The Physics of Star Trek Read Free

to leave the inertial dampers hanging without
     at least some concrete description of how they would have to operate. From what I have
     argued, they must create an artificial world inside a starship in which the reaction force
     that responds to the accelerating force is canceled. The objects inside the ship are
     “tricked” into acting as though they were not accelerating. I have described how
     accelerating gives you the same feeling as being pulled at by gravity. This connection,
     which was the basis of Einstein's general theory of relativity, is much more intimate than
     it may at first seem. Thus there is only one choice for the modus operandi of these
     gadgets: they must set up an artificial gravitational field inside the ship which “pulls”
     in the opposite direction to the reaction force, thereby canceling it out.
    Even if you buy such a possibility, other practical issues must be dealt with. For one
     thing, it takes some time for the inertial dampers to kick in when unexpected impulses
     arise. For example, when the
    
    
     Enterprise
    
    
     was bumped into a causality loop by the
    
    
     Bozeman
    
    
     as the latter vessel emerged from a temporal distortion, the crew was thrown all about the
     bridge (even before the breach in the warp core and the failure of the dampers). I have
     read in the
    
    
     Enterprise's
    
    
     technical specifications that the response time for the inertial dampers is about 60
     milliseconds.
    
    
     2
    
    
     Short as this may seem, it would be long enough to kill you if the same delay occurred
     during programmed periods of acceleration. To convince yourself, think how long it takes
     for a hammer to smash your head open, or how long it takes for the ground to kill you if
     you hit it after falling off of a cliff in Yosemite. Just remember that a collision at 10
     miles per hour is equivalent to running full speed into a brick wall! The inertial dampers
     had better be pretty quick to respond. More than one trekker I know has remarked that
     whenever the ship
    
    
     is
    
    
     buffeted, no one ever gets thrown more than a few feet.
    Before leaving the familiar world of classical physics, I can't help mentioning another
     technological marvel that must confront Newton's laws in order to operate: the
    
    
     Enterprise's
    
    
     tractor beamhighlighted in the rescue of the Genome colony on Moab IV, when it deflected
     an approaching stellar core fragment, and in a similar (but failed) attempt to save Bre'el
     IV by pushing an asteroidal moon back into its orbit. On the face of it, the tractor beam
     seems simple enoughmore or less like an invisible rope or rodeven if the force exerted may
     be exotic. Indeed, just like a strong rope, the tractor beam often does a fine job of
     pulling in a shuttle craft, towing another ship, or inhibiting the escape of an enemy
     spacecraft. The only problem is that when we pull something with a rope, we must be
     anchored to the ground or to something else heavy. Anyone who has ever been skating knows
     what happens if you are on the ice and you try to push someone away from you. You do
     manage to separate, but at your own expense. Without any firm grounding, you are a
     helpless victim of your own inertia.
    It was this very principle that prompted Captain Jean-Luc Picard to order Lieutenant Riker
     to turn off the tractor beam in the episode “The Battle”; Picard pointed out that the ship
     they were towing would be carried along beside them by its own momentumits inertia. By the
     same token, if the
    
    
     Enterprise
    
    
     were to attempt to use the tractor beam to ward off the
    
    
     Stargazer,
    
    
     the resulting force would push the
    
    
     Enterprise
    
    
     backward as effectively as it would
    push the
    
    
     Stargazer
    
    
     forward.
    This phenomenon has already dramatically affected the way we work in space at present.
     Say, for example, that you are an astronaut