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alt title(s): Polarity Reversal; Reverse The Polarity The Internet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:
How do you keep a rhino from charging?
And in response, thus spake the Oracle:
Reverse the polarity of his terminals.
When a major obstacle in a Science Fiction show is resolved purely through the judicious application of Techno Babble, the characters have successfully Reversed the Polarity. It seems that every futuristic gadget or space ship subsystem performs some miraculous function if only you route the power through it backwards. The expression originated on Doctor Who, said to have been the only phrase of Techno Babble Jon Pertwee could reliably deliver. The version most associated with the Third Doctor is "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow", although he only said it once during his time as the Doctor.
A type of Applied Phlebotinum, Reversing the Polarity is the be-all end-all technical solution for any problem. Usually only thought of at the very end of the show ("Captain... we could reverse the polarity of the positron toilet and send a stream of charged crap particles toward the Romulans, rather than away..."). It always works. Always.
Of course, you can "reverse the polarity" in real life — just put the battery in the other way round. Doesn't quite have the same effect, though. Most simple powered toy vehicles, electric toothbrushes and other devices that rely on a spinning electric motor will simply run backwards while more complex electronics with a DC power supply may even break or fry the device in question. ( Dont Try This At Home, Kids!). (Reversing the polarity on an AC device does...nothing.)
Reversing the polarity on a car is also possible - some vintage cars, particularly British ones are positive-ground while negative-ground has been the standard worldwide since The Sixties so if you want to put a modern MP3-compatible stereo in your '59 Morris Minor a car polarity swap is a must.
Really, it makes the characters in question look a lot less like brilliant scientists when they are (basically) sighing and asking the technician, "Did you plug it in the wrong way again? I mean, seriously. Red cable is positive. How hard can it possibly be to remember?"
Of course you can't do this with neutrons, because they're as electrically neutral as the name suggests, although if we're getting technical they do have a magnetic polarity. However, if the neutrons are flowing somewhere, reversing the polarity might refer to changing the direction of flow.
Closely related to the Forgotten Superweapon. Also see Techno Babble.
Compare to Tim Taylor Technology.
Examples:
- If the characters are hacking, then they reroute the encryptions instead.
- This once happened in Pokémon when Team Rocket tried to get hold of two Luvdisk, and then reverse the polarity to get rid of all of the love in the world.
- Dub only. And even the little kids were all like, "WTH?"
- In Pokémon: Jirach Wismaker, Butler makes a machine that is supposed to create a live Groudon from its fossilized remains. When the machine creates an enormous evil monster instead, he is able to make the machine destroy Groudon by simply reversing the direction of the fossil.
- Uchuu Senkan Yamato: I'm pretty sure something like this was how they got the drill-missile to unscrew itself out of the barrel of the Wave Motion Gun.
- In Transformers Victory, Braver invents a device that can detect Decepticon brainwaves (yeah, apparently Transformers have brains). During the inevitable battle, he is able to drive them off by actually reversing the polarity.
- Subverted in Runaways: Victor Mancha (who is being held captive by the aforementioned group) attempts to escape by threatening Gertrude York with a remote that has had its "polarity reversed". The other Runaways scoff at the idea.
Gertrude: Relax, people. He's a powerless kid holding a remote control.
Victor: I... I flipped this thing's vibranium battery when you weren't looking. If I press one button while the polarity is reversed, it... it won't be pretty.
Molly: Yeah, right. Even I know he's tricking, and I dropped out of the fourth grade.
- Ironically, it might not be pretty... but really only for the remote. This is one of those things you don't try at home.
- Vibranium, a fictional Marvel Comics metal, -is- pretty nasty.
- From a Carl Barks comic book: "I have to de-amp the resistor diodes to reverse the polarity of the potentiometers — it's simple when you know how!"
- Used to defeat energy-eating giant square stompy robot in Kurt Neumann's 1957 Sci Fi film Kronos, Destroyer of the Universe.
- In Austin Powers in Goldmember, the tractor beam used by Goldmember and Dr. Evil to pull an asteroid to Earth has "Do not reverse polarity" written on a low-tech-looking panel. When Dr. Evil, having turned good, does reverse the polarity, the beam destroys the asteroid instead of sending it to Earth.
