Short Wave - New Star Trek Season, Same Ol' Sci-Fi

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

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 [e-mail]. We'd love to hear from you!See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. I have vivid memories of watching Star Trek with my dad as a kid. Even today, just hearing the first few notes of that iconic theme immediately makes me think of exploring that final frontier. I loved anything space. And I still do. But what really resonated with me was the cooperation I saw. The communication and the problem solving between different people and species and the the fact that they're mixed kids like me.

And I'm not the only scientist who holds Star Trek near and dear to my heart. Star Trek was formative to even me having the thought that I could be a scientist. Chonda Prescott Weinstein is a theoretical physicist and a huge Star Trek nerd, or, as we say in the community, a Trekkie. My earliest memories of Star Trek are watching the next generation with my dad. And LeVar Burton was playing Jordy LaForge. It's a remarkable piece of bioelectric. He was the first black scientists that I ever saw. And Beverly Crusher was the first woman scientist that I ever saw.

Exploratory surgery. Desensitize the brain area's troubling you. I then go on to have the thought, well, maybe I can do science. For astrophysicist Aaron McDonald, Star Trek is also a big part of her life. But it wasn't always that way. Yeah, I think for me, you know, I wanted to become a scientist first. I particularly was drawn to Janeway, not just because she was. She had origins as a scientist, but just her leadership style and, like, the way she approached life. Sometimes diplomacy requires a little safer rattling.

Her feminine qualities and how she incorporated that into how she led a team. Nowadays, Aaron is the science advisor for the whole Star Trek franchise. I meant to help create the Janeways and all these other characters to inspire people to become scientists. As an adult, I still love Star Trek and often find myself wondering, if that cooperation, along with all of the futuristic science and gadgets, could actually ever work. But I'm also looking forward to seeing what ways physics will be bent in season two of Star Trek's Strange New World series. It just came out.

Today on the show, we boldly go where many, many nerds have gone before and explore the science and the fiction of Star Trek. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. The first Star Trek theme I want to ask about is warp drive. The idea that we can travel faster than the speed of light, which lets the Star Trek crew zoom through the galaxy. But before we go into that, I think it'd be helpful to brush up on the concept of space time. This idea that pops up in the 1800s, which is when Aaron says some mathematicians started thinking about our universe in four dimensions.

So we have three dimensions in space where you can go forward, back, left, right, up and down. But then we also go forward in time. at one second per second. Then Einstein had the idea to introduce the concept that mass can affect how things move in space. And it explained why Mercury moved the way it did around the sun, something that was a mystery before that. And so that was sort of that first indication that gravity is actually the bending of space time due to the presence of mass. And so that was kind of what we call the origins of general relativity, which is what my background was in. and looking into how mass can affect the shape and behavior of space time.

And then as objects are traveling through space time, the heavier they are, the sort of more they're dipping it down, the harder it is to move. Which is why a planet, or even a human in a spaceship, things with mass are much harder to move through space time than, say, light. And the lighter they are, the easier it is to move. And then eventually they get to where they have no mass, like photons, light particles, and they coast in a straight line at a fixed speed, which is what we call the speed of light. That's kind of what we think of as the speed limit of the universe.

Okay, Aaron, so I'm going to ask you about probably a question you've been asked a lot, and that's can warp drive happen, and how does it work in Star Trek? Yeah, so the short answer is the math checks out, and nothing says that spacetime itself can't go faster than the speed of light. And so you have a ship that does have a massive presence, but you build a bubble of space time around your ship, and then that pushes you faster than the speed of light. And if you want to go even faster, you can build another bubble around that bubble and like exponentially increase your speed, and that's like warp factor two. Build another bubble around that, that's like warp factor three. And so you exponentially increase until

you reach a theoretical limit. But the amount of energy we need to bend space time and equivalent amount of mass is like far beyond any energy that we have the capability of harnessing at this point. For me, the main concern is always the energy problem, which is that it requires harnessing an extraordinary amount of energy that is beyond our capabilities. To work out the kind of engineering that would be required for that certainly requires a level of cooperation that we see on display in the Star Trek universe. And I don't think we as a single species have achieved that level of cooperation.

And so I think one way of looking at the challenge is not just that it's technical, but that those technical challenges are also social and political. Erin, you had mentioned before about another staple of Star Trek that you love talking about, and that's the transporters, right?

Can you tell us a little bit more about that, Aaron? Yeah, so the idea of a transporter is that it maps and breaks down essentially all of your particles down to like the subatomic level, right? And it maps that and then it carries those and then it rebuilds you somewhere else. But in order to do that, you have to know where every single particle is. And the physics limit that we have for that is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which I think Chana can probably speak more about with her background. But the idea that the more you know about where something is, the less information you have about, like, it's momentum, how fast it's moving. And then regardless, there's still a fundamental limit of how much you can actually know. And what I love about the transporters in Star Trek is it's such a good example of science in science fiction. Because I think in the next generation, O'Brien makes an offhand comment about the Heisenberg Compensator. Check the Heisenberg Compensators. I want a level one diagnostic of the pattern.

