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It is not uncommon for engineers to accept the reality of phenomena that are not yet understood, as it is very common for physicists to disbelieve the reality of phenomena that seem to contradict contemporary beliefs of physics.
— H.Bauer
An elaboration on No Plans No Prototype No Backup.
In engineering terminology, a "black box" is a device with one or more inputs (cake ingredients, a excerpt of text in Mandarin, iron ore), one or more outputs (cake, the same text translated into Frisian, a battle golem), and internal processes that are either:
1) irrelevant.
2) unknown and/or unknowable.
Such technology falls into the hands of some organization, usually the military or a commercial business. The original creator is dead ( or is an alien, or otherwise can't be reached), but said technology is really convenient. The organization's analysts went over the thing, and while most of it makes sense, there are these elements, either program or device, that they cannot comprehend at all. Removing them causes the entire thing to simply not function. The organization may be able to reverse-engineer copies, or lesser versions, but they don't understand how it works.
So, since the financial bottom line or military advantage is so important, they go along with it anyways.
....yes, of course, the technology has a bizarre effect that nobody could have predicted - you really need to keep track of those inputs and outputs! Usually it's in the form of acquiring sentience or a bizarre weapon, or only being able to be used by people of the show's target demographic. (It's common in Humongous Mecha series.)
Compare Scavenger World, where everything is similar to a Black Box not by conspiracy but by The End Of The World As We Know It.
See also In Working Order. Sister Trope to Disposable Superhero Maker.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- One word and three unintelligible symbols: .hack//. CCCorp treats The World as the game it appears to be, but those who can find the so-called "Creator's Rooms" can discern some of the original designer's true intent.
- And the game keeps sucking up player's, programmer's, and administrator's minds; even after they've rewritten it twice.
- Even so, that's much safer than the alpha version. The creator didn't dare playtest it.
- For good reason: there were rumors that at least one tester (or it might have been a programmer) died while playing.
- The core code of The World is explicitly referred to as a "Black Box" in several of the novels.
- The development of the Evangelions in Neon Genesis Evangelion is very much along the lines of this trope, although the source of the Black Box is not earthly.
- The S2 engine is a particularly fitting example. American attempts to reverse engineer the device result in a massive disaster - the test engine vanishes, along with the entire research facility and all other objects in a 50-mile radius.
- The plants in Trigun can do pretty much anything depending on how you power them, but nobody's really sure how they run anymore. (The manga actually calls them "humanity's ultimate black box".)
- The flying machines in Simoun have two black boxes: the "Helical motor" (according to the sub) and the "Simoun Gem". Trying to find out how these things work apparently drives you mad for a little while.
- The SDF-1 in Super Dimension Fortress Macross is riddled with black boxes.
- Black Boxes are a dime a dozen in The Big O, ranging from nigh-indestructible giant robots to androids to underground tunnel networks. Hell, the last episode reveals that the entire plane of existence is one big Black Box. The only comprehensible objects in the series are tomatoes, and even those are a type of mysterious lost technology.
- The Nanomachines powering the Otomes in Mai-Otome. Frankly, what kind of perverted scientist thought it would be a good idea to have them break down upon any contact with male DNA, thus requiring exclusively female virgins to operate it under the shaky hope they aren't depowered?
- The Clow Cards in the first arc of Card Captor Sakura. The cards are sapient, though astonishingly specialized, and their creator is dead but returns anyway in the form of his reincarnation in the second arc..
- Zoids, anyone? Several of the special zoids are shown to literally have a "black box" that other zoids do not.
- Gao Gai Gar mentions this. In one flashback, they actually discuss a strange interface on Galeon, an alien mecha lion, and refer to it as a Black Box. Once they figure out how to activate it it contains designs for half the Applied Phlebotinum in the show.
- In the Nausicaa manga, the Crypts of Shuwa are full of Black Boxes—most notably the God Warrior. More mundanely, nobody has the technology to build new airship engines any more, so when an airship is downed, there's a scramble to salvage the irreplaceable engines.
