Resources on the "Scientific Unrealism" of Trek

[Junghalli]

I think the problem can be intuitively explained this way:

Say the Enterprise turns on its mass-lightening field and then accelerates by 100 km/s, then turns it off. Now it's moving 100 km/s faster ... but it only expended 1/100 of the energy it needed for that velocity change. Obviously that would make no sense. I know pretty much nothing about physics but logically I can think of two ways of resolving this paradox:

1) The velocity drops so that the velocity change was equal to what you would have gotten if you applied that kinetic energy to the entire mass instead of a mere 1/100th of it.

2) The "lightened" 99/100th of the ship continues going at its old velocity while the parts that was actually accelerated keeps going at the new velocity. I imagine the results would be quite unpleasant for anyone in the ship at the time.

The danger presented by scenario #2 never seems to be an issue in the show, so it's probably safer to assume #1 is the case.

[Diplomat]

This is tangentially related to the debate over categorizing Star Trek vs. Star Wars (Sci Fi vs. Fantasy), if you're curious, but I am looking for any good resources on the Scientific Unrealism of Trek, preferrably handy online resources.

Now I read Mike's entire page sometime between 2003 and 2005, but I don't have it all memorized and frankly haven't looked through it in years. I remember the canon database talked about some things, but I don't recall precisely where stuff was laid out specifically.

What I'm really after are Trek episodes I could point people to that have some extremely bogus "science" in them, or examples of obvious "fantasy," not just general inaccuracies like characters who are "human alien half breeds" or sound in space, etc.

Like Voyager's "Threshold" or TNG's "Genesis" for mangling of science, and episodes like "Who Mourns of Adonais" and the various Q episodes for fantasy. That sort of thing.

Like the episode in TOS where sonic weapons are effective against the Enterprise or they find a crack in the event horizon of a black hole in Voyager. Or the episodes where people get possessed by super beings or magical "evolution" type episodes. Yes, I've seen every episode of Trek, but it's been six years, and I don't have the time anymore to go back over every single one. So I appeal to y'alls superior collected knowledge.

Thanks in advance!

PS: If you think this belongs in "Pure Trek" then my apologies.

I certainly agree that much of the "Wrath of Khan" and later Trek "science" was pure fiction-garbage which really turned me off of it, for the same reason that I liked Trek in the first place because of the better science than standard sci-fi, which took a lot of liberties.

I'd like to know the TOS episode, however, in which sonic weapons worked against the Enterprise; I can't for the life of me recall any such mention.
Also, I don't know how "Who Mourns for Adonis" used bad science, since I don't recall any type of science or figures being mentioned.

If anything in Start Trek is off, however, I'd say that Star Trek's "anti-matter" figures are either grossly exaggerated from real science, or was some very different type of substance than the current definition; since in "Obsession" they use an ounce of anti-matter from the ship's engines to destroy the alien; however it also rips away "half the atmosphere" of an Earth-sized planet.
Now calculating for this, we're talking about quite a lot more than the standard E=MC^2 equation, which for an ounce of anti-matter would be about 1.22 megatons, or about 4.1E+9 MJ.
Rather, "ripping away" half of an Eath-sized planet's atmosphere would require 1E+16MJ, or about than 2 million times this much.

So either Star Trek uses some different type of anti-matter than real modern science, or else its energy-figures are exaggerated some 2 million-fold.

[Samuel]

I'd like to know the TOS episode, however, in which sonic weapons worked against the Enterprise; I can't for the life of me recall any such mention.
Also, I don't know how "Who Mourns for Adonis" used bad science, since I don't recall any type of science or figures being mentioned.

A Taste of Armaggedon.

If anything in Start Trek is off, however, I'd say that Star Trek's "anti-matter" figures are either grossly exaggerated from real science, or was some very different type of substance than the current definition; since in "Obsession" they use an ounce of anti-matter from the ship's engines to destroy the alien; however it also rips away "half the atmosphere" of an Earth-sized planet.

That was one episode- for the most part they use antimatter more sanely (except when they have to heat it up before putting it into the reactor ).

