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!
This is refuted by in-universe POV accounts. We have traveled through the transporter with several characters, and not once is their stream of consciousness or even vision broken.
Barclay even observes creatures slightly out of phase in the transport stream and manages to pull them in. (TNG, “Realm of Fear”)
I know it’s described as disassembling and reassembling, but in practice it looks more like they’re being adjusted out of phase, pushed to their location using the annular confinement beam, and resequenced into phase with the rest of the universe. This is what happens with Geordi and Ro in TNG, “The Next Phase.”
It doesn’t explain transporter clones or most transporter accidents, or even TNG, “Relics” but the transporter as a whole is kinda sorta space magic anyway.
If our consciousness is just a series of electrical impulses, as long as the transporter keot those impulses intact, makes sense that we would still be us at the other end. But I’d think nearly any transporter accident would kill the person being transported since it would mess that up.
This is refuted by in-universe POV accounts. We have traveled through the transporter with several characters, and not once is their stream of consciousness or even vision broken.
Barclay even observes creatures slightly out of phase in the transport stream and manages to pull them in. (TNG, “Realm of Fear”)
I know it’s described as disassembling and reassembling, but in practice it looks more like they’re being adjusted out of phase, pushed to their location using the annular confinement beam, and resequenced into phase with the rest of the universe. This is what happens with Geordi and Ro in TNG, “The Next Phase.”
It doesn’t explain transporter clones or most transporter accidents, or even TNG, “Relics” but the transporter as a whole is kinda sorta space magic anyway.
If our consciousness is just a series of electrical impulses, as long as the transporter keot those impulses intact, makes sense that we would still be us at the other end. But I’d think nearly any transporter accident would kill the person being transported since it would mess that up.