- Full Metal Panic! has a bunch of them, collectively called 'Black Technology', created by the mysterious 'Whispered'. Many are simply extrapolations of existing technologies, which are mass-produced and change the world drastically - Whispered are explicitly NOT useless. Others, however, are perfect examples of the trope - Foremost among them is the 'Lambda Driver', a true Black Box which enables users to warp the laws of physics through sheer determination.
- In The Second Raid it's mentioned that the Arbelest is opimised for the first person who used it (Sousuke) and as the designer died since then that means it can't be reset for another user. As Sousuke hates the unreliability of the weapon and is also undergoing a Heroic BSOD this causes major problems.
- The FMP manga Arbalest won't work for anyone other than Sousuke because if anyone else tries to pilot it the AI just constantly asks for Sousuke, and no matter how many times the reset or reprogram the thing it still will only work for Sousuke.
- Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu used this to humorous effect with the Bonta-kun class Powered Armor — it has a voice filter that renders all spoken speech as "Fumoffu!" to anyone listening. It causes the armor to shut down if disabled, and no one — not even Sousuke, who designed the thing — knows why.
- Humans don't seem to figure out how to replicate Ganmen during the timeskip of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. The Guraparls that form the backbone of the Earth military were reverse-engineered from Gurren Lagann, but they don't seem to have figured out much about Spiral energy or how to reverse-engineer the "generator" that lets a Ganmen use it. This means that forces initially superior to the Ganmen they replaced wind up looking like anemic kittens once the hot blood Goes To 11... Million... And drives the standard-issue Ganmen to absurd, physics destroying heights.
- This is explicitly because Rossiu believes the Ganmen to be inferior and a reminder of Lord Genome's reign and so he had them destroyed rather than any lack of ability on the part of the humans.
- Technically the grapearls are superior. They use the same power sources as the ganmen and gurren lagann. The only real difference between them and the GL are Gurren Lagann can make drills and move faster than light unaided(though given in the last episodes they have a better understanding on spiral power and more examples of such technology being reverse engineered in lost civilizations this may have changed). The only real differences with the old Ganmen are that Ganmen usually were much bulkier and slower. So all in all it is an improvement, just not as big of one as anticipated.
- Grapearls are mechanically superior to Ganmen, but less capable of harnessing Spiral Power - Rossiu was Completely Missing The Point.
- The Reveal of Outlaw Star. The titular Cool Ship and Melfina were created based on the unknown data (the black box) that Gwen Khan could not translate from an advanced ancient civilization which is implied to have created all of the ancient ruins of the galaxy. Only Melfina can open the door to the Galatic Leyline itself, and grant the people that go there their ultimate desire.
- The false GN drives in Gundam00. Although The Federation can make them, they still don't know how to make them run for an infinite time. This is because the special component that separates the true GN drives from the fakes either has to be constructed at or is found in Jupiter (or at least, that's what's implied).film
- Darker Than Black has alien technology and powers coming from the "Gate". It's been suggested on this site that Roadside Picnic (see below) was an inspiration.
- This is a main plot point in Robotech The Shadow Chronicles. The Haydonites provide humans with shadow technology which greatly aids them in fighting Invid. But the technological information supplied by Haydonites is incomplete, so even though the shadow devices were built by humans themselves, they still have flaws which Haydonites exploit when they attack humans.
- In the American release of Voltron (which combined the separate series Go Lion and Dairugger XV), it's established that the Vehicle Voltron was built as an imitation of the original Lion Voltron built by the late King Alfor of Arus. Since the original Voltron is semi-mystical in nature and the magic was not copyable, the duplicate can only stay unified in giant robot form for five minutes at a time.
- Used in Mahoromatic. Mahoro was built using incompletely-understood Alien Phlebotium, including the power source. Which leads to the Death Clock - as the power source cannot be refueled or recharged by Earthly technology. It CAN be recharged by SAINT - they just don't get around to doing it in time, focusing on fixing the horribly-botched job on Minawa first.
Comics
- The T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents were all recipients of black boxes. As their origin shows, their devices were found amid the rubble of the lab of a famous inventor, who had been killed by foreign agents. The commies had looted the place, but missed a few items. Several early stories were about the agents discovering drawbacks to their new powers.