[Patrick Degan]

I'd like to know the TOS episode, however, in which sonic weapons worked against the Enterprise; I can't for the life of me recall any such mention.
Also, I don't know how "Who Mourns for Adonis" used bad science, since I don't recall any type of science or figures being mentioned.

The sonic weapon being used against the Enterprise was part of the episode "A Taste Of Armageddon" —the one with the two planets in a computer-war which had lasted for five centuries. I tend to simply mentally substitute "MASER" for "sonic disruptor" in that instance.

"Who Mourns For Adonais" was a bit more vague about what science it was focussing on or violating, but it did get at least one thing dead right: to do the sort of tricks Apollo was doing required lots of energy and a means for him to process it through his body. Whenever he expended too much power, Apollo would visibly tire and vanish to renew himself while in his weakened condition.

[Batman]

TOS was just as bad about ignoring science as any later Trek (phasers, Warp drive, transporters, shields, forced orbits, you name it). The difference was TOS never made up technobabble excuses trying to say they DIDN'T. The E-Nil needed engines to stay in orbit, and that was that. The Warp core needed dilithium crystals to work for some reason, and that was that. TOS didn't go out of its way to present scientific explanations that were verifiably complete and utter garbage.

[Diplomat]

According to Star Trek, nothing can remain in planetary orbit without engine power. But if that’s the case, then what holds up all those engine-less satellites, space telescopes, and space stations in Earth orbit today?

Those are either in moving orbits, or geosynchronous orbit at 22,000 miles; neither was acceptable for transporter-use.

Thus we see, that a single fact will often spoil a most lengthy argument.

The Sound And The Fury —this, of course, is Star Trek’s most famous scientific blunder, the one that probably gets the most laughs at physics department cocktail mixers. In “A Taste Of Armageddon”, the Enterprise finds herself caught between two planets fighting a computer war that’s lasted for 500 years. Declared a casualty in the latest computer attack from Vendikar, the leaders of Eminiar VII demand that the ship’s crew beam down to obediently trot themselves into the disintegrator booths to keep up the agreement which regulates the conduct of the computer war. Anan 7, the head of the council, tries tricking the crew down, then when that fails orders the planetary disruptor banks to open fire on the Enterprise. The ship, in orbit, is hit by very powerful sonic waves but is protected by her deflector screens.
By now, everybody knows what’s wrong with this scene. The Enterprise is in orbit. Sound waves cannot propagate in a vacuum.

Who said that sonic vibrations are always caused by sound? They can be transmitted other ways: ever used two dixie-cups and a string?
They could have been using some other type of rays to inflict high-level sonic vibrations in order to disrupt the ship's hull. Naturally these would have little to no impact on shields... and they didn't.

Once again, a single fact....

You’ve Seen One Earth, You’ve Seen Them All —Earth is only one planet of nine circling a rather insignificant little yellow sun located within a more remote part of the western spiral arm of the galaxy. So what accounts for the discovery by the Enterprise of a carbon-copy duplicate of the Earth, occupying the same orbit around the same type G2V yellow star supporting a system of nine planets occupying the same orbits as those in our own little star system in the episode “Miri”, and supporting a human culture which developed in such a complete parallel to our own until they started fooling around with biotech, which they probably regarded with even greater enthusiasm than we did as the Wave Of The Future until the glitch in the lab happened? Later episodes would invoke the truly absurd Hodgkins’ Law of Parallel Planet Development to explain away all the various theme-park planets encountered by the Enterprise crew in their travels, but the duplicate Earth truly takes the cake. The number does not exist to express the improbability of such a world’s existence.

True 'nuff... but this isn't really about science and technology, so much as logic and astronomy.
But then, this is pretty smug talk coming in defense of an ancient, distant, and fully-populated galaxy that's being controlled by humans.

