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 think transporters would work better if they just said they pushed you through a subspace portal of some kind vs. the whole matter-to-energy-and-back again process described. That sidesteps some of the thornier physics issues and makes more sense why it would work at a distance.
I think transporters would work better if they just said they pushed you through a subspace portal of some kind vs. the whole matter-to-energy-and-back again process described. That sidesteps some of the thornier physics issues and makes more sense why it would work at a distance.