Which is a component of the transporter that compensates for Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. And now they can do it. There's never any explanation. It works very well. And we're fine with that. Chonda, what would be this Heisenberg compensator? And tell us a little bit more about, like, if you have any more thoughts about how this is, like, not possible. Or maybe it could be. Yeah, okay, so I'm going to bring up an episode that I like to talk about,

is the Tuvix episode. And it's basically it's about a transporter accident where I'm two different characters, Tuvok and Neelix, end up being merged into what essentially turns out to be a third brand new being that's sentient and has their own sense of self. It might have caused their patterns to merge. Like an Andorrean amoeba. Just like that. Tuvix is born. It's like obviously like a highly dramatized version of there is this uncertainty that you can't exactly locate a particle and how fast it's going at the same time. Like you kind of have to choose which one you want to know. And right? And so at the very least, you can't have a scenario where the transporter is in motion relative to you or you are in motion relative to the transporter. And trust

that all of the information is going to be accurately transported and rendered. So essentially, I don't think transporters will ever be a thing that we can do. But I always say that it's important for me as a scientist to be humble. And so it may be that there is some science beyond the uncertainty principle that we're just not aware of at this point. And so maybe what the writer behind that particular Miles O'Brien quip was imagining is actually just very forward thinking. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I'm going to assume. And that gets us to our last science topic. And this is something that Chonda, you had mentioned to me, the galactic barrier.

All this travel in Star Trek is within the Milky Way. So can you tell us what exactly the galactic barrier is and how it's different from what actually is at the edge of our galaxy? Right. So the concept of the galactic barrier is that there is a phenomenon at the edge of our galaxy, which it's been roughly described across multiple series as something that prevents signals from getting through from outside of the galaxy. We're inside the barrier. So I'm just going to say what bugs me about the galactic barrier. And I have to say I shouted at the TV a little bit during Discovery season four, which is, The claim that signals can't get through the galactic barrier, but we see other galaxies all the time, and those are signals. Like, we see radio observations, we see across the electromagnetic spectrum.

If Star Trek Discovery was going to go on for more seasons, I actually had a plan to suggest an idea to Aaron about how to clean up a little bit of the galactic barrier stuff to make it more scientifically plausible, which is to suggest that when a little bit of the galactic barrier stuff to make it more scientifically plausible, which is to suggest that when, an object is close to the outer bounds of the galaxy, that there is a short range effect. No, I mean, I love that. I think it's absolutely, it's so funny that you say that because, like, the way that I was approached about the galactic barrier was very much, like, look, Aaron, we apologize ahead of time, but we're building this based on the original series. Like, we want to use the galactic barrier as it was described and utilized in the original series that was like relatively impenetrable but more of the sense that like it was just wholly

destructive that it created like this psychological effects that there were quote like strange energies at the galactic barrier and so the the question was like okay well could we have any sort of science that was in there what i was thinking was like well what if there's a galactopause like a buildup of radiation particles that might be able to escape their star systems but don't have enough to be able to escape the gravitational field of the entire galaxy, the presence of all of the stars within it. And that this radiation, once you're there, is causing high amounts of interference. Can, you know, like we have seen effects of like cosmic rays, for example, on astronauts and their brains and their optics and all of those, that you could build an

analogy to that. And so that was sort of the very loose thread that we built. to have this sort of galactic barrier that's high radiation particles that maybe we don't totally understand. But yes, I'm glad China made the point. You can see past and outside our galaxy. That is key to astronomy and something that's used all the time. Let's get to the last question, which is, what's your favorite science fiction technology? It doesn't even need to be Star Trek that you hope or may think will become a reality one day. So my quick answer is warp drive. I want us to make some huge unknown, unknown advancement in energy and all come together as a species to invent warp drive. That's the dream. The realistic one that I do think we're getting closer to, but there's still a lot of science and technology that needs to happen, would be like a replicator. So a replicator is a Star Trek technology that is where they go up and they say like computer, coffee, black. And it's a replicator. It's a replicator. It's a Star Trek technology that is where they go up and they say like computer, coffee, black.

and it just prints them out and there's just a steaming hot coffee sitting there. And it also produces the cup. It does. Chonda, what about you? I recently had the opportunity to visit the Reginald F. Lewis, Maryland Museum of African American History and Culture. They have Philandis Thames' work using hair beads that spells out space, place, and it comes down from the ceiling. As I was looking at this work, I started thinking about the nanobots. My viewer understanding is that they have developed the technology at the

microphysical level to make rapid mechanical changes to a structure where they can take it apart and put it back together very quickly. A very obvious thing is if you can have a ship come apart and come back together very quickly, then you can very obviously do complicated African and black hairstyles, like really quickly with nanobots. Love it. It would save hours. It would save hours.

I'm a theoretical physicist, so that's more in the imaginary. But I just love that idea. Thank you, Erin and Chonda, for coming to talk to me. I had a great time talking about Star Trek. Thank you. Thanks for having me. This episode was produced by our chief science officer, Burley McCoy. Edited by our captain, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Lieutenant.

Commander Katie Doggart. Flight controller Josh Newell engineered the audio and Federation Council member, Johannes Durge, is our main legal Duterino. Beth Donovan is our Commodore. Anya Grunman is our fleet admiral, and I'm First Officer, Regina Barber. Thanks as always for listening to Shortwave.

See you next time.