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WT Sharpe · 04-03-2012, 01:56 AM

Stupid cat just hopped on the keyboard and deleted the whole freakin' message I was writing. Where are phasers when you need them? Or transporters, so I could transfer this cat to Pooh's house? Oh well.

Earlier today I finished reading The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss, and I highly recommend this book, not only to fans of the series (all the series and the movies), but to all fans of science and science fiction as well. It was written in 1995, but the current version was updated in 2007 and has a forward by one of the shows most famous fans, Stephen Hawking. It contains explanations of where the Star Trek writers got it right, and examples of where they got it sometimes amusingly wrong.

One example of where they got it horribly wrong comes from one of my favorite episodes, "Wink of an Eye," in which Captain Kirk and crew encounter the Scalosian race who live life at such a highly accelerated pace that they are invisible to those who sense time's passage as we do. At one point, Kirk fires his phaser at one of them, who simply moves calmly out of the beam's way before it can reach her.

If phasers are pure energy and not particle beams, as the Star Trek technical manual states, the beams must move at the speed of light. No matter how fast one moves, even if one is sped up by a factor of 300 million, one can never move out of the way of an oncoming phaser beam. Why? Because in order to know it is coming, you have to first see the gun being fired. But the light that allows you to see this travels at the same speed as the beam. Put simply, it is impossible to know it is going to hit you until it hits you!

This book is thought provoking:

If you keep on extrapolating, you will find that the density required to form a black hole with a mass equal to the mass of the observable universe would be roughly the same as the average density of matter in the universe! We may be living inside a black hole.

The book covers the plausibility of teleporters, the energy requirements needed to accomplish warp drive, and much, much more. An interview with the author can be found here.

04-03-2012, 01:56 AM	#64
WT Sharpe Bah, humbug! Posts: 39,073 Karma: 157049943 Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Chesapeake, VA, USA Device: Kindle Oasis, iPad Pro, & a Samsung Galaxy S9.	Stupid cat just hopped on the keyboard and deleted the whole freakin' message I was writing. Where are phasers when you need them? Or transporters, so I could transfer this cat to Pooh's house? Oh well. Earlier today I finished reading The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss, and I highly recommend this book, not only to fans of the series (all the series and the movies), but to all fans of science and science fiction as well. It was written in 1995, but the current version was updated in 2007 and has a forward by one of the shows most famous fans, Stephen Hawking. It contains explanations of where the Star Trek writers got it right, and examples of where they got it sometimes amusingly wrong. One example of where they got it horribly wrong comes from one of my favorite episodes, "Wink of an Eye," in which Captain Kirk and crew encounter the Scalosian race who live life at such a highly accelerated pace that they are invisible to those who sense time's passage as we do. At one point, Kirk fires his phaser at one of them, who simply moves calmly out of the beam's way before it can reach her. If phasers are pure energy and not particle beams, as the Star Trek technical manual states, the beams must move at the speed of light. No matter how fast one moves, even if one is sped up by a factor of 300 million, one can never move out of the way of an oncoming phaser beam. Why? Because in order to know it is coming, you have to first see the gun being fired. But the light that allows you to see this travels at the same speed as the beam. Put simply, it is impossible to know it is going to hit you until it hits you! This book is thought provoking: If you keep on extrapolating, you will find that the density required to form a black hole with a mass equal to the mass of the observable universe would be roughly the same as the average density of matter in the universe! We may be living inside a black hole. The book covers the plausibility of teleporters, the energy requirements needed to accomplish warp drive, and much, much more. An interview with the author can be found here.