For some reason this popped into my head the other day. At the beginning of the first Back to the Future movie, Marty goes to the Doc’s house before school. He gets on the phone with the Doc, and all the clocks start chiming. The Doc says something like, “My experiment worked! All the clocks are exactly 20 minutes behind!”
So what was the experiment? Did Dr. Brown somehow figure out how to affect relativity inside his house or something?
There wasn’t an experiment with the clocks, Doc just liked clocks. He does set the clocks a few minutes behind, though, causing Marty to be late for school. This is a necessary plot device – without it, Marty would not be motivated to listen to Huey Lewis while skateboarding.
Doc’s experiment with the clocks is never explained. However, since his time machine is obviously already complete or nearly complete at the time, it can’t be part of any prerequisite research. A plausible explanation is that he was testing for low-grade side effects of a charged flux capacitor, and his theory predicted a mild time dilation. So he put a charged flux capacitor in his lab and left for a few days (so that he could time the experiment from outside the time dilation field. Presumably, the clocks gradually fell behind, and Marty confirmed that they had done so by the amount Doc’s theory predicted. Maybe this was the last piece of data Doc needed to calibrate the time circuits?
Pure speculation, of course, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable.
As friedo points out (if a trifle facetiously), it also serves a plot purpose. Aside from the rather trivial establishment of the nature of Doc’s work, it also offers a chance to introduce Strickland. That provides the basis of one of the character parallels that are responsible for a lot of the trilogy’s charm (as well as providing some relatively painless exposition).
Yes, it was. He never says what the experiment is exactly, but when he calls Marty at his house that morning and all the clocks start chiming 8:00, he says, “My experiment worked! They’re all precisely 20 minutes slow!” at which point Marty realizes he’s late for school.
Maybe he took all the clocks 20 minutes into the future using the time machine, and wanted to check some time later to see if they were still keeping time and weren’t damaged in any way.
Sending a clock (or other nonliving instruments) through the time machine is a reasonable first step. Later on, with Marty videotaping, he performs an experiment with his dog, sending him (and another clock) one minute into the future. Then the Libyans show up and all hell breaks loose.