Season 2 of the critically acclaimed Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiered June 15 (streaming on Paramount+). So today, Short Wave Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber chats with two Trekkie physicists about the science powering the show and why they love the franchise. Astrophysicist Erin Macdonald is the science consultant for Star Trek, and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a theoretical physicist and author of the book The Disordered Cosmos. This episode, the trio discusses not only the feasibility of warp drive, global cooperation and representation and how the transporters that beam crew members from the surface of a planet to the ship might be breaking fundamental laws of physics.Questions about the "scientific" underpinnings of other pop culture? Email us at shortwave@npr.org. We'd love to hear from you!
Warp drive matching real science isn’t too much of a surprise. The current theoretically possible model for a real-life warp drive is the Alcubierre drive, and Miguel Alcubierre came up with it because he was inspired by the warp drive from Star Trek, and wanted to see what it would take to make it real, for want of a better word.
Funnily enough, it’s kinda more like SW hyperdrive than warp. Point-shoot-pray, can’t see outside, can’t change direction, lots of calculations needed to find an unobstructed path
Warp drive matching real science isn’t too much of a surprise. The current theoretically possible model for a real-life warp drive is the Alcubierre drive, and Miguel Alcubierre came up with it because he was inspired by the warp drive from Star Trek, and wanted to see what it would take to make it real, for want of a better word.
Funnily enough, it’s kinda more like SW hyperdrive than warp. Point-shoot-pray, can’t see outside, can’t change direction, lots of calculations needed to find an unobstructed path