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=== Forms ===
There are several forms of technobabble. One form, mostly used in fiction, depends on jargon and story features that are specific to or even exclusive to the story's universe. Stringing together a series of these elements to explain a problem or solution allows the author to easily craft a situation without having to depend on real-world laws to correlate to or confirm it. For example, the time travel device in the 1985 comedy drama film ''[[Back to the Future]]'' was said to be powered by a "flux capacitor", which has no meaning outside the context of the movie. A specialised form of technobabble known as ''treknobabble'' (and listed in scripts simply as '[TECH]') was devised for the various long-running ''[[Star Trek]]'' television programs and movies, which relied upon quasi-scientific [[Deus ex machina|solutions to dramatic problems]]. Other [[science fiction]] movies and literature have their own form of technobabble. This is often because the concepts and items being talked about are fictional, but necessary for the story.
A second form of technobabble comes from the practice of taking an otherwise simple concept and describing it in a scientifically overworked manner to mask its inherent simplicity (see: ''[http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A640207 Sesquipedalian Obscurantism])''. One well-known example is the [[dihydrogen monoxide hoax]], describing the supposedly dangerous characteristics of ordinary [[water]] by labelling the substance with its esoteric chemical name. Another famous example is the sentence "I reversed the polarity of the neutron flow" used by the [[Third Doctor]] twice in his original run in the 1970s and in the 1984 Doctor Who anniversary episode; [[neutron|neutrons]] are chargeless, so to reverse the polarity of a neutron flow is to do nothing at all.
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