- Captain America's shield is essentially a Black Box in design; made of an unknown alloy of Vibranium, other metals and a mysterious bonding agent- which the creator doesn't know about, having fallen asleep during its production- which results in a shield that has properties unlike anything else in existence. Some way that agent was American Rightousness (as opposed to American self-righteousness), explaining why it seems to act as almost an Empathic Weapon to Cap.
Film
- The guidance system abroad the Russian communication satellite in Space Cowboys is so archaic that no one except the original creator understands it.
- Something of a subversion, since the technology isn't too advanced or hidden, it is simply not known to the current generation of astronauts due to it's extreme obsolescence.
- The Machine in Contact is both this and Imported Alien Phlebotinum, as humans are given plans for a Machine, but not an explanation how it works.
- When it is activated the chair for the occupant drops straight through in a matter of seconds, while 18 hours passes for the occupant, causing onlookers to think that it didn't work.
- In Sneakers the whole plot revolves around a black box device which is able to decrypt any western encryption (not the russian encryption-methods, however).
- Does Triffid oil, which effectively saves the world from global warming, but then it turns out that Triffids are fairly dangerous beings if let loose, count?
Literature
- The Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic, as well as The Game of the Movie S.T.A.L.K.E.R (but oddly enough, not the movie) have an entire Danger Zone full of Black Box alien artifacts as the catalyst for the plot.
- In Discworld the Devices discovered by dwarfs are ancient Black Boxes with assorted functions, including power sources and recording devices. The magical supercomputer Hex is also a Black Box; it's added so many peripheral devices to itself that even it's original designer, Ponder Stibbons, is no longer sure exactly how it works.
- A particularly good example is Hex's teddy bear- a simple cuddly toy, yet when taken away from Hex, Hex refuses to operate.
- With the error message +++Mine! Wahhhhhhh!+++
- In Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, the subtle knife certainly fits the bill. It is an ancient weapon that can cut through anything, including the fabric between dimensions. However, it has the unfortunate effect of creating a soul-eating monster every time it is used, and eventually weakening the equilibrium of the universe. The alethiometer also qualifies, though it has no negative effects.
- The Posleen War Series by John Ringo features a number of examples of the Black Box. The alien Posleen (or "people of the ships" in their language) are similar to the Covenant in Halo in that they use technology they understand poorly if at all. A perfect example of this is one of their commanders staring in confusion at a computer helpfully informing him "Incoming ballistic projectiles. Impact in 10 seconds. Five.... etc" The views of their society in the initial books of the series (all this editor has read, sadly) are vague for the most part but imply that they only really use the systems that kill things or are almost entirely automated. A literal black box used by the humans in the same series appears in the form of the AID which is a black memory plastic box about the size of a pack of cigarettes with an extremely potent AI embedded in it. They act as a Universal Translator as well, but are provided by another species and the humans haven't a clue how they really work or how to make them. This turns out to be a serious problem for a number of reasons
- There is also the small black box from his and Travis S. Taylor's Into The Looking Glass books, a device about the size of a pack of cards does "interesting" things with spacetime. It was given to them by the friendly aliens at the end of the first book, who had found it on some other planet and had no idea what it was for. Although they did warn that one should NOT apply a "significant voltage" to it.
- Hooking up a double-A battery leaves a 10-mile crater. A car battery destroys the (deliberately uninhabited and unimportant) planet. Three-phase current ereases the solar system. They eventually figure out how to turn it into a warp drive and use it to power the ASS Vorpal Blade. Turns out hooking it up to a car battery was using it wrong.
- In Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time there are the ter'angreal (magical items), the secret of whose making has been lost for three thousand years. The Aes Sedai keep plenty of ter'angreal around for use as black boxes without understanding how they work, and many more items where they don't even know what they do.
- Being subverted in the more recent books as Elayne and Egwene begin discovering how to make them again.
