I want a definitive answer, no more of your weaselly technobabble!"

The Doctor: Looks like a spatio-temporal hyperlink.
Mickey: What's that?
The Doctor: No idea, just made it up. Didn't want to say "magic door".

"This is my timey-wimey detector. Goes 'ding' when there's stuff."
The Doctor, Doctor Who, "Blink"

Rayyan: Looks like a nasty sprain.
Fatima: You don't have to dumb it down for me. I came for your medical opinion.
Rayyan: You vitiated your anterior cruciate ligament.
Fatima: Oh no... What does that mean?
Rayyan: Looks like a nasty sprain.
Little Mosque on the Prairie, "Swimming Upstream"

Character: Switch the system over to analog!
Mike: It has a warmer sound!

"Hey, let me walk you through our Donnelly nut spacing and cracked system rim-riding grip configuration. Using a field of half-C sprats and brass-fitted nickel slits, our bracketed caps and splay-flexed brace columns vent dampers to dampening hatch depths of 1/2 meter from the damper crown to the spurv plinth. How? Well, we bolster 12 husk nuts to each girdle jerry, while flex-tandems press a task apparatus of ten vertically composited patch hamplers, then pin flam-fastened pan traps at both maiden apexes of the jimjoints."
Leslie, Patriot

Samantha Carter: For some reason, the warping of our space-time is in advance of the gravity field rather than as a result of it. It's probably a lensing effect of the stargate itself, but I can't be sure.
Colonel Cromwell: [to Jack O'Neill, who's nodding] Don't even pretend you understand that.
Stargate SG-1, "A Matter of Time"

"Still chasing your own tail? Picard and his lackeys would have solved all this techno-babble hours ago. No wonder you're not commanding a starship."
Q to Sisko, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - "Q-Less"

"Perimeter sensors are picking up a subspace oscillation. ...The hell does that mean?"
Major Kira, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "If Wishes Were Horses"

Rom: If we vent plasma from the warp core into the cargo hold, we may be able to start a cascade reaction in the kemacite. Then we can modulate the reaction to create an inversion wave in the warp field and force the ship back into normal space! If I time it just right, I should be able to get us close enough to Earth to make an emergency landing.
Quark: Rom, you're a genius!
Rom: You think so?
Quark: How should I know? I have no idea what you're talking about.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "Little Green Men"

EMH-II: Doctor, some...thing just went off-line.
Doctor: Specifically?
EMH-II: "The secondary gyrodyne relays of the propulsion field intermatrix have depolarized"!
Doctor: In ENGLISH!
EMH-II: I'm just reading what it says here!
Star Trek: Voyager, "Message In A Bottle" (starting its later-season habit of poking fun at its own cliches)

Riker: Okay, Morta. The Enterprise computer system is controlled by three primary main processing cores, cross-linked with a redundant melacortz ramistat. Fourteen kiloquad interface modules. The core element is based on an FTL nanoprocessor with twenty five bilateral kelilactirals, with twenty of those being slaved into the primary heisenfram terminal. Now you do know what a bilateral kelilactiral is?
Morta: Well, of course I do, human. I am not stupid.
Riker: No, of course not. This is the isopalavial interface which controls the main firomactal drive unit. Don't touch that. You'll blow up the entire firomactal drive.
Morta: What? Wait. What is a firomactal drive? Just explain it to me.
Riker: That is the firomactal drive unit. It controls the ramistat core and also keeps the ontarian manifold at forty thousand KRGs.
William T. Riker, bullshitting a member of an enemy boarding party, Star Trek: The Next Generation: "Rascals"

Jack: I'm using satellite tracking data to determine the intra-trajectory of the meteorite.
Toshiko: He means he's trying to find out where it's come from.
Jack: Hey! Sometimes a little technobabble is good for the soul.
Torchwood, "Day One"

Number Five: In the end, I had to project my consciousness forward into a suspended quantum state version of myself that exists across every possible instance of time.
Diego: That makes no sense.
Number Five: Well, it would if you were smarter.
The Umbrella Academy (2019), "We Only See Each Other At Weddings And Funerals"

