The Physics of Star Trek Read Free Page A

assigned to tighten a bolt on the Hubble Space
     Telescope. If you take an electric screwdriver with you to do the job, you are in for a
     rude awakening after you drift over to the offending bolt. When you switch on the
     screwdriver as it is pressed against the bolt, you are as likely to start spinning around
     as the bolt is to turn. This is because the Hubble Telescope is a lot heavier than you
     are. When the screwdriver applies a force to the bolt, the reaction force you feel may
     more easily turn you than the bolt, especially if the bolt is still fairly tightly secured
     to the frame. Of course, if you are lucky enough, like the assassins of Chancellor Gorkon,
     to have gravity boots that secure you snugly to whatever you are standing on, then you can
     move about as efficiently as we are used to on Earth.
    Likewise, you can see what will happen if the
    
    
     Enterprise
    
    
     tries to pull another spacecraft toward it. Unless the
    
    
     Enterprise
    
    
     is very much heavier, it will move toward the other object when the tractor beam turns on,
     rather than vice versa. In the depths of space, this distinction is a meaningless semantic
     one. With no reference system nearby, who is to say who is pulling whom? However, if you
     are on a hapless planet like Moab IV in the path of a renegade star, it makes a great deal
     of difference whether the
    
    
     Enterprise
    
    
     pushes the star aside or the star pushes the
    
    
     Enterprise
    
    
     aside!
    One trekker I know claims that the way around this problem is already stated indirectly in
     at least one episode: if the
    
    
     Enterprise
    
    
     were to use its impulse engines at the same time that it turned its tractor beam on, it
     could, by applying an opposing force with its own engines, compensate for any recoil it
     might feel when it pushed or pulled on something. This trekker claims that somewhere it is
     stated that the tractor beam requires the impulse drive to be operational in order to
     work. I, however, have never noticed any instructions from Kirk or Picard to turn on the
     impulse engines at the same time the tractor beam is used. And in fact, for a society
     capable of designing and building inertial dampers, I don't think such a brute force
     solution would be necessary. Reminded of Geordi LaForge's need for a warp field to attempt
     to push back the moon at Bre'el IV, I think a careful, if presently unattainable,
     manipulation of space and time would do the trick equally well. To understand why, we need
     to engage the inertial dampers and accelerate to the modern world of curved space and time.

The Physics of Star Trek

CHAPTER TWO
    EINSTEIN Raises
    There once was a lady named Bright, Who traveled much faster than light. She departed one
     day, in a relative way, And returned on the previous night.
    
    
     Anonymous
    “Time, the final frontier”or so, perhaps, each Star Trek episode should begin. Thirty
     years ago, in the classic episode “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” the round-trip time travels of
     the
    
    
     Enterprise
    
    
     began. (Actually, at the end of an earlier episode, “The Naked Time,” the
    
    
     Enterprise
    
    
     is thrown back in time three days
    
    
     but
    
    
     it is only a one-way trip.) The starship is kicked back to twentieth-century Earth as a
     result of a close encounter with a “black star” (the term “black hole” having not yet
     permeated the popular culture). Nowadays exotica like wormholes and “quantum
     singularities” regularly spice up episodes of
    
    
     Star Trek: Voyager,
    
    
     the latest series. Thanks to Albert Einstein and those who have followed in his footsteps,
     the very fabric of spacetime is filled with drama.
    While every one of us is a time traveler, the cosmic pathos that elevates human history to
     the level of tragedy arises precisely because we seem doomed to travel in only one
     directioninto the future. What wouldn't any of