- In Fredrick Pohl's Heechee Saga, the entire plot of the first few books revolves around highly advanced alien space ships, though they do eventually manage to decipher the instruction manuals.
- One big one is that after you set the targeting crystal, that no human understands, which glows various colours and auto-locks by AI, anyone who has changed those settings after launch has disappeared.
- The hero eventually finds out why.
- Parodied in The Galaxy Game (by Phil Janes) where a scientist trying to master FTL for a trip to the stars finds three small boxes each printed with the words "Inertialess Device" in his kitchen cupboard one day. We later find out they were put there by bored Energy Beings who pit civilisations against each other for sport.
- In David Brin's Uplift War series all of galactic civilization is based on such technology (very much like Mass Effect) the exception being humanity's, note that humans STILL have to rely on Black Box technology in order to go FTL or fight in space, but they try to do it as little as possible, and sometimes having access to a technology you know intimately might be an advantage... Rocks Beats Lasers after all.
- This is a major feature in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space novels. Everyone uses a certain kind of stardrive, but only the makers know how they work, and fiddling leads to an enormous explosion. The most powerful weapons are barely-understood gifts from Sufficiently Advanced Aliens or future humans who will sent the blueprints back in time.
- Judging by the eponymous character's vauge discription of the internal conditions in a stardrive in "Weather", the Conjoiners kept the stardrive technoloy Black Box so that the 'retarded' (everone else) wouldn't try and weaponise it. And also because of the whole disembodied-brain thing...
- The O/BEC processors in Blind Lake. Created by accident due to the use of self-rewriting code, not even the scientists who operate them are quite certain how they do what they do. There are only two in existence; all attempts to make a third by replicating the conditions that lead to the first two have failed.
Live Action TV
- Western Example: Stargate SG-1 often adapts lesser versions of the technology the crew encounters from other planets. "It doesn't quite work like the original" is commonly stated. However, they're far more aware than most Black Box users of the potential for unexpected side effects.
- In fact, nearly every piece of technology they pick up is mentioned to be sent off to Area 51, either in the episode where it's introduced, or when they decide to use it again. This leads to situations that look like Forgotten Phlebotinum, until two or three years down the line where the device pops up again. Except, of course, for anything that comes with a trigger (Zat guns, anyone?) which is usually put into active service immediately. Which should come as a surprise to nobody, since military usage (including stuff that makes an Earth Shattering Kaboom) is usually the first application mankind can think off for any given tech. Naquadria bombs, anyone?
- There are few ideas that are missing how ever. So they can take apart staff weapons but can't build them or speed up rate of fire but could find them by the buttload after a firefight right? Well, seeing as how that whole unlimited ammo for machine guns thing would be veeeeery useful in their fighters, why didn't they strap six or seven of the firing portion onto a rotating contraption and make an impromptu gatling weapon and mount one of those?
- The Jump Gates in Babylon 5 - nobody knows who built the first gates or what principle they operate on, and every spacefaring race in the universe simply produces replicas thereof without understanding how they work.
- Other leftover First One technology likewise. For example, Shadow devices that allow for remote control of ships. Like Sheridan says, the younger races don't understand them and can't build them, but are sure as heck willing to use them.
- In the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, it's eventually revealed after the destruction of the Resurrection Hub that the "Significant Seven" Cylons don't understand how the resurrection process they use actually works, and so they can't reconstruct it after it's gone. Only the Final Five have the knowledge necessary to recreate the technology, since they designed it in the first place.
- The positronic brain that makes Data a Ridiculously Human Robot serves as his black box in Star Trek The Next Generation. While Starfleet has a pretty good idea of how the rest of his body works, the technology that actually makes him sentient is a complete mystery to them, especially since the genius inventor who built him is dead. They're understandably reluctant to take Data apart to figure it out, since they don't know if they'd be able to put him back together afterwards, and after a particularly overzealous researcher took the issue to court, Data gained the legal right to refuse such a dismantling anyway. His own attempt to replicate the technology seemed to succeed when he built a "daughter", Lal, but her positronic brain became unstable and she only lived for a few weeks. Nobody's tried to build another one since.