- The original 80s Transformers movie: Being pursued by heat seeking missiles, the fleeing heroes reverse polarities, which apparently causes a sorta energy beam to appear beneath their spaceship. The trope is then subverted because, despite the missiles flying straight through said beam, it has absolutely no effect whatsoever.
- I think it hada bit of an effect - the missiles didn't actually blow up the ship (sorta exploded in front of it).
- The 2007 Ocean's 13 had Brad Pitt dismissing Don Cheadle's technobabble by saying, "Becomes magnetized, reverse polarization, I know."
- The Fantastic Four movie
- Batman The Movie (1966): "If I could just... reverse the polarity... send out waves... of super-energy!" Highly effective on torpedoes until... "Confound it! The battery is dead!"
- For reference, he reverses the polarity on his radio. Yes, that's right, he detonates torpedoes by reversing the polarity of his radio.
- Then again, WWII-vintage missiles could be thwarted with electric shavers, so...
- In the 1952 British film The Sound Barrier
 . the hero solved the problem of controlling a supersonic airplane by reversing the flight controls. To increase lift, for example, he pushed the stick forward instead of back as would be expected. The movie does not state whether this also held true for the engine: would you apply more throttle if you wanted less forward thrust? In any case, Major General Chuck Yeager, the man who was actually the first to fly an airplane faster than sound, was asked about this and stated that any such method would result in the pilot's death. (In reality, the problem of lack of control in the transonic range was solved in a straightforward manner by creating much larger control surfaces.)
- In the original Spy Kids, the heroes force a Heel Face Turn of the titular Spy Kids robots by reversing their alignment polarity. He does this by inverting the binary code. While it probably would stop the robots from attacking, they would be more likely to crash then turn good. Of course, you can Never Say Die in a kids film, so...
- In Young Frankenstein, Frederick reads from his grandfather's book How I Did It:
"'...until, from the midst of this darkness, a sudden light broke in upon me. A light so brilliant and wondrous and yet so simple. Change the poles from plus to minus and from minus to plus. I alone succeeded in discovering the secret of bestowing life. Nay, even more... I myself became capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter!' ... IT - COULD - WORK!!!"
- The 1963 movie Son of Flubber features a rain machine that does not work until they reverse the polarity.
- This actually makes a kind of sense. If the machine ran on DC, it wouldn't work if you had the polarity back to front. Unless it had some other function that worked without the polarity reversal.
- Ghostbusters. "'Scuze me, Egon, I thought you said crossing the streams was 'bad'."
- In the 1996 TV movie Gulliver's Travels Gulliver reversed the big magnet in the flying island to counter the plot of the people on the ground to crash the island by using another big magnet that attracts the island.
- Robert A Heinlein's novel The Sixth Column features two kinds of Reverse Polarity used with the book's race-specific-Death Ray. The first way turns it in to a health-ray (don't think too hard about that), and the second way lets you use it on non-Asians ( this is a book about a ray-gun that only kills Asians).
- It was also a story where Asians had invaded and conquered the country of the guys making the ray guns, so you can see what their incentive was to build the thing.
- The ray gun in question could be tuned to the resonance of any racial type (whatever that means), kill/stun/induce fear depending on the setting, transmute matter, levitate, filter gases, act as a deflector shield, you name it. The whole Asian-killing thing was actually a hardware filter built into the device so they wouldn't accidentally kill white people. Really more of a Green Rocks, although treated as Applied Phlebotinum. Let's also not forget that Heinlein spent a great deal of his time in the sixties and seventies trying to get people to take the threat of nuclear world war seriously. The Anvilicious nature of The Sixth Column is merely one sample of his work, which was intentionally designed to evoke as much stereotypical fear as possible.
- In Heinlein's defense, it was published in 1941, and he re-wrote an unpublishable story by John Campbell several times attempting to make it less racist. (It's said the original story had white people given divine powers by god to fight Asians). Heinlein later admitted to hating this story even when done with it. There are elements of stealth parody of it, with one character believing the propaganda and attempting A God Am I, supposedly this was Campbell himself parodied.