Rimmer: Do you think it's because the sub-space conduits have locked with the transponder calibrations and caused a major tachyon surge that has overloaded the time matrix?
Kryten: No, sir. I've just been jabbing it too hard.
Red Dwarf, "Tikka to Ride"

"One more word of technobabble out of you and I'm gonna cut out your tongue!"
John Crichton, Farscape, "Coup by Clam"

    Radio 
(The Doctor is tending to a stun-gun wound of Onya's)
The Doctor: ...as the stun gun blocked the energy flow, so we have to reverse the effect.
The Brigadier: Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, eh, Doctor?
The Doctor: You may mock, Lethbridge-Stewart. I know as well as you, that expression would sound like nonsense to a classical subatomic physicist!
The Brigadier: What?
The Doctor: Well, now I'm reversing the pseudopolarity of the metaphorical synapses in Onya's putative energy channels! And that's just as nonsensical and just as effective.
Sarah Jane Smith: *giggles*
The Brigadier: I haven't a clue what you're talking about.

    Stand-up Comedy 
The Doctor: Now, it looks like the proto-anodysing discorporators have short circuited the molecular quark overload.
Companion: Is that difficult to fix?
The Doctor: No, but it's very difficult to say!

    Tabletop Games 
A minor but annoying personality quirk makes you incapable of carrying on a conversation without employing verbose and obtrusive discourse. No matter how simple the subject might be, you must fill it with compulsory metaphraseology, obfuscationatory terminology and counterintuitive newspeak. Jeez, learn to talk normal for cryin' out loud!
— The Technobabbler flaw, Mage: The Ascension - Guide To The Technocracy

    Video Games 
"I once saw one take out a squadron of Romulan warbirds by creating a subspace inversion field and then detonating a charged particle burst. Least, that was what my science officer said she did."
Captain Bronok Zell, Star Trek Online Foundry mission "Bait and Switch"

Kenneth Donnelly: I won't bore you with the tech, but there is an array of attenuators in the primary power transfer system that channels the field bleed...
Gabriella Daniels: Kenneth, you're boring the commander with tech.

Gabriella Daniels: The new armor reinforcements really threw off the gravimetric profiles. But engines are good to go. I rebalanced the Gillbourne coefficients and adjusted the anterior intakes on the second tier stabilizers.
Kenneth Donnelly: I love it when you talk dirty.

Knuckles: Still, how does a plank like that just float?
Tails: That's easy to explain! According to the Kutta-Joukowski Lift Theorem, the control surface flow is balanced by the inverse kinetics of the-
Knuckles: STOP!!! I get it, OK? It just floats and that's good enough for me!

See, regular knob goblin guards are lazy and slow, so they get fast zombies.
Zombie speed is the inverse of the original organism, due to release of stored potential energy in the muscle fibers.

Also zombie science is real easy because you can just say random words.
Kingdom of Loathing, Monster Manuel entry on "Knob Goblin Elite Zombie"

    Webcomics 
Fighter: What you've got here is your basic system total failure. The upper support rig is three degrees out of nominal operation range. Just right out of it. Your L Beam is cracked in at least three places. I wouldn't attempt impulse speeds with that kind of damage. On the subject of propulsion, the anti matter regulator is coughing up a lung. If you have any interest in not being vaporized, don't switch it on till we can replace the unit. The entire GN/DN tube network is shot.
[...]
Thief: Where do you suggest we start?
Fighter: First, it'd be nice if we knew what any of this stuff meant or did.

Bob: You really can't fix it?
Galatea: Impossible! I've quantum destabilized the blah blah blah yakkedy shmackedy blah blah polarity of the neutron flow!

Nova: You're a worthy adversary, Misho. But even you could not anticipate that I would invert the photon charge of the deflector array... ... AGAIN.
Misho: SOL DAMNIT THAT SHOULDN'T DO ANYTHING EVEN IF IT IS POSSIBLE!!