Newspaper Comics
- The legacy server in Dilbert, which Dilbert was put in charge of. It's worth noting that Dilbert's immediate response upon seeing it was
Dilbert: Frack.
Tabletop RPG
- Justifies in Cthulhu Tech-Since the Dimensional Engine runs on non-Euclidian mathmatics, attemping to find out what goes on inside one will cause weak minds to break.
- Mathematicians do in fact understand non-Euclidian geometry and so do I. A mathematician deals with things that would drive H. P. Lovecraft (yes, the author) insane on a daily basis.
- Given the sheer scope of Lovecraft's phobias and neuroses, that really isn't saying very much.
- The term non-Euclidean here is meant to be a hint of how complex and hard or impossible to understand this geometry is, rather than a strict description. I've read that, according to one article, 4D geometry isn't Euclidean because there's an easy way for corners to mathematically become curves. We're familiar with geometry that works with respect to spheres, because trying to travel in a large enough square path will not result in getting to the original place. That's a standard example of non-Euclidean geometry. Imagine going to a realm where backtracking would *also* take you to a different place. Or travelling in distances that cannot be expressed only in real numbers, so imaginary numbers must also be used. See the trope Alien Geometries.
- Mathematicians most likely have theory that works with these geometries as well. They seem to like inventing things that can cause madness in more grounded in reality people. Fortunately, most of these are kept out of public view.
- Anisotropic space
 ? What's wrong with it?
- "In the center of every ANIMa creche lies a scavenged peice of an alien's brain. It's possible that this is the only thing that an ANIMa requires to function, and that the rest of the machine is there to inspire more confidence on the part of the pilots." - Bliss Stage: Ignition Stage rulebook
- In the Eberron campaign setting of the Dungeons And Dragons roleplaying game, black box magic was used to develop the warforged through schemas, which are essentially magical blueprints conveniently left behind by an ancient giant civilization. It turns out (in the Secrets of Xen'drik supplement) that it was an attempt by an ancient extradimensional race to escape to our world from the realm of dreams by creating artificial bodies, though this doesn't explain why modern warforged are fully sentient and appear to have souls.
- Syrneth artifacts in the Seventh Sea RPG setting are an intentional use of this trope. It should be noted, however, that Syrneth technology does not just do whatever is convenient; the results of humans tinkering with it can have effects ranging from miraculous to horrendous, and sometimes no effect at all.
- Warhammer 40000: The Imperium of Man, specifically the Adeptus Mechanicus (their Cargo cult) only find weapons from thousands of years ago and use them, rather than, y'know, inventing new, more destructive weapons. Problem is, many times they don't know how the hell to use the technology, so they just use their tried and true method of either chanting at it or beating it with a wrench until it does something. The bad thing is that many times this works, reinforcing their belief that they are on the right track. However, other races have no qualms about this, causing problems for the Imperium, such as the Tau empire, whose basic foot soldiers carry rifles more powerful than those of space marines. Subverted with the Eldar and Necrons, who do not invent new technology, but do not need to since their current weapons are far more advanced than others, with the Adeptus Mechanicus believing that Necron gauss weapons are impossible, despite them being very real and very terrifying. Averted with the Tyranids, who adapt their weapons really quickly to be able to kill their specific enemy. And don't even get me started on the Orks...
- There are some Tech-Priests that actually do invent new technology. Some of it even goes in to production. Most are executed for heresy, however, if they even go public with it. Or are found it. The worst part is is that there is a really good reason why they're slow to deal with new or unusual technology, since daemons can infest technology, just that (Like most things) the Imperium has taken it to an extreme and added a religious twist to it. The process of getting new technology accepted by the Adeptus Mechanicus is a long one, and will probably be a post-mortem one as well.
- Mad Science in Deadlands is a prominent example. A Mad Scientist may create fantastic devices that surpass anything "regular" science is able to produce, but it's impossible to mass-produce Mad Science gizmoes - they just don't work. Throughout the centuries, Mad Science gains or loses popularity, depending on the shifting popular opinion. Mad Science is partly magical, the ideas for it coming from Manitous, malevolent spirits serving the setting's Big Bads. It is part of a master plot to (eventually) bring about Ghost Rock bombs, nuclear weapons capable of warping or killing spirits of living things, and to transform the entire Earth into a terror-filled wasteland.
