The Liang Oscillation Effect (often referred to simply as “Liang Oscillation”) is the effect observed primarily by chrononauts; that is, people that have moved through the spacetime continuum in a non-natural manner.

Named after Dr Liang Shi Meng (梁时萌) in 2982, it is a theory describing the behaviour of altered time. Contrary to early concepts, changing past events doesn’t produce an alternate parallel timeline. Nor does that timeline skew off at a tangent, forever getting more and more different from the original events of history. Time, if modeled as a crude line on a graph, in fact oscillates like a wave when it is changed.

This is based on the concept that the effect of an event will be proportional in significance to its cause, the majority of the time. In other words, big changes will come from big things, typically. Sometimes we observe what we call the Butterfly Effect, when something very small sets off a chain of implications that snowball up into a massive effect. But the probability of one of these occurring is inversely proportionate to the difference in significance. Ergo, a butterfly and hurricane are a factor difference of several billion and as such a given wing-beat has a one to a billion probability of being necessary for the hurricane formation. This is only measurable however with identical circumstances in the same time and space, requiring information to travel through time in order to produce precise results.