flux capacitor

plural flux capacitors

1. literatureA fictional instrument required to operate a time machine, consisting of a rectangular-shaped compartment with three flashing Geissler-style tubes arranged in a "Y" configuration.

   2 more examples

   Tucked into the corner of the Rinky Dink Flea Market in Marietta is a time machine that transports its visitors to an era before digital music. It doesn’t need a flux capacitor to work, just a plug to power the vintage stereos and turntables that produce the sounds of the thousands of vinyl records sold there.

   2019 January 12, Chad Plauche-Adkins, “Playing the classics: Flea market music collection includes thousands of records”, in The Marietta Times

   Is this a glitch? Is the system experiencing an outage? It is a temptation that is best resisted, the urge to talk about this Chelsea team as a piece of fine-point engineering, to style Thomas Tuchel as a pure systems man, poring over his data charts, banging his dials, reconfiguring the flux capacitor with a bent hairpin.

   2021 December 4, Barney Ronay, “Thomas Tuchel must gear up for a new phase to reboot glitching Chelsea”, in The Guardian