I've been thinking about the time-stopping problem since 1987, when I first watched "Out of This World" with Evie, a half-alien who could stop time. I thought "She can't just stop the room, people could walk in." Then "She can't just stop the city, all calls and commerce would halt between cities and the National Guard would be called in to investigate." Soon "She can't just stop the people, because they'd notice that time had jumped considerably when she unfroze them, and also, every car would crash, and people would wake up underwater wherever tides came in, etc." It grew to "She can't just stop every process on Earth, because then scientists would find we'd jumped minutes or most of a day into the future, and all kinds of things like satellites and observatories would be wrong, plus everyone would notice the sun/moon/stars had leapt considerably in an instant. Eventually I realized she had to stop time everywhere in the universe for it not to cause problems. That's a lot of power! In fact, that's exactly as much power as the universe, because she'd have to stop all expressions of power, which is an equal, but opposite force to all of existence.

However, there's a simpler problem. What about air? Terminal velocity, and that trick people here were talking about doing with their hands out the car window, pretending it was an airplane wing all show that air is a tangible thing in your way. It just moves out of the way as you walk around, sloshing together again behind you. If you froze all of time around you, you'd freeze the medium through which you move, pinning yourself pretty well in place. You'd probably be able to wiggle around like you can inside your own skin when you're buried in wet sand at the beach, but that's about it.

Evie could 'unfreeze' people by putting her hand on their arm, so perhaps she's unfreezing the air she bumps into. Still, there are more problems. If this person did what they said, they'd be alone for the rest of their life with no TV, radio, car (combustion/gas pumps wouldn't work). Also, what would you drink? Liquids would all be solid. Even if you could unfreeze food to eat it, there'd be no farming, no shipping, no plant growth, so you'd have to expand your search from a central point, or become a nomad, wandering everywhere to find food. Coming back for the money shots would become harder and harder to do, always on foot, always farther from new food and resources.

What would happen to the things you'd disturbed? Would things you let go of refreeze, or would you be leaving a trail of unfrozen things behind? Would they rot? Would it be dark out, because the sun's light could no longer travel? I would expect the instant you froze time, it would become dark. Would photons seem solid suddenly? So many questions!