- Wonders in Genius The Transgression work in a similar way to Deadlands- Geniuses can build devices that delicately bend the laws of physics, usually with a crackpot theory given legitimacy by the light of Inspiration. For many years, various Geniuses have tried to find out the secrets behind Inspiration, with little success.
Videogames
- Xenosaga: KOS-MOS is built by Kevin, and then rebuilt after the first one kills him and others, but with numerous black boxes that were copied straight from the original. The only way Shion is able to figure most of them out enough to rebuild KOS-MOS a third time is by going back in time and reading Kevin's plans in the past.
- Also, a great deal of the setting's technology including its infinite energy generator were the product of one man, Joachim Mizrahi. After he died on Militia during the Federation's invasion, a great deal of the game involves piecing together his knowledge and motivations.
- Xenogears has Gears, the giant mecha of the game. Gears are obtained both by construction and excavation, it's never elaborated on exactly to what degree common gears are irreplaceable black boxes, copy-able black boxes, and understood technology. Thats not nearly as important, however, as the black boxes on Weltall, which is described as The Vessel for the Destroyer of God distrubingly early in the game. And for good reason, by the end of the game, it has transformed into the titular Xenogears, which is suffers from no Gameplay And Story Segregation and is incredibly powerful.
- In the Mega Man X game series, the sentient robot X is copied imperfectly, resulting in the Maverick uprisings.
- The documentation for the original SNES Mega Man X outright stated that there were some systems that Dr. Cain just didn't understand and therefore didn't reproduce. He even called them "Black Boxes". It's unknown if these parts were part of X's ethical training, or his various weapon systems (his ability is repeatedly described as "limitless", and no one understands why). Later games revealed that Zero has similar black boxes, mostly likely stolen by Wily.
- But in the Mega Man Zero series, Ciel, as a young kid, manages to reproduce X perfectly. Unfortunately said perfect reproduction showed why Dr. Light had X put into ethic training sleep for at least 40 years.
- Ciel's no slouch though; didn't she spend much of the series developing a revolutionary new energy source, one that would end shortages and bring about world peace? Yeah, you never saw Dr. Cain pulling something like THAT off.
- A rare example where the black box is in the alien's hands is in the Halo universe, where all of the super powerful technology used by the Covenant are just leftovers of another alien race called the Forerunners. Instead of even trying to discover the means of its operation, they take them to have divine powers and remember the Forerunners as gods. For this reason it has been established that they do not even use the technology very efficiently. By contrast, human attempts to analyse captured Covenant technology, as demonstrated in the Expanded Universe novels, result in drastic improvements. Cortana, for example, analyzes the tech and uses it against the Covenant by converting a plasma torpedo launcher on a ship they hijacked into a Wave Motion Gun by simply recalibrating its programming. This turned out to be not so beneficial when the rogue Covenant AI on that ship managed to send the information about the improvements out to other ships in the area.
- The inability of the Covenant to use their technology is made very obvious in the manual with the Halo 2 collector's edition, where the Covenant hierarchy themselves state they have no way of recharging plasma weapons in the field, and all Covenant troops are trained to throw away a depleted weapon and take a charged one off their dead comrades.
- The titular technology in Mass Effect is derived from an unknown substance, Element Zero or "Eezo," which can alter the mass of objects in a space depending on the electric current flowing through it. Eezo was first found in Prothean ruins and could be synthesized after that, but nobody is exactly sure how it works. What's that? Don't remember that from the game? It's all there in the manual included in the in-game menu.
- Not to mention the Mass Relays, especially the Citadel, and the Keepers.
- Much of the Tiberian story arc of Command And Conquer revolves around recovery, possession and use of the Tacitus - a black-box type artifact misplaced by the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.