- Subverted in one of the fiction-chapters of The Science of Discworld. After the Roundworld is transformed into a snowball (Ice Age), the Dean proposes (after four glasses of sherry) to "reverse the thaumic flow in the cthonic matrix of the optimized bi-direction octagonate" to fix it. The Archchancellor replies that he would prefer a non-gibberish opinion.
- Also in Discworld, there's a spell called the "Rite of Ashk Ente" which summons Death to you, in order to partake in his wisdom. Alberto Malich thought that if the spell makes Death go to you, then performing it backwards would make Death go away. However, he soon finds out that there is another way to consider the spell backwards: sending you directly to Death. (Which, oddly enough, worked out pretty well for him.)
- It's debatable whether Malich ever intended to banish Death in this manner; he never says so, and Mort's own interpretation is simply that Malich wanted to go to Death's own country, where there is no time and no death (at the price of being forever removed from the land of the living).
- In Sandy Mitchell's Warhammer 40000 novel Scourge the Heretic, the jury-rigged device to keep a machine going "reversed the polarity of the neutron flow."
- Considering the amount of tropes invoked and subverted in the book and the fact that the above-mentioned machine simply didn't work due to the tampering, this can probably be considered deliberate.
- Similarly, the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 once attempted to shake an alien monster off the satellite with a polarity-reversal maneuver; theirs involved an actual car battery and jumper cables. Also, the alien liked it.
- The CSI New York Season 1 finale had someone actually "reverse the polarity".
- In episode 17 of the Sakura Taisen TV series, Kohran puzzles over how to make Iris' kohbu properly handle her vast spirit energies, and comes up with an idea that, among other things, reverses the flow of her spirit energy through the regulator crystal.
- Star Trek The Original Series
- In the episode "That Which Survives", Spock orders Scotty to reverse the polarity of a "magnetic probe". Scotty's incredulous, "reverse polarity?!" is not only Narmtastic, but qualifies as the Trope Namer.
- In the episode "Obsession", Spock once did this by "cross-circuiting to B". Same thing.
- On Star Trek The Next Generation, Geordi could make the Enterprise do anything by "routing [some piece of Techno Babble] through the main deflector array".
- Which almost makes sense, the main deflector array being the largest single antenna on the entire ship. Creative "techno babble", indeed!
- Wesley Crusher, from the same series, is famous for reversing the polarity on every damn thing.
- Subversion: In "The Samaritan Snare", Geordi subverts this while captured by the Pakleds, who have ordered him to arm them with photon torpedoes or die. He stalls his captors with technobabble until the Enterprise picks up on his plan to vent harmless hydrogen at the Pakled ship. He tells the Pakleds that the Enterprise has disarmed them with its "Crimson Force Field" and they surrender.
- Data literally uses the phrase "Reverse the Polarity" concerning the magnetic door in "Generations". Course, reversing the polarity on a magnetically-controlled door would open it. Go figure.
- Subversion: In the Star Trek Voyager episode "Drone", Janeway and Seven of Nine thought they could fry a Borg tractor beam by reversing the polarity of Voyager's phaser banks; it looked on-screen like it was about to work, and instead their own phaser array was knocked out.
- It should be said, however, that Voyager uses this trope like a tentacle demon would a Japanese schoolgirl. However, most of its incarnations feature a "Deflector Pulse" of some sort.
- One episode that did the polarity reversal straight had a giant larva draining the ship's power. The crew realized it was basically nursing off them, and used "souring its milk" as a metaphor for why polarity reversal would work. In a whole universe of polarity reversals, this moment apparently stood out above the rest, as the MST3K example above directly references it.
- That's Star Trek The Next Generation, and they were changing the amplitude of the AC current, or something Techno Babble-y that involved units of centimeters (which is length, not current).
- Captain Janeway once suggested that Harry "remodulate" the universal translator which somehow worked.
- Lampshaded in Stargate: SG-1 in which Carter's analogue on the parallel show Wormhole X-treme attempts to solve all problems by reversing the polarity.
