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‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ to End With Season 2 (EXCLUSIVE), Joe Otterson, Variety

Topics: Civilization, Einstein, Literature, Space Exploration, Special Relativity, Star Trek

Magic Carpet Physics

In the TNG Movie, “Star Trek: First Contact,” Captain Picard, Commander Riker, Counselor Troi, Dr. Beverly Crusher, Lieutenant Commander Joardi Laforge, Lieutenant Commander Worf and Lieutenant Commander Data defied Causality and Relativity once again to do the “slingshot” thing their predecessors, James T. Kirk, Spock, et al, were all so famous for doing on TOS (The Original Star Trek for the non-Trekkies out there). Zephram Cochrane (the fictional creator of warp drive) almost scrubbed the mission because of a missing CD playing the appropriate tune, “Magic Carpet Ride,” (by the rock band, Steppenwolf) on the maiden voyage of the Phoenix, which everyone in my theater cheered, unbeknownst to them that it was (to me) a tongue-in-cheek to the absurdity of breaking the universe’s speed limit, and thereby allowing the audacity of time travelers to affect past events.

As an undergraduate physics major, I took “Classical Mechanics,” which did a lot of Newtonian mechanics, but went deep into Lorentz Transformation, pivotal to understanding the Special Theory of Relativity as it relates to time, mass, and length contraction as an object, or a person, approaches the speed of light.

Colloquially, "Warp Factor One" is supposed to be light speed, 186,232 miles/second, or 300,000 kilometers/second. The formulas in Einstein's Special Relativity, tables, and their implications follow.

There are websites you can do these calculations, but I thought it better to talk through these one by one, then discuss the reason for the creative ways screenwriters avoided the conundrum of time dilation, massive astronauts compressed into gelatinous goo, and the hilarious technobabble (Sir Patrick Steward’s term, not mine) of “Inertia Dampeners” and “Heisenberg Compensators.”

The Demise of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, and Maybe, Sci-Fi

As I read the screeds of “old heads” (some I agree with, and some points I don’t) that “Star Fleet Academy’s” demise did not start this season, and end next season: the downfall of Star Trek as a franchise began with the premiere of Star Trek: Enterprise, September 26, 2001, fifteen days AFTER September 11, 2001, when the nominal equivalent of Khan Noonian Singh convinced his cult followers to plunge planes into buildings. In contrast, “24” premiered on November 6, 2001, and revenge porn against “evil doers” and “bad hombres” became the zeitgeist of America. We're more armed to the hilt than any other Western nation, kill each other with such regularity that gun massacres are not "front page news," ever ready for "jackbooted thugs," Armageddon, and the Rapture with Jesus parting the clouds with an AR15. Paramount gave us an optimistic Captain Jonathan Archer for five seasons. On the heels of 9/11, it was probably not the best time for a show about humanity living beyond its adolescence.

Fox Entertainment gave us vengeance and Jack Bauer for nine. Vengeance, in all its forms, from military deployments to Sci-Fi to superhero genres, stuck.

Starfleet and military protocol

Captain Nahla Ake, played by the actress Holly Hunter, as Commandant of Starfleet Academy, walked around the Academy and the Starship Athena in her stocking feet, and curled up in the Captain's chair with a good book. I'm an Air Force veteran and an avid Trekkie. I have no memory of James T. Kirk, Benjamin Lafayette Sisko, Kathryn Janeway, Jonathan Archer, Carol Freeman (voiced by Dawnn Lewis), Michael Burnham, or Christopher Pike, curling up in the Captain's chair like it's their living room! Starfleet was patterned after the US Navy; creator Gene Roddenberry and James Doohan ("Scotty") were both WWII veterans in the Army Air Force and Canadian Air Force, respectively. "Starfleet Academy and Oxford both serve as elite, historic, and demanding institutions aimed at cultivating elite, knowledgeable leaders. While Oxford focuses on academic tradition, humanity, and scientific research, Starfleet Academy trains students for space exploration and military service, often compared in structure and discipline to institutions like the U.S. Air Force Academy." Google AI

A space opera working every modern trope, and patterned after "90210" in the current mood of the country, probably doesn't have a long shelf life either. As an "old head," the tropes felt recycled: Anthony Rapp and Wilson Cruz made history on Star Trek: Discovery as the first openly LGBT married couple in the franchise's history. There were a lot of crass comments online from "old heads," the same, I assume, who have issues with Starfleet Academy in its current iteration. I'm sure that even in Worf's time, there were LGBT Klingons, just as their analog here on Earth were LGBT Samurai. In Picard, Season 3, Episode 3, Worf gave his resume of badassery and offered Chamomile Tea. Riker fell in love with a nonbinary alien in Next Generation. Jadzia Dax, in several of her Trill lives, had been both sexes, often referred to by Benjamin Sisko as "old man" (because, when a younger Benjamin Sisko, before he knew he was a religious icon to the Bajoran people, met the Dax symbiont, their expression was as an elderly man).

