Patrick Degan wrote: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.
).