    Web Original 

"The early attempts to construct a sufficiently robust spiral decommutator failed largely because of lack of appreciation of the large quasi-pietic stresses in the gremlin studs; the latter were specially designed to hold the roffit bars to the spamshaft. When, however, it was discovered that wending could be prevented by the simple addition of teeth to socket, almost perfect running was secured.
The operating point is maintained as near as possible to the HF rem peak by constantly fromaging the bituminous spandrels. This is a distinct advance on the standard nivelsheave in that no drammock oil is required after the phase detractors have remissed."
— Description of the (fictional) Turboencabulator

"What, um, what I'm trying to say sir is that... look, we're all aware that we're sort of under contract here to provide explanations to the public about, um, about how basically all of this works, and, well the thing is sir that we haven't got the slightest idea about how stuff turns into explodium. No idea sir. Just, it's an entire team of elite scientists, and we're sort of just left scratching our heads because we haven't found so much as a way to even.... what I'm saying, sir, is that we're going to have to hire a really good public speaker to work a particularly fat sack of bull feces into the official line here."
Chibi-Reaper, providing a possible explanation for why a particularly nonsensical bit of Techno Babble might be explicable in Watsonian terms.

"Words have meanings. I mean, except for incels and scifi screenwriters."

    Web Video 
"Okay, I didn't understand a word of it, so it must be scientifically accurate!"

Maya: (talking very fast) Hold on! I detect an exponential increase in photon energy levels!
Misato: Say that again?
Makoto: She said the photonic energy levels are rising.
Misato: IN ENGLISH!
Maya: WE'RE FUCKED!
EvAbridged 3.0 Rei is (not) Pleased

    Western Animation 
Fry: Usually on the show, they came up with a complicated plan, then explained it with a simple analogy.
Leela: Hmmm... If we can re-route engine power through the primary weapons and configure them to Melllvar's frequency, that should overload his electro-quantum structure.
Bender: Like putting too much air in a balloon!
Fry: Of course! It's all so simple!
Futurama, "Where No Fan Has Gone Before"

Fry: Bender?! What happened to you?
Bender: I'll try to put it in terms you can comprehend. I passed the existential singularity.
Fry: Try harder!
Futurama, "Overclockwise"

Attila the Hun: Stop! Don't shoot fire stick in space canoe! Cause explosive decompression!
Zapp Brannigan: Spare me your space age technobabble, Attila the Hun!
Futurama, "Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch"

The Flash: How are we supposed to get in again?
Lex Luthor: Multi-frequency band encryption analyzer replicator pack.
Flash: Some of us don't speak Star Trek.
Lex: Think of it as a fancy garage door opener.

Morty: Oh boy, what's wrong, Rick, is it the quantum carburetor or something?
Rick: Quantum carburetor? Jesus, Morty, you can't just add a s-urp-sci-fi word to a car word and hope it means something. Huh, looks like something's wrong with the microverse battery.
Rick and Morty, "The Ricks Must Be Crazy"

Lt. Regurge: If we manoeuvre around the Makular ship while firing simultaneous blasts of UV radiation and enhanced zeno-treknoan beams, we should take out the pustular emitters and disable their Disbelief Suspension field!
[Captain Pinchhard beckons Commander Piker closer]
Pinchhard: [quietly] I didn't understand a word of that.
Piker: [enthusiastically] Sounds good to me!
Sev Trek: Pus in Boots

Gibson: They're probably trying to buy Wallerian dutronium to power the Chronogasmic matrix!
Mariner: Yeah, Doc, you really wanna avoid that many made-up words in a row.
Star Trek: Lower Decks, "Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus"

Peter Perfect: Everyone to battle stations! Laser shields to maximum! Reverse the polarity of the flux-transistor!
Penelope Pitstop: Darlin', there are no battle stations.
Bella: You're just babbling technical-sounding gobbildy-gook to make yourself sound cool!
Peter Perfect: (sigh) I know...

    Real Life 

"I remember Terry telling me in the bar one time, that whenever he got letters from people complaining about scientific inaccuracies, he would just send back this standard letter, which would say, 'you will be aware of the formula XYZ to the power of 17...' He said it was all total bullshit and he didn't know what it meant, but he would just bung it off and they loved it!"
— Interview with Chris Boucher

"I was literally writing 'Science, science, science' in the dialogue and going back to fill in the proper wording later."
Joss Whedon, on making The Avengers

"...Who talks like this, George!?"
Mark Hamill, on the early drafts of A New Hope

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