Living In The Fast Lane —”Wink Of An Eye” is another episode that gets laughed over for its absurdity. Professor Krauss has pointed out not only the hyperimpossibility of the accelerated Deela being able to outrace a phaser beam in his book The Physics Of Star Trek, but also that even in order to do so, she and the other Scalosians, and Kirk as well, would be existing at a level where they all would have ended up ageing ten years for every second that passed aboard the Enterprise. The fact that no more than the time it took Scotty to descend from the bridge to arrive at the transporter room to stand by for action after Kirk’s “disappearance” passed aboard the Enterprise before Kirk returned to normal is enough to suggest that the level of acceleration is no more than 300X normal time. Certainly not fast enough to outrace a beam of pure radiation or even a much slower charged-particle beam.

Assuming it's electromagetic radiation-- which a phaser isn't, obviously, as even by the fact that the unaccellerated audience we can see its beam visibly tracing from phaser to target; even a normal-speed Bruce Lee could dodge that. Phasers set on stun are notoriously even slower than more powerful-settings, as can be seen readily.
Likewise, ship-phasers move far faster than light, so that clearly rules out anything in the EM spectrum. While the beams are visible, that doesn't mean they're E-M based-- any more than they're sound-based because the hand-phaser makes a whisting-sound either. It's simply an effect of the beam.

If a phaser beam propagates at lightspeed, and the Scalosians can move faster than c.,

Again, it doesn't. A hand-phaser is far slower than c, depending on the power; meanwhile a ship's phaser is far faster.

The Incredible Shrinking, Freezing Planet —in “The Naked Time”, planet Psi 2000, a frozen and dead world on which a Federation science team died after contracting the water-borne sickness, was in the process of contracting itself prior to a planetary breakup. There were shifts in gravity and mass, which made the job of maintaining the Enterprise in orbit a difficult one even before Lt. Kevin Riley goes nuts, locks himself up in Engineering, and deactivates the ship’s engines while singing “I’ll Take You Home Kathleen” horribly off-key.

By any measure, the Enterprise is witness to an anomaly of physics so improbable that it goes right off anybody’s scale. Firstly, the planet is on the verge of breaking up because of its contraction. Which means that somehow, despite the fact that gravity is pulling its mass ever inward, at some point the planet will disintegrate into a cloud of rubble. There’s only one slight problem: if mass is collecting toward a central point due to gravity, it will simply keep collecting and contracting until either mutual electromagnetic repulsion holds its mass up, or assuming a hyperimpossible exponnential increase in mass it would end up collapsing into a black hole. Psi 2000 has nowhere near the mass to make this possible, and the gravity which is causing the planet to contract would not allow it to then break up into free-floating rubble afterward, because mutual gravitational attraction would still keep the planet in one piece.

Psi 2000 experiences sudden, weird shifts in mass and gravity —so much so that the Enterprise must adjust its orbit to keep the ship from being pulled down. Unless Psi 2000 is magickally acquiring mass from elsewhere, its gravitational attraction should remain a constant. If the planet is somehow magickally losing mass, its gravity would be consequently reduced, and the Enterprise’s problem becomes one of slowing her own momentum to maintain the orbit instead of flying off into space on a free trajectory. The only factor which could affect the Enteprise’s orbit would be Psi 2000’s tidal force, but this would require the planet’s rate of rotation to increase by orders of magnitude, yet it is supposedly doing so while collecting additional mass from somewhere, which would tend to slow angular momentum.

If that isn’t enough to cause the solons at the Interstellar Geophysical Conference to scratch their heads in utter bewilderment, there is the fact that the planet is a frozen wasteland despite the fact of its contraction. If Psi 2000 is indeed contracting, then this means that gravitational collapse is occuring. The matter of the planet is being forced to squeeze in upon itself, which means that a huge amount of molecular friction is being generated. Which means that Psi 2000 should actually be heating up from its own internal friction; so much so that it should have been impossible for the Federation to plant a science station on the surface, which would have been molten slag.

All this, amusingly, is taking place in the very same episode in which Scotty famously tells Captain Kirk that he can’t change the laws of physics. He’dve never had a chance to even if he wanted. The writer beat him to it.

As if the above writer would know, since he does a poor job of checking his facts- and as we see, a single one spoils his most long-winded schpiels.
Perhaps the planet heated up on the later stages of collapse, as a cooling planet is subject to various states of "shrinkage" unrelated to Seinfeld.