- Not only that, but the in game resource "Tiberium" which acts as the catalyst for the entire series is an alien terraforming plant that will shape earth to become like their planet. In their attempts to study the plant both sides find ways to turn it into a weapon.
- In Sins Of A Solar Empire, the Advent field Phase Inhibitors stolen from the TEC, who use Phase Inhibitors captured from the Vasari. . . who also don't know how Phase Inhibitors work, and simply field copies of ones that they found.
- The Metroid Prime subseries involves the use of Phazon, a blue gooey substance that turns its users Nigh Invulnerable and greatly amplifies their weapon strength. It also corrupts its users into willing slaves of the host planet Phaaze, but thems the breaks!
- The PED suit from Metroid Prime 3 contains a "black box" that allows the user to boost their power with Phazon, though how the corruption is contained is not explicitly stated. Samus's black box, of course, breaks early in the game.
- Samus's suit has tons of hidden properties the Chozo didn't have time to tell her. Fortunately the suit is smart enough to do that for them. Not only that, but the suit is actually capable of using non-Chozo technology to upgrade itself when Samus acquires it, which gets really strange when she picks up Luminoth, Space Pirate and human technology (though human power suits are most likely based off Chozo power suits anyway).
- Played with in Homeworld, whose Historical and Technical Briefing describes the discovery of a large amount of Lost Technology in the wreck of an ancient spacecraft, including something eventually identified as "a solid-state hyperspace induction module". It's implied that much of their limited understanding of how it actually works was gained from building a couple of scaled-down copies and fitting them to small spacecraft, pressing the 'on' button and watching to see what happened.
- In Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus, no one knows how the power source of the airships works.
Webcomics
Web Original
- Most of the super-advanced technology in the OA universe is at least partly powered by transapientech. This is by definition designed by beings orders of magnitude smarter than ordinary folks. This is something of a subversion in that the inner workings are completely known, and probably published somewhere on the net, but the people using them can't understand them, since their brains aren't complex enough. It's sort of like trying to teach a small child nuclear physics in depth.
- Some artifacts in custody of the SCP Foundation - for example, SCP-914.
Western Animation
- Ben 10's Omnitrix. Not from earth. Seemingly simple to use on the surface... But it has secrets, hidden abilities, glitches, and occasionally, a mind of its own.
- Eventually they meet its creator, who doesn't seem to understand what he's built either.
Real Life
- On Doctor Who, one of the companions, Kamelion, was, behind the scenes, an actual, animatronic robot. Unfortunately, the person who had designed it and who knew the control codes died after the episode where it first appeared, so the character mostly had to stay in the background.
- The Jargon File and its dead-tree twin, The New Hacker's Dictionary, is rife with terms describing programming Black Boxes, most notably Black Magic.
- The most memorable of which is the "Magic / More Magic" switch. The only wire soldered to the switch goes directly to the case of a server. There is electrically no way it can affect anything on the server [Except for EXTREMELY bizarre capacitance effects] and yet switching to "Magic" causes the server to die.
- It could also be due to a difference in electric potential between the ground and the case.
- Large amounts of real world software source code is an absolute abomination of incomprehensible abbreviations, architectures which haven't evolved and grown so much as become cancerous, baffling hacks and plain old carelessness and stupidity or even just plain old lack of programming know-how. Such software will gain Black Box status pretty soon after the original developers move on.
- Fun fact: Masi Oka (yes, Hiro from Heroes) still has to do occasional effects work for his former employer, ILM, because nobody else knows how to use his software.
- This isn't unusual. Truly understanding non-trivial code written by someone else without documentation is considered the mark of a master programmer. It's said engineers don't retire, they just become consultants and come back to fix their old things when they break.
- Older electronic (and most especially military) technologies may well have been designed by people who are dead, coded in languages which no-one ever hears of nowadays, use electronic standards long since obsoleted and built by companies that dissolved or got eaten by other companies some time ago. BlackBoxhood arrives quite naturally for such devices, which could conceivably include missile guidance systems or nuclear warhead triggers which are still quite useable today.
