# Presentation: 128088

## Watch ‘Star Trek’© with a Physicist

**Don Lincoln**
**Fermilab, University of Michigan**

## Watch ‘Baywatch’© with a Physicist

**Don Lincoln**
**Fermilab, University of Michigan**

## E = m c2

- E = m c2

- High speed takes
- infinite energy.

- You just can’t go
- faster than the speed
- of light.
- Blame Albert.

## UUU WARNING UUU

- UUU WARNING UUU

- ☹ The next page contains adult math ☹
- ☹ Viewer discretion is advised ☹

## Icky Math

## Were the old days wrong?

- Nope!
- Note that vrifle ~ vEarth = 500 m/s = 1080 mph
- Energy/(Rest Mass) ~ 1.000000000001
- (They only disagree for very fast things.)

## It gets worse:  Time dilation

- Moving clocks tick(!) more slowly than stationary ones. (Trust me ☺)
- A person traveling to the nearest star at 50% the speed of light will take 16 years according to Earth.  The traveller will perceive 14 years.
- A person traveling to the nearest star at 99% the speed of light will take 8 years according to Earth.  The traveller will perceive 1.2 years.
- Thus a traveller may be able to travel to and return from a star, but the world he left behind will be very different (this is especially true for very long journeys at high speed).

## Screen Test

- ‘Arena’
- Aired: January 19, 1967
- Gorn commander and Kirk
- duke it out.

- Originally intended characters
- Rejected due to frightening
- content.
- Evidence for the decline of
- television programming standards

## Wormholes

## Klingons

- A warrior race, who changed from normal
- sized, vaguely Arabic looking people, to
- large hulking people with rippled foreheads.
- Not known for computer skills.

- Of course, this could
- change......

## Gene Roddenberry

- August 19, 1921- August 24, 1991
- War hero, Cop, Author, Producer, Genius
- Thanks Gene.

## Things that will never happen on Star Trek

- The Enterprise runs into a mysterious energy field of a type which it has encountered several times before.
- The crew is stuck by a strange alien plague, the cure for which is found in the Enterprise’s well stocked sick bay.
- Mood rings come back in fashion, thus jeapordizing Counselor Troi’s position.
- The warp engines start acting up a bit, but sort themselves out without any action by the boy genius Wesley.

## Things that will never happen on Star Trek (continued)

- The captain has to make a difficult decision involving a less-advanced species which is made much simpler because of the Prime Directive.
- A major Starfleet emergency breaks out in the vicinity of the Enterprise which is dealt with to everyone’s satisfaction by other ships in the area.

## Snafu: Squire of Gothos

- Episode:  The Squire                                        of Gothos
- TOS takes place in                                      2267 (5 year mission)
- Trellane has watched                                 Earth but sees it 900                                       years too late.
- Trellane knows of Alexander Hamilton (1780)
- 1780 + 900 = 2680 (400 years too late)
- Ooops!

## Snafu:  Geordi’s VISOR

- Episode: The Masterpiece Society
- Geordi states his VISOR covers the range 1 Hertz to     1 TeraHertz (1012 Hertz)          (30 μm)

## Snafu:  Dramatic Math

- Episode: The Court Martial
- Aired: February 2, 1967
- Premise:  Kirk is on trial for                                 jettisonning Finney, a                              disgruntled crew man, unnecessarily.
- During the trial, Finney is alive and on the Enterprise.  Everyone is removed from the ship and microphones magnify the sound by a factor of ‘one to the fourth power’ (14 = 1 •1 •1 •1 = 1)
- Plus the microphones didn’t magnify voices.....

## Snafu:Your butt is harder than your hand

- Episode: The Next Phase
- Aired:  May 23, 1992
- Premise:  Geordi and Ro are                               shifted ‘out of phase’ by a                                    transporter mishap.
- They are able to walk through walls, etc.
- But they don’t fall through the floor, they can sit down, a chair moves when Geordi stands up.
- Plus they can breathe.....oops!

## Snafu:  Didn’t there used to be a Starship around here?

- Episode:  Starship Mine
- Aired:  August 11, 1993
- When a ship travels at warp                                        speeds, it picks up ‘baryon particles’ which must be removed.
- The crew leaves as the ‘baryon sweep’ progresses.
- Familiar baryons are protons and neutrons.
- When the crew returns and the baryons are removed, aren’t they just left with a cloud of electrons and no ship?

## Transporters: Pretty Tricky...

- Transporters are technology which allows a person to be beamed (i.e. sort of ‘faxed’) from one place to another.
- This is impossible by any conceivable current physics.  In the future.......?
- In the following                                           discussion, I will                                               outline some of the                                            technical difficulties.

## Transporters:  Technical Difficulties

- A 150 lb person contains approximately        10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000     electrons, protons and neutrons (1028)
- Each particle needs 6 measurements to describe it (position and velocity (x,y,z))
- That person, converted to energy, would release the equivalent 1,000 megatons of TNT.
- If one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day, I’ll bet 1,000 could ruin the entire week.

## More Transporter Difficulties

- Suppose you’re not converted to energy, just torn apart into tiny pieces.  This reduces the energy requirements to 100 megatons of TNT.  Still tough.
- In principle,                                disassociating matter                                into its constituents is                           doable.  The technical                         problems seem                          insurmountable.

## Transporter Problems: Final Word

- Quantum Mechanics states that you can’t measure both the position and velocity of something at the same time.  No way around it.  This is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
- On ST:TNG, they have ‘Heisenberg Compensators’ to fix this problem.
- When asked how they work, Michael Okuda (the ST technical consultant) said:      ‘Very well, thank you!’

## Slide 23

## Antimatter

- Antimatter is true and exists!
- Unfortunately, approximately 100 anti-hydrogen atoms have been made (at Fermilab).
- At any one time, approximately 10,000,000,000 antiprotons are being stored at Fermilab.
- Antimatter is a very butch energy source.
- Dilithium [2(5)6 dilithium 2(:)1 diallosilicate 1:9:1 heptoferranide] is pure fiction.

## Phaser Imponderables

- If phasers travel at the speed of light (which they must if energy weapons), how can they fight at warp speeds?
- Similarly, how can you dodge a phaser blast, if the blast and the light from it arrive at the same time?
- How can you see a                                  phaser in space?

## Other Technologies

- Photon torpedos (which aren’t photons)
- Deflectors, tractor beams, shields (which should use technology similar to warp fields)
- Artificial gravity and intertial dampers (which could be a consequence of warp field technology, except they work even when the warp engines are dead).
- Replicators (plausible if tranporters are)
- Holodeck (plausible if transporters and tractor beams are)

## What if Transporters worked?