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!
oooh… introduced in Rise, apparently to explain why they needed to have fancy devices to pinpoint how to get to things. I thought it was just because they legit didn’t know where these places were, rather than that they had no direct path.
@FormerGameDev Introduced probably with novelizations in the 80’s, so still long after TOS, but it never really appears outside of novels until Rise. This stuff that blocks hyperspace travel at the edge of the galaxy is found through out the galaxy as well, which is why they have to have well charted hyperspace routes. I think Rise is the first movie where they mention hyper space lanes as well, which sounds contrived the first time you hear it, but finding new routes is actually very risky.
yeah this doesn’t really sound like a … barrier… per se, but just a zone of space that is not safe to travel at light speed through. Whereas in Trek, it actively prevents people from entering/exiting the galaxy.
Correct. The “barrier” in Star Wars is a mess of hyperspace disturbances that prevent safe navigation. Ancient Jedi and Sith found ways through using the Force, and using the relics they stored these routes in (“wayfinders”) is the only way to traverse it.
oooh… introduced in Rise, apparently to explain why they needed to have fancy devices to pinpoint how to get to things. I thought it was just because they legit didn’t know where these places were, rather than that they had no direct path.
@FormerGameDev Introduced probably with novelizations in the 80’s, so still long after TOS, but it never really appears outside of novels until Rise. This stuff that blocks hyperspace travel at the edge of the galaxy is found through out the galaxy as well, which is why they have to have well charted hyperspace routes. I think Rise is the first movie where they mention hyper space lanes as well, which sounds contrived the first time you hear it, but finding new routes is actually very risky.
yeah this doesn’t really sound like a … barrier… per se, but just a zone of space that is not safe to travel at light speed through. Whereas in Trek, it actively prevents people from entering/exiting the galaxy.
Correct. The “barrier” in Star Wars is a mess of hyperspace disturbances that prevent safe navigation. Ancient Jedi and Sith found ways through using the Force, and using the relics they stored these routes in (“wayfinders”) is the only way to traverse it.