pubs
Idle and unrefined thoughts.
Whereas with the Internet one can simply follow a thought until the questions raised along the way become an all-encompassing open-ended knowledge mission, the Doctor can simply seize an idea and run with it through all of time and space, exploring it until he has wrested from it all the understanding he can manage — at which point he hyperlinks to another time and place and a peripheral thought that popped up along the way.
Unlike the past, where one had to shrug when something went unknown, or an opportunity went past; unlike the real world, where you’re stuck in one place, experientially, unless you make the old-school investment to move yourself the hard way.
That hasn’t really been done much, though, has it? I mean, the Doctor’s travels are more like a single-tab surfing on Wikipedia, running exclusively along the peripheral and rarely making a deliberate effort to answer a particular question.
The Time Lords could have (and let’s assume did) performed any sort of grand scale experiment with ease, in an instant determining the million-year-later outcome of any test they cared to set up.
And then if you really want to screw with people’s heads (and, uh, break certain established rules), they could have avoided even doing the experiment by looking to the future to see what it’s outcome would have been had they done the experiment.