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!
The real question is why they wouldn’t use the transporter buffers effectively as backups for away teams. Have an away team member killed? No problem, rematerialize them from the buffer.
Well, Thomas Riker proves you can create duplicates and the doctor’s daughter in Strange New Worlds as well as some other episodes prove that the patterns can be stored in the buffer for extended periods of time.
Here’s the thing: Does Tom Riker actually prove that? That’s the explanation suggested in the episode, but the preponderance of information about the mechanisms of transporter technology, as given both before and after, conflicts with it. But there’s another hypothesis, a simpler one, and one that we know for a fact transporters are capable of, because it’s a recurring element in Star Trek: Thomas Riker is from another universe, brought to the Prime universe by similar means as many of the various visits to and from the Mirror universe.
@taladar@dustojnikhummer Why not just let the crew member stay on the ship and just send dozens of copies of them to the planet to overwhelm any danger with sheer numbers?
Well, it makes sense to me to want to have the away mission in the memory of the crew member you retain long term unless something happened to them on the away mission.
The real question is why they wouldn’t use the transporter buffers effectively as backups for away teams. Have an away team member killed? No problem, rematerialize them from the buffer.
The simplest answer would be because it doesn’t ordinarily work that way.
Well, Thomas Riker proves you can create duplicates and the doctor’s daughter in Strange New Worlds as well as some other episodes prove that the patterns can be stored in the buffer for extended periods of time.
Here’s the thing: Does Tom Riker actually prove that? That’s the explanation suggested in the episode, but the preponderance of information about the mechanisms of transporter technology, as given both before and after, conflicts with it. But there’s another hypothesis, a simpler one, and one that we know for a fact transporters are capable of, because it’s a recurring element in Star Trek: Thomas Riker is from another universe, brought to the Prime universe by similar means as many of the various visits to and from the Mirror universe.
@taladar @dustojnikhummer Why not just let the crew member stay on the ship and just send dozens of copies of them to the planet to overwhelm any danger with sheer numbers?
Well, it makes sense to me to want to have the away mission in the memory of the crew member you retain long term unless something happened to them on the away mission.