- She also did actually get her homemade naqadah reactor working by reversing the polarity of a trinium plate in Learning Curve.
- And in "200", during a Star Trek parody, Mitchell as The Captain asks Carter to reverse the polarity in an overly dramatic manner.
- Doctor Who, as mentioned above. After a long time of deliberately not using the phrase, the Tenth Doctor has started saying it as an occasional Continuity Nod.
The Doctor: "Really shouldn't take that long to reverse the polarity. Must be out of practice."
- The source of this quote was "The Lazarus Experiment", in which polarity reversal is possibly justified: The Doctor and Martha were trapped inside the booth of the device, and Lazarus activated it. Depending on how the device actually functions, perhaps reversing the magnetic polarity would have the depicted result: rather than the energy being attracted to the booth's interior, at which point it would hit the protagonists, it being repelled, and blasting the outside of the booth, hitting Lazarus.
- "Doomsday" is one particular example.
- Doctor Who also provides a rare example of polarity reversal not working. When Nyssa and Tegan are rapidly aged every time the Doctor tried to take off the ship in Mawdryn Undead due to... something or other, the Fifth Doctor attempts to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow. This only causes them to de-age into children. Try not to think about it.
- The exact same thing happened to the Fourth Doctor, only it was a chicken turning into an egg, and it wasn't really a failure he was just trying to make a point or something. It Makes Sense In Context.
- Lampshaded nicely in one of the radio series, The Ghosts of N-Space, in which the Brigadier jokingly suggests that the Doctor "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow", to which the Doctor replies that the Brig knows as well as he does that the phrase is meaningless.
- However, the Torchwood radio play "Lost Souls" plays this trope entirely straight, with the world saved from disaster by reversing the polarity of the positron flow. CERN apparently approved the science, and I got the distinct impression the writer was delighted to have found a context where the phrase actually made sense.
- Space Cases: Catalina is having some trouble with the concept from her textbook. "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow? What's that all about?" Aren't Shout Outs fun?
- Paul Chuckle is always using this in Chucklevision. At one point he reverses the polarity of a UV light (which helps plants grow) to shrink his brother Barry.
- In the second season The Man From UNCLE episode "The Minus-X Affair", THRUSH scientist Lillian Stemmler is developing a pair of drugs. One ("Plus-X") heightens the senses of the recipient to an almost superhuman degree. The other ("Minus-X") is intended to incapacitate its victims. And how is Minus-X made? Obviously:
Arthur Rollo: Yes, yes. I know what it's supposed to do. But, uh, how about the other one? The Minus-X?
Lillian Stemmler: No problem. To get the Minus-X drug, I only have to reverse the chemical processes inherent in the Plus-X.
- Reversing the polarity of the Lexx's main drive causes an EMP of sufficient power to fry any circuits on or near the ship.
- Power Rangers RPM: "Ranger Blue" — Flynn can't morph due to a bug in his morpher that has led to an energy buildup. While Dr. K is unable to work out a solution, Flynn realizes that he can discharge the energy by simply morphing with his activator chip in backwards.
- Spoofed in Kyle XY, when Josh tells a drunken Kyle to sober up by "reversing the polarity of his liver". Kyle goes offscreen, vomits, and comes back sober, saying that he took Josh's advice. It's hard to say whether he was joking or not.
- Eureka solves a lot of problems this way.
- Blatantly and explicitly so in the season 3 finale, where Carter must reverse the polarity of a device causing a magnetic anomaly that threatens the whole world, before it gets blown up by the Martha drone sent by Zane and Fargo.
- A popular filk song, "The USS Make Shit Up" by Voltaire, about the Star Trek series contains a similar line: "Bounce the graviton particle beam / Off the main deflector dish / That's the way we do things, lad / We're making shit up as we wish..."
- A musical example is in Bob Carlton's — sorry, William Shakespeare's — Return to the Forbidden Planet. Before the show starts, the 'crew' or ensemble members walk out and instruct the audience in standard safety procedures for their flight (air masks will deploy from ceiling, use of cell phones will cause the ship to explode, etc.) and end with teaching the audience how to Reverse Polarity themselves — only for an emergency situation, which is highly unlikely, nigh impossible — by putting their hands on their heads and twisting their torsos and heads to and fro. In Act II, of course, polarity needs to be reversed ("But it's not logical!" "Damn your logic! I've got lives to save!") and the audience has to help.
- As an added bonus, at the end of the show, as the crew and captain prepare to launch back to Earth (singing Born to Be Wild, of course), crew members announce that all is well by calling "Iambics functioning, Pentameters locked in, Hyperboles all off the scale!" and "R.S.C. jettisoned," injokes all relating to Shakespeare's text, a conceit of language, and the Royal Shakespeare Company, respectively.
- Many of the posters (and T-shirts) for the show consist of a warning sign saying "WARNING: Do not reverse polarity!", and the playbill warns of the dangers of polarity reversal in space. Note that it is never actually specified what the polarity is reversed on, just that polarity in general is reversed - which makes the joke even more tongue-in-cheek...
- Pops up in the Rush song "Vital Signs".
- In Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich, Sky King gets his jetpack to work and saves the day after Bullet tells him to reverse the polarity on his neutrino pack. Bullet is from the future and knew this from reading the Sky King comic books written after Sky King got his jetpack to work, but causality sucks anyway.
- It turns this is the way to reconnect Clockwerk's body in Sly 2.
- Subverted in Ikaruga where polarity reversing is a constant activity.
- Space Quest 5 has you "reverse the phase polarity of the interface grid" multiple times throughout the game.
- Referenced in Final Fantasy VI. One of the final bosses uses an attack named 'R. Polarity' to reverse the characters.
- The video game adaptation of the Death Gate novels uses Magi Babble instead of Techno Babble, but the principle remains the same. There's no point to casting a spell that sets you on fire—but reversing the order of the spell runes casts it on your Doppelganger.
- When a phone exchange fails to hang up on a land line, what do you do? Polarity Reversal!
- A certain model of text message pager made by Motorola and Unication can be cleared from certain faults by removing and re-inserting the single AA battery in reverse to the normal installation for about 15 seconds, then removing it and installing it normally again.
- Anti-matter is normal matter with Reverse Polarity. The charges of protons and electrons are switched.
- Technical support sometimes ask people to reverse the wire. Of course, this is just a subtle way of making sure the customer has the danged thing actually plugged in.
- Most mains-powered electronic devices with ungrounded (2 prong) cords have the neutral side of the cord connected to the case through a small capacitor. This provides a high-pass filtered path to ground on the case. The idea is to allow high frequency (typically RF) noise to be shunted to ground to prevent interference. Back in the days of non-polarized two-prong plugs, there was actually a benefit to reversing the plug to minimize noise. While the line is AC, it is not balanced. One side is grounded. If two audio devices are connected together, it is best if both cases are bonded to the same side of the mains wiring, ideally the grounded side. Otherwise a small AC current is induced in the shield of the interconnecting cables, which in turn induces a hum in the signal wire.
- Reversing the Polarity of one speaker of a stereo sound system can have real effects. This happens because waveforms that are 180 degrees out of phase will cancel each other out. The listener will usually hear this as weakened bass response. Of course, this only works once: "My stereo sounded much better when I reversed the polarity on the left speaker. I can't wait to hear how much better it will sound when I reverse the right speaker too!"
- This can also serve as a simple way of converting mono to stereo. Take a mono sound file, put your sound editor into stereo mode, then invert one of the channels. Quick surround sound. Mind you, it only works well with headphones, and if the resulting file is converted to mono again, silence will result.
- Live sound reinforcement mixing consoles have a "phase" switch on every input which is really just a ReversePolarity switch. This is often used when placing two microphones on the same sound source directly facing each other. If there are 2 microphones on a snare drum, one above facing down and a second below facing up, the engineer will usually ReversePolarity on the bottom mic.
- Converting a voltage follower with gain into a comparator with hysteresis is as simple as reversing the polarity of the amplifier.
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