[Samuel]

Who said that sonic vibrations are always caused by sound? They can be transmitted other ways: ever used two dixie-cups and a string?
Ever think they could have been using some other type of rays to inflict high-level sonic vibrations in order to disrupt the ship's hull. Naturally these would have little to no impact on shields... and they didn't.

That requires a physcial medium for the ray to propogate. Outside of an atmosphere you have no physical medium.

However given that this plot was stolen from an episode of "The Wild, Wild West," then I'll leave it at that.

The diamond theif one, right?

Perhaps the planet heated up on the later stages of collapse, as a cooling planet is subject to various states of "shrinkage" unrelated to Seinfeld.

Please, explain how a world could be cooling fast enough for it to be physically visible. All the planets in the inner solar system aside from Earth are geologically dead, but none of them experience anything remotely like this.

[Batman]

According to Star Trek, nothing can remain in planetary orbit without engine power. But if that’s the case, then what holds up all those engine-less satellites, space telescopes, and space stations in Earth orbit today?

Those are either in moving orbits, or geosynchronous orbit at 22,000 miles; neither was acceptable for transporter-use.

What, exactly, is a moving orbit? And blatant lie. Satellites remain in orbits as low as 400 miles without any trajectory adjustments for YEARS.
Note that 22,000 miles is well within established transporter range and there's exactly zero evidence for the ship having to be relatively stationary compared to the tranportee.

Who said that sonic vibrations are always caused by sound?

Physics.

They can be transmitted other ways: ever used two dixie-cups and a string?

Which use-sound.

Ever think they could have been using some other type of rays to inflict high-level sonic vibrations in order to disrupt the ship's hull.

Except if you do NOT use sound to do whatever it is you do to the ship, it ISN'T a sonic weapon. And you CAN'T use sound to affect a ship out in space.

Once again, a single fact....

...that shows Star Trek has about as much bearing on real science as superhero comics.

If a phaser beam propagates at lightspeed, and the Scalosians can move faster than c.,

Again, it doesn't. A hand phaser is far slower than c, depending on the power; meanwhile a ship's phaser is far faster.

Except when it isn't. I suggest you actually WATCH Star Trek. While ship phasers are usually faster than hand ones they're never ever APPROACHING c when we can actually see them.

[Patrick Degan]

According to Star Trek, nothing can remain in planetary orbit without engine power. But if that’s the case, then what holds up all those engine-less satellites, space telescopes, and space stations in Earth orbit today?

Those are either in moving orbits, or geosynchronous orbit at 22,000 miles; neither was acceptable for transporter-use.

Thus we see, that a single fact will often spoil a most lengthy argument.

You're an idiot. Satellites at altitudes of 100-150km manage to hold stable, unpowered orbits for years at a stretch. Try reading about orbital mechanics in an actual science book and not the Star Trek tech manuals sometime.

The Sound And The Fury —this, of course, is Star Trek’s most famous scientific blunder, the one that probably gets the most laughs at physics department cocktail mixers. In “A Taste Of Armageddon”, the Enterprise finds herself caught between two planets fighting a computer war that’s lasted for 500 years. Declared a casualty in the latest computer attack from Vendikar, the leaders of Eminiar VII demand that the ship’s crew beam down to obediently trot themselves into the disintegrator booths to keep up the agreement which regulates the conduct of the computer war. Anan 7, the head of the council, tries tricking the crew down, then when that fails orders the planetary disruptor banks to open fire on the Enterprise. The ship, in orbit, is hit by very powerful sonic waves but is protected by her deflector screens.
By now, everybody knows what’s wrong with this scene. The Enterprise is in orbit. Sound waves cannot propagate in a vacuum.

Who said that sonic vibrations are always caused by sound? They can be transmitted other ways: ever used two dixie-cups and a string?
They could have been using some other type of rays to inflict high-level sonic vibrations in order to disrupt the ship's hull. Naturally these would have little to no impact on shields... and they didn't.

Once again, a single fact....

—that you're an idiot. Sorry, but sound is a direct result of pressure-wave displacement in an atmosphere. No atmosphere, no sonic waves. Did you flunk high school science?