- COBOL used to be a very common language for developing business software in. Though superceded by modern languages like Java or Visual Basic, old working software was not replaced. The pool of skilled COBOL engineers is rapidly dwindling simply because they are retiring and in due course upgrade and maintenance engineers will simply not exist anymore.
- This is largly the philosophy behind object orientated programming; once that class in Java, C++, Python, etc is done then all that matters is the numbers you can throw in and get out. If someone else wants the class to do something else, the chances are they'll write a class that extends the old one or even (if they're sloppy) just calls it rather than risk fiddling with the source code.
- It seems that the original programming of Microsoft Excel might be a black box, since after the principal programmer quit, the project virtually stopped. Luckily he came back.
- Many psychiatric drugs work via mechanisms that are either totally unknown or only loosely understood. The laborious (sometimes decades long) process of searching for side effects and other quirks irons out many of the Black Box problems that plague fiction.
- Real Life is rife with stories of a programmer being fired for whatever reason; only for his ex-boss to realize nobody knows how to maintain the server.
- Due to the "digital rights" controversy, certain laws have been put into effect that require black boxes to remain black boxes, making it illegal even to try to crack into them. For example, it's now illegal to write programs to get past certain types of encoding on music, DVD's, and electronic books. If you have even a slight understanding of the way technology progresses, you'll probably see this move as either "stupid" or "scary", possibly both.
- Non-programming example: During the early eighteenth century, Antonio Stradivari hand-crafted several wooden violins that, compared to other violins before or since, produce the highest-quality sound. Many violin manufacturers have, for centuries, attempted to not only replicate the sound of the Stradivarius, but have even labeled violins as "Stradivarius" as a marketing ploy. Unfortunately, when Stradivari died, the technology and skill required to produce a violin of such caliber died with him. Scientists continually do research on the Stradivarius sound and technologies to replicate that sound, and original Stradivarius violins remain to be the most valuable musical instruments in the world.
- It has been speculated that the sound quality is due to the wood available at the time. He built them around the little ice age, and wood at that time was particularly thin and brittle due to the odd weather patterns, making them irreproduceable. On the other hand, other violin makers of the time were unable to reproduce it either.
- Gravity. No one (except maybe Stephen Hawking) understands how it works. We can use it, such as in the generation of electricity, but we cannot reproduce or manipulate it.
- There is General Theory of Relativity, which tells us how it works. By warping space-time. Said theory uses too advanced mathematics, and thus doesn't see much applications.
- ...as well as handful of others, including "much like any other quantum-based field which pulls things" (RTG). But as journalists cannot understand any Hawking's statement, this guy must automatically know everything. As simple as that. Not that "have sensible model of a thing" equalled "understand thing", of course, but usually it helps.
- The philosophy of instrumentalism boils down to "the only important thing about any theory is whether it's usable, i.e. predicts a result of given experiment". Basically, this means that "light is truly made of particles" and "light is truly made of waves" are fancy statements that delusionally bind real events to imaginary constructs while "wave model of light correctly and in convenient form predicts diffraction effects" or "particle model of light correctly and in convenient form predicts absorption or emission effects" states everything that really matters in this issue. Hunting for explanations is but a pointless infinite regression. From this point of view anything is a Black Box, the only difference is that we already know how to dismantle some blackboxes to several smaller blackboxes.
- Arguably the universe itself is a black box since we don't (yet) have a complete phyiscal theory of the universe. Also, while we do have two theories that work fine in their respective arenas (General Relativity: big and heavy stuff, Quantum Mechanics: small and light stuff), they are contradictory and become completely incomprehensible when used together.
- The plans for the Saturn V rocket from the Apollo Project are stored in a format that isn't readable by any computer actively used right now. Since there exists a few leftover rockets, that could potentially be fueled up and fired, they have become black boxes. When the new designs for the Orion spacecraft (not the nuclear-bomb one, the newer one) were in the works, the inability to look at the old Saturn design and learn from them was denied the engineers, who had to waste potentially years starting from scratch. Since then, to avoid this trope, a project was initiated to attempt to retrieve the data and transfer it onto a more modern storage medium. The project however is so underfunded it is not currently active.
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