The Physics of Star Trek

Author: Lawrence M. Krauss
Publisher: HarperCollins 1995

I used to be a diehard Star Trek fan.  My friends knew about it.  They couldn’t get me out of my house for anything on Wednesdays from 8 PM to 9 PM.  When this book came out, one of them got me a signed copy as a gift.  

Now let me redefine the “diehard” fan.  There are “diehard” fans and there are “real diehard” fans. 

The real diehard fans knew all the episode names, the actors, the details of their personal lives, and the physics errors in those episodes.  I was not a real diehard fan.  I did not pay any attention to titles, the names of actors, or the physics errors.  I watched them because it stimulated my imagination.  I also liked most of the plots, and the social issues they addressed in those episodes.  I did not pay much attention to the so called “scientific” jargon either.  That is, I did not care to know what “warp speed 9” means, or what “slip stream drives” are.  Perhaps, the word “energize” bugged me.  They should have used “transport” instead.

Krauss is a real diehard fan.  So are many other well-known physicists.  (Krauss was the Ambrose Swasey Professor of Astronomy and Chairman of the Department of Physics at Case Western Reserve University and Stephan Hawking wrote the forward for this book.)

Throughout the book Krauss will remind the reader certain episodes and certain incidents and then bring in relevant physics and explanations.  Krause has done a masterful job in that sense.  Even though I was a diehard fan, I do not remember some of these episodes and incidents.  I do not have all the DVDs and even if I have them, I was not going to sit and watch each and every episode mentioned in this book.  So, I settled for just reading the book but not watching the relevant episodes.

He (Krauss) starts picking on mundane things like the accelerated motion and the tractor beams.  When the Enterprise leaves an orbit of a planet and uses the “impulse drive” to achieve the half-light-speed travel, it is going through an accelerated motion.  Any jet pilot knows that the pilot’s seat could kill him if the force it applies to him is too great during the acceleration.  This is due to the Newton’s laws of motion.  NASA identifies this force exerted on your body while you undergo high acceleration as G-force.  Nothing—certainly not your body—can withstand the kind of force needed to accelerate to impulse-speed quickly.  (Star Trek writers invented “internal dampers” to circumvent this problem later.  Of course, that created new problems.)  The energy requirements are also enormous.  The impulse drive burns hydrogen to generate energy.  The impulse drive needs hydrogen that is 81 times the mass of the entire Enterprise to accelerate to half-the-speed-of-light.

Traveling at high speeds brings about time dilation according to the special relativity.  clocks run slower in fast moving ships.  The distance from Earth to the center of the galaxy is about 25,000 light years.  If the Enterprise is traveling sufficiently close to the speed of light, then the trip may take about 10 years according to the clocks within the Enterprise.  A return trip takes 20 years.  But, when they return, they will not be meeting their loved ones as they have passed away nearly 50,000 years ago.  To circumvent this problem, writers invented warp drives.  This way, (a) light speed (and the time dilation) can be avoided, and (b) faster than light speeds can be realized.

The idea is straightforward.  If spacetime can locally be warped so that it expands behind the starship and contracts in front of it, then the starship will be propelled along with the space it is in, like a surfboard on a wave.  The starship will never travel locally faster than the speed-of-light, because light, too, will be carried along with the expanding wave of space.

(According to the “Next Generation technical manual, warp 9.6 is the highest speed which is 1909 times the speed-of-light.)

Krauss discusses the transporter issues in-terms of converting atom to bits and back to atoms.  Even if you transport “information about people” in bits, rather than “transporting people” in atoms, the challenges are enormous, if not impossible.  To me, there are other non-technical issues as well.  How do you energize (transport) feelings, memories, knowledge of a person?

Rather than going through each issue mentioned in the book, let me list the titles of chapters and a major issue that each chapter is devoted in brief.

1. Newton Antes (this is a discussion about impulse drives)
2. Einstein Raises (this is a discussion about warp drives)
3. Hawking Shows His Hand (this is a discussion about black holes and worm holes)
4. Data Ends the Game (this is a discussion about warp speeds and clocking devices)
5. Atoms and Bits (this is a discussion about transporters)
6. The Most Bang for Your Buck (this is a discussion about matter-antimatter generators)
7. Holodecks and Holograms
8. The Search for Spock (this is a discussion about Borg, Q continuum, class M planets, and communication with aliens.)
9. The menagerie of Possibilities (this is a discussion about the scale of the universe, extra dimensions, quasars, neutron stars, Anions, Solitons, Neutrinos, the Solar Neutrino Problem, Quantum Measurements, and Dark Matter.  Dark energy has not yet been discovered when he wrote this book.   The solar neutrino puzzle was solved only in 2002.)
10. Impossibilities: The undiscoverable Country.

Let me finish this note by looking at some of those impossibilities from the last chapter.

You hear thundering blasts and explosions in space in some Star Trek episodes.  But sound cannot travel through empty space.  You can see the explosions, but you cannot hear the explosions.

In an episode Kirk fires his phaser at a Scolosian queen but, the queen moved in a “wink of an eye” and escapes.  Phaser fire is high intensity light.  Nothing can move faster than the light.  Not even information.  So, the queen would not know that Kirk fired the phaser until the light reaches her.  By then she is dead.

In a next generation episode Enterprise dock at a Remmler array to have a “baryon sweep” to remove the built-up baryons.  But the entire starship is made of baryons.  (Protons and Neutrons are baryons.) There will be nothing left after such a baryon sweep.

You can see light beams in empty space when they fire their phasers in some Star Trek episodes.   Anyone who has used a laser pointer knows that you can see the red spot on the wall, but you cannot see the beam even in non-empty space.

According to Stephen Weinberg, the main mistake made on Star Trek is to split an infinitive every damn time: To boldly go …