You’ve Seen One Earth, You’ve Seen Them All —Earth is only one planet of nine circling a rather insignificant little yellow sun located within a more remote part of the western spiral arm of the galaxy. So what accounts for the discovery by the Enterprise of a carbon-copy duplicate of the Earth, occupying the same orbit around the same type G2V yellow star supporting a system of nine planets occupying the same orbits as those in our own little star system in the episode “Miri”, and supporting a human culture which developed in such a complete parallel to our own until they started fooling around with biotech, which they probably regarded with even greater enthusiasm than we did as the Wave Of The Future until the glitch in the lab happened? Later episodes would invoke the truly absurd Hodgkins’ Law of Parallel Planet Development to explain away all the various theme-park planets encountered by the Enterprise crew in their travels, but the duplicate Earth truly takes the cake. The number does not exist to express the improbability of such a world’s existence.

True 'nuff... but this isn't really about science and technology, so much as logic and astronomy.
But then, this is pretty smug talk coming in defense of an ancient, distant, and fully-populated galaxy that's being controlled by humans.

You're an idiot. There is no natural process by which two planets would form as exact duplicates of one another down to the exact same fucking shapes of the landmasses.

Living In The Fast Lane —”Wink Of An Eye” is another episode that gets laughed over for its absurdity. Professor Krauss has pointed out not only the hyperimpossibility of the accelerated Deela being able to outrace a phaser beam in his book The Physics Of Star Trek, but also that even in order to do so, she and the other Scalosians, and Kirk as well, would be existing at a level where they all would have ended up ageing ten years for every second that passed aboard the Enterprise. The fact that no more than the time it took Scotty to descend from the bridge to arrive at the transporter room to stand by for action after Kirk’s “disappearance” passed aboard the Enterprise before Kirk returned to normal is enough to suggest that the level of acceleration is no more than 300X normal time. Certainly not fast enough to outrace a beam of pure radiation or even a much slower charged-particle beam.

Assuming it's electromagetic radiation-- which a phaser isn't, obviously, as even by the fact that the unaccellerated audience we can see its beam visibly tracing from phaser to target; even a normal-speed Bruce Lee could dodge that. Phasers set on stun are notoriously even slower than more powerful-settings, as can be seen readily.
Likewise, ship-phasers move far faster than light, so that clearly rules out anything in the EM spectrum. While the beams are visible, that doesn't mean they're E-M based-- any more than they're sound-based because the hand-phaser makes a whisting-sound either. It's simply an effect of the beam.

A hand-phaser is far slower than c, depending on the power; meanwhile a ship's phaser is far faster.

You're an idiot. A phaser is either firing a beam of pure radiation or a particle beam. The velocities of either are far faster than any human movement is capable of producing, which means that if the Scalosians are accelerated faster than the velocity of the phaser beam, there should be catastrophic effects of their movements through the ship's atmosphere. Also, your argument that the audience can see the beam is meaningless —it still doesn't change the essential fact of what's wrong with the "physics" of this episode.

Furthermore, there is exactly zero evidence that phasers are FTL in nature. Either produce that evidence to back your contention, idiot, or shut the fuck up.

The Incredible Shrinking, Freezing Planet —in “The Naked Time”, planet Psi 2000, a frozen and dead world on which a Federation science team died after contracting the water-borne sickness, was in the process of contracting itself prior to a planetary breakup. There were shifts in gravity and mass, which made the job of maintaining the Enterprise in orbit a difficult one even before Lt. Kevin Riley goes nuts, locks himself up in Engineering, and deactivates the ship’s engines while singing “I’ll Take You Home Kathleen” horribly off-key.

By any measure, the Enterprise is witness to an anomaly of physics so improbable that it goes right off anybody’s scale. Firstly, the planet is on the verge of breaking up because of its contraction. Which means that somehow, despite the fact that gravity is pulling its mass ever inward, at some point the planet will disintegrate into a cloud of rubble. There’s only one slight problem: if mass is collecting toward a central point due to gravity, it will simply keep collecting and contracting until either mutual electromagnetic repulsion holds its mass up, or assuming a hyperimpossible exponnential increase in mass it would end up collapsing into a black hole. Psi 2000 has nowhere near the mass to make this possible, and the gravity which is causing the planet to contract would not allow it to then break up into free-floating rubble afterward, because mutual gravitational attraction would still keep the planet in one piece.