Thus, Jay-Den Kraag, as an openly gay Klingon, seemed like a retread of a trope that had been successful in previous iterations of Trek but did not fit the framework of a warrior-class Klingon. Like the Samurai, I'm sure that the Klingon had same-sex relationships, and like wolves, as long as you protect the young in the pack, or Qo'Nos, you're good! A "pacifist healer rather than a warrior," who did not perform the first ritual kill with his father, didn't seem Klingon. I'm as sure as the fictional Klingons having LGBT as having doctors, except, instead of the Hippocratic Oath ("do no harm"), they grant you an honorable death that will land you in Sto'Vo'Kor. I was surprised that his father didn't try to ritually kill him, rather than scream and abandon him. So "un-Klingon."

Despite impossible physics, Star Trek, unbeknownst to its detractors, was "woke" from the beginning. Like all good fiction, it's supposed to be a mirror of the human condition, not a science seminar. "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was a stark warning on the ultimate result of racial or social class hatred: annihilation on both sides, the haters and the hated. The Original Star Trek was born in the crucible of the Civil Rights movement, beloved by Dr. Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King, to the point that he convinced Nichelle Nichols not to quit the show after its first season, so that our people could "see themselves in the future" (it was the only show the Kings let their children stay up late to see). Trope pasting is lazy writing and a disservice to an otherwise talented cast.

I wish all the actors well. We will be more likely than starships to build more relationships on the only planet suited uniquely for human life. There are no Vulcans on the horizon. If humanity is to survive, it will do so with cooperation and less hoarding of resources by the rich. No beneficent aliens or superluminal starships: ALL of us.

(Credit: ktsdesign/Shutterstock)

Topics: Astrobiology, Astrophysics, Civilization, Existentialism, Philosophy, Special Relativity

The Cold War was a genesis of angst about the future due to the detonation of the atomic bomb by the Soviet Union in Kazakstan in 1949. After WWII (WWI was originally called, "the war to END all wars," until the sequel), the existential nervousness is understandable. Extraterrestrials, or musings about them, let humans off the hook if the Earth is rendered dystopic, and uninhabitable (with respect to "War of the Worlds" Martians), and some more advanced species to come to save us from our screw-ups (Star Trek Vulcans). Trek aliens that aren't that hospitable are the Gorn and Klingons. Neither of which I'd prefer to see on first contact. However, the vast distance between stars, relativistic speeds, and the drag of mass on even reaching a fraction of the speed of light make that possibility remote.

*****

In September 1961, Barney and Betty Hill were driving late at night in the mountains of New Hampshire when they saw a flying object whizzing in the sky. Barney thought it was a plane until he saw it swiftly switch directions.

According to The Interrupted Journey, the couple nervously continued driving until a spacecraft confronted them. They remembered seeing “humanoid-like” creatures and hearing pinging sounds reverberating off their car trunk. And then, they found themselves 35 miles further along on the highway with almost no memory of what had just transpired. They believed they had been abducted.

Scholars mark 1947 as the start of the UFO fascination. A pilot flying in the Cascade Mountains in Washington state reported seeing disc-shaped objects. In the next decade, aliens were primarily seen as benevolent, intelligent beings who came to Earth to offer advice or warnings.

In 1961, the Hills reported their abduction, and stories about aliens became more sinister. Social scientists, like famed psychologist Carl Jung, analyzed the UFO obsession and found it fit neatly with humans’ long fascination with heavenly ascents. Whereas past societies looked for angels, saints, or Gods to descend from the heavens, modern Americans were looking for “technological angels.”

Starting in the 1960s, aliens were both benign angels and menacing demons, which prompted some religious scholars to see UFO fixation as a modern religious movement.

Our Fascination With Aliens and When it All Started, Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi, Discover Magazine

Image source: link below

Topics: Applied Physics, Einstein, General Relativity, Special Relativity

According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, first published in 1905, light can be converted into matter when two light particles collide with intense force. But, try as they might, scientists have never been able to do this. No one could create the conditions needed to transform light into matter — until now.

Physicists claim to have generated matter from pure light for the first time — a spectacular display of Einstein’s most famous equation.

This is a significant breakthrough, overcoming a theoretical barrier that seemed impossible only a few decades ago.

What does E=mc² mean? The world’s most famous equation is both straightforward and beyond comprehension at the same time: “Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.” 

At its most fundamental level, it means energy and mass are various forms of the same thing. Energy may transform into mass and vice versa under the right circumstances. 

However, imagine a light beam transforming into, say, a paper clip, and it seems like pure magic. That’s where the “speed of light squared” factors in. It determines how much energy a paper clip or any piece of matter contains. The speed of light is the factor needed to make mass and energy equal. If every atom in a paper clip could be converted to pure energy, it would generate 18 kilotons of TNT. That’s around the size of the Hiroshima bomb from 1945. 

(Still can’t picture it? Me neither.) 

You can go the other way, too: if you crash two highly energized light particles, or photons, into each other, then you can create energy and mass. It sounds simple enough, but no one has been able to make it happen.

Since they couldn’t accelerate light particles, the team opted for ions and used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to accelerate them at extreme speeds. In two accelerator rings at RHIC, the accelerated gold ions to 99.995% of the speed of light. With 79 protons, a gold ion has a strong positive charge. When a charged heavy ion is accelerated to incredible speeds, a strong magnetic field swirls around it. 

That magnetic field produces “virtual photons.” So, in a roundabout way, they accelerated light particles by piggybacking