True but hyopothetically speacking, it could have finished seconds after Tennant's Doctor looked at it.
Sure, but I'm not even sure the point of this debate. Does it really matter if it took 400 years or 201?
The original question was whether we could estimate how much older the Eleventh Doctor was than the War Doctor.
Allyn believed that the sonic-screwdriver calculation provided hard evidence because it was stated to take 400 years to run. But he was misremembering the dialogue; the 400 years figure was only stated as the the Eleventh Doctor's unreliable estimate of how much older he was. Since the exact time the screwdriver calculation took cannot in fact be narrowed down, it doesn't provide any solid evidence of whether that estimate is accurate. So the point is that we still don't know whether Eleven is remembering his age correctly.
If anything, it's the consistency of the new show (and how WD's line depends on consistency to make sense) that bothers me. That suggests he knows how old he is, which contradicts previous descriptions about how old he is (suggesting he didn't know back then).
Not necessarily. It just means that he started counting at a certain figure and has been adding to that figure since then. That doesn't mean that original figure was accurate.
I mean, think about it. He said at the start of his 7th life that he was 953. Both his 7th and 8th lives implicitly lasted a fairly long time, since in both cases he appeared visibly older when he regenerated. Given that Smith's Doctor aged 200 years without visible change, that implies that those two Doctors lasted even longer. And the War Doctor looked
much older when he regenerated than when he was "born," which implies he lived a very long time indeed. And yet when the War Doctor regenerated into the Ninth Doctor, he started saying he was 900 years old -- interchanged with statements that he'd been traveling for 900 years, which doesn't make sense since it would mean he'd stolen the TARDIS as an infant.
So yes, the Doctor has been counting his age consistently upward from that 900-years figure ever since the end of the Time War, but that figure is immensely problematical on the face of it.
And that makes sense, really. The Time War lasted a very long time and played merry hell with the timestream of the universe. It would've been extremely difficult for a participant in the war to keep track of the passage of time, due both to the psychological traumas of war and to the literal, physical distortion of time itself. And so much subjective time would've passed that he may have forgotten how old he'd been before the war. And who knows what injuries or memory loss he may have sustained?
I guess one reason I asked how long an individual regeneration lasts, though, is that it is possible to posit that the Doctor started counting all over again after the eighth regeneration (sort of being reborn again). If that's the case, he would have spent 800 years as the War Doctor. That would help explain why he's wearing thin and regenerated. When the War Doctor heard 1200 years old, he didn't know for sure whether or not 11 started counting over again, but could at least assume that he didn't add years that weren't there. Therefore, he knew that 11 was at least 400 years older even if he could be theoretically even older.
I suppose that's one possibility. Except that he tried to put the War Doctor behind him and forget that part of his life, so I think he'd be more likely to count his age as the sum total of every life
except the War Doctor. Which is why I think he must've forgotten how long those prior lives actually were.
Heck, it's not as though he was consistent about them in the first place. In "The Ribos Operation," when the Fourth Doctor first met Romana, he claimed to be 756, and she corrected it to 753, saying he'd lost track. So he was already unsure of his age even then. (That is perhaps one of the few reliable figures we have, since it came from someone other than the Doctor.)