Psi 2000 experiences sudden, weird shifts in mass and gravity —so much so that the Enterprise must adjust its orbit to keep the ship from being pulled down. Unless Psi 2000 is magickally acquiring mass from elsewhere, its gravitational attraction should remain a constant. If the planet is somehow magickally losing mass, its gravity would be consequently reduced, and the Enterprise’s problem becomes one of slowing her own momentum to maintain the orbit instead of flying off into space on a free trajectory. The only factor which could affect the Enteprise’s orbit would be Psi 2000’s tidal force, but this would require the planet’s rate of rotation to increase by orders of magnitude, yet it is supposedly doing so while collecting additional mass from somewhere, which would tend to slow angular momentum.

If that isn’t enough to cause the solons at the Interstellar Geophysical Conference to scratch their heads in utter bewilderment, there is the fact that the planet is a frozen wasteland despite the fact of its contraction. If Psi 2000 is indeed contracting, then this means that gravitational collapse is occuring. The matter of the planet is being forced to squeeze in upon itself, which means that a huge amount of molecular friction is being generated. Which means that Psi 2000 should actually be heating up from its own internal friction; so much so that it should have been impossible for the Federation to plant a science station on the surface, which would have been molten slag.

All this, amusingly, is taking place in the very same episode in which Scotty famously tells Captain Kirk that he can’t change the laws of physics. He’dve never had a chance to even if he wanted. The writer beat him to it.

As if the above writer would know, since he does a poor job of checking his facts- and as we see, a single one spoils his most long-winded schpiels.
Perhaps the planet heated up on the later stages of collapse, as a cooling planet is subject to various states of "shrinkage" unrelated to Seinfeld.

You're an idiot. You don't offer a fact as rebuttal but only your pig-ignorant speculation and one which contradicts the known mechanics of molecular friction in a condensing mass. And in fact, your "theory" only adds a further complication to the situation regarding Psi 2000.

Go back to remedial science class, idiot, before you blow your fool mouth off again.

[Junghalli]

Ah, nice to see this thread got reactivated, because I just watched the DS9 episode Melora a week or so again and I really felt like putting its abuse of medicine and biology in here. Let's see:

1) Melora's homeworld. It's implied to be an Earthlike world (at least Melora is certainly an oxygen breather who requires something like Earth temperatures and pressures), but it has near free-fall gravity. It has much less gravity than the Moon. So how the hell does it hold onto a thick atmosphere? OK, we never see it, so I suppose we could assume Melora's race is actually space nomads or something (it has trees, but you could get those in an artificial environment easily). Still, let's face it, I'm about 95% sure that is giving the writers way too much credit.

2) The technique they use to adapt her to our gravity. It consists of doing something to the motor control regions of her brain, and apparently that's it. They do something to her brain and then she can get around in Earth-normal gravity fine. Her muscles, which are used to and evolved for near free-fall gravity, apparently just magically gain the strength to support her and let her move normally in Earth gravity once the right neurons in her head are stimulated. Umm, no, that's not the way it should work at all. Her problem is logically that her muscles are too weak to support her in Earth normal gravity, so Bashir should have been putting her on something like super-steroids.

3) Why would she be unable to return home once the adaptation is completed? Supposedly she'll get disoriented or something if she goes back to low gravity. Uh, and yet that doesn't happen to astronauts when they go from Earth gravity to zero gee, hmm. Well, OK, there is space adaptation syndrome, but that doesn't stop people from going into space. You might get glorified motion sickness, you cannot go home EVAH!

Basically, it's just really obvious they put no actual research or thought into the episode.

It's also rather weird how, in the 24th century, they can't give her anything better than a wheelchair to get around in. I mean, we're working on support exoskeletons for the disabled now FFS! But I guess that would have gotten in the way of the ham-fisted allegory.