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!
I’m with you on the transporters, but the fly in the ointment for me has always been inertial dampeners. If it’s possible to sidestep conservation of inertia, I’d be pretty surprised. If not, the crew will be converted into stew the first time a ship slows down or makes a course correction.
The other part of that is, of course, that they don’t seem to use the technology (or artificial gravity or the tractor beams for that matter) for anything else. In particular no weapons or defence systems.
I’m with you on the transporters, but the fly in the ointment for me has always been inertial dampeners. If it’s possible to sidestep conservation of inertia, I’d be pretty surprised. If not, the crew will be converted into stew the first time a ship slows down or makes a course correction.
I wonder if there’s a technical manual out there that tries to explain it. It seems like energy manipulation is something startrek tech excells at.
The other part of that is, of course, that they don’t seem to use the technology (or artificial gravity or the tractor beams for that matter) for anything else. In particular no weapons or defence systems.
The Final Architecture series by Adrian Tchaikovsky uses artificial gravity as the basis for almost all its tech.
Seriously, once the shields are down why aren’t they just dematerializing parts of the enemy ship?
And why bother with fussy warp cores? Just de-materialize random junk and use that energy.