On Fake Physics and the Acceptance Thereof

Star Trek has a lot of…well, bullshit science. In the TV Tropes world, this is known as applied phlebotinium. (Or sometimes misapplied). In fact, Star Trek is notorious for junk science, and their questionable physics are frequently made the butt of jokes.

So, Joe…how do you plan to engage with Star Trek’s physics?

I’m so glad you asked.

I’m going to accept it and move on.

No, really. Stop laughing! Sheesh.

In all seriousness, I think this ability to accept a show’s premise and get on with the experience is an important skill, at least for people like me who want to pick apart everything particle by subatomic particle.

Look at it this way – if we accept all the science that the show offers us as real, and assume that all their technology works pretty much the way they say it does, this frees up our time to criticize their human interactions and decisions instead! Like when they don’t even use their own technology correctly! Or when it works differently depending on what the plot needs! Won’t that be fun?

I’ll try to avoid doing too much of this specific sort of nitpicking. After all, we already know why it’s popular on science fiction shows – because plot. But sometimes a show earns a raised eyebrow or two, and in that case you can trust me to deliver it with the appropriate amount of incredulous snark.

So before we jump into the actual episodes, let’s get some basic nitpicking out of the way.

Warp Travel

I have unfortunate news for Star Trek fans. Faster-than-light travel isn’t happening any time soon. Probably never. The problem is, FTL travel breaks so many known laws of physics that if we ever do achieve it, we should probably start seriously entertaining the notion that we might be living in a simulation.

If we want to reach other planets, we’re probably going to have to get there the pokey, slow way. Stick a bunch of colonists – or better yet, self-replicating nanites – on a spaceship, launch it into the cosmos with an ion drive and a bunch of math, and wait ten thousand years.

Star Trek, fortunately for the show, doesn’t have this problem. They have FTL travel as a base assumption. It’s an absolute necessity for the show to work the way it does. It is also, dear readers, our first clue that this world runs on a different set of rules than our own. It’s important to keep this in mind when we put ourselves in the characters’ shoes.

Transporters

Teleportation is probably not happening either. Sorry, fans. It’s not ruled out quite the way FTL travel is, it’s not outright impossible, but it’d take a heck of a lot of advances that we don’t have.

Realistically, the most likely form of teleportation we ever get is uploading our brains to computers and then just swapping between an android body in New York and an android body in Tokyo. Cool, but not quite the same.

Now, we might say this doesn’t matter, because it’s totally possible in Star Trek. And yes, that’s true. But the way it works can tell us a lot about the Star Trek universe.

For example: in the show, transporter technology works by turning matter into energy, shooting the energy over somewhere else, then turning it back into matter.

Now, in the real world, “turning something into energy” is actually a pretty terrifying power. Matter can be converted to energy and back, it’s the equation Einstein was famous for. But it usually happens in tiny amounts at a time…in fission and fusion reactions, most commonly. If you were turned from matter to energy, you would explode with the force of a nuclear bomb, leveling whatever city block or stretch of countryside you currently occupy. (50 kilograms or thereabouts is 10^15 joules, about the yield of a modest nuke).

Also, “energy” is vague, in scientific terms. What kind? Energy comes in radiation, motion, heat, electric, potential… Star Trek uses “energy” in several episodes and it’s…well, it’s pretty much more phlebotinium. Saying a species is “made of energy” doesn’t really tell us much, and it’s kind of a weird concept. You’re never going to run into a “cloud of energy” in our world, the concept doesn’t even make sense.

But that’s okay! We don’t need to know exactly how it works in order to understand the show. We just need to know that in Star Trek, “energy” is a different sort of thing than in the real world. It’s a sort of vague incorporeal magic-stuff that sometimes acts sorta like matter and sometimes doesn’t. Like ghostly ectoplasm. And transporters can turn you into it and reassemble you afterwards.

Interestingly, transporters don’t seem to have the ability to “reassemble” the same person twice. They just turn you into energy and put you somewhere else before reassembling you. Well, except when they malfunction and you get weird stuff like that one time Captain Kirk got an evil twin. This limitation neatly sidesteps questions like “why don’t I just make a backup copy of myself in the transporter in case I die on this mission?”

Eh. Okay, I’ll buy it. Moving on.

Replicators

We have these. They’re called 3D printers and they’re actually kinda scary when you think about it.

Okay, maybe not exactly.

I used to think replicators and transporters were supposed to work the same way, but it turns out I was wrong. Replicators don’t turn things to energy-and-back. Instead, they scan an object and store that object as a digital pattern. They seem to be able to absorb energy by deconstructing objects, too. Objects too complicated simply can’t be stored – and that includes a lot of organic stuff, like people. Given enough power, replicators can make many copies of whatever they scanned. Is this sounding like a 3D printer yet? Honestly the only real differences are that replicators are more flexible (they can make a wider variety of stuff) and they need a lot of power instead of plastic or metal pellets.

Replicators explain why the Federation is post-scarcity. They can pretty much make whatever they need as long as they can supply enough power for the replicators – they can even recycle anything back into energy by deconstructing it! Convenient. And since there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of power: bam! Instant abundance.

Once again, the “complexity” limit is a clever way of avoiding the “but why don’t I replicate myself?” questions. I’m a little sad that Star Trek never really engaged with this question (no, malfunctions and evil twins don’t count), but I can’t blame them for steering clear of it. It would trivialize a lot of things. When you have a backup copy, “death” is just a mild inconvenience and a loss of some memories.

Does that assertion seem odd to you? Well, the key insight is that people are patterns, not sacks of meat. As long as your pattern sticks around, so do you. There’s plenty of debate on the subject, which I won’t get into here, but I know what makes sense to me.

Though now I kind of want to see a version of Star Trek where they can replicate anything, people included. It would make for some wacky episodes, even more than they already are. Maybe the Enterprise gets fried ten times trying to figure out some anomaly, and the revived crew keep trying to puzzle out what got them the last time…

Phasers

Every science fiction show worth its salt needs “laserbeams!!!” Phasers are Star Trek’s version. Nothing says “futuristic” like glowing red special effects.

I initially felt a little bit skeptical about phasers. Not the physics of them – yes, it takes a bunch of energy to vaporize someone, news at eleven. In Star Trek physics, it works, and that’s all we really need to know. But tactically, phasers are harder to justify. Compare a handheld phaser to, say, a handgun. If either one hits you, the outcome is pretty much the same – you’re dead. What’s so special about phasers, tactically speaking?

Well, there are actually quite a few advantages, with the way phasers work on the show.

• Nonlethality. Phasers have a “stun” setting. Handguns don’t.
• Reliability. If a handgun hits you in the leg, you are injured. If a phaser hits you in the leg, you’re still vaporized or stunned depending on what button the wielder pressed. I think. Not really sure about this one, and I think the show has a few cases of “phaser burn” type injuries. Maybe those were low-power settings?
• Firepower. Phasers seem to be able to obliterate a lot more stuff than mere firearms. I wouldn’t want to drive, say, a tank against phaser-armed soldiers. They can blow up cover and fry their way through walls. Wielders can fire a sustained beam, which probably operates like an especially lethal machine gun. (Athough this doesn’t seem to matter much when there’s a firefight in the show. People still hide behind boxes and such that phasers should probably burn through. Low-power settings, again? So as not to utterly destroy surroundings or create toxic gases?)
• Weight. Phasers can presumably run out of power, but they seem quite efficient for what they do. In the real world, ammunition is heavy. Soldiers with a pound or two of phaser have a major advantage over soldiers carrying 20-30 pounds of cartridge ammunition and a 10-pound gun.

The only disadvantage seems to be that the physical design of them is more for coolness than aim. Handheld phasers look like TV remotes – you ever try to aim a TV remote? Sometimes it misses the TV, and that’s with it sending its signal out in a cone. That’s a terrible shape for aiming. Much better to have a barrel shape and a stock you can look down. Some phasers look more like rifles or pistols, but the ones the Enterprise uses look more like this:

Still, as TV physics go, phasers aren’t half bad. Also, they’re cool. Pew pew! Bang! Zap! Science!

Other Tech

Surprisingly, a lot of the technology that Star Trek doesn’t get criticized for happened to be totally spot-on. The communicators and automatic doors in the original series are a great example; the show came before cell phones and, well, automatic doors. While we’re bashing Star Trek science fiction for being too fictional, it’s easy to forget all the stuff they got right. That tends to fade into the background. Remember when voice commands were future-tech, and the ship’s computer seemed incredibly sophisticated? And now we have Watson winning Jeopardy, AlphaGo Zero mastering a game within days, and GPT-2 writing poetry. The Future Is Now!

Final Thoughts

If you take away nothing else from this brief dive into otherworldy physics, remember: this universe runs on different rules than our own.

I’ll say this again, because it bears repeating: this universe runs on different rules than our own. From time to time, I’ll take a guess at those rules and how they work. But those rules exist, and they are mostly consistent throughout the series, something the writers deserve a great deal of credit for.

I may poke and prod at some of TNG’s ideas about physics in general, and artificial intelligence in particular. We’ve come a long way in 30 years and learned a lot about how physics, intelligence, and computers work. But I’ll try not to let it ruin the fun.