Here’s a trope that gets to me partially because I’m an engineer who would be helpless if I was handed a slide rule rather than a calculator:
Person travels back in time and/or to a less technological culture, and, using his advanced knowledge of modern technology and science, is immediately able to vastly improve upon whatever technology is available and use it in ways that seem almost magical to the locals.
Some examples, of which there are many:
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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (which I’ll give a pass on, since Twain is awesome and may have originated the trope)
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Michael Crichton’s Timeline, which was a ripoff of Twain’s book
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Scotty in Star Trek movie #4 (pretty adept with that Apple) and AGAIN in Star Trek Beyond (fixing a 100 year old ship in days when the crew that previously occupied it was unable to do so after years??)
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A bunch of other Star Trek episodes
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Back to the Future part III
Someone who actually got it RIGHT was Douglas Adams. From one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books: "He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn’t, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn’t do it. Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. "
The further we move into the future, the more obvious it should be just how wrong this trope is. Could a typical kid who grew up using an iPhone be expected to be able to expertly operate a DOS-based computer better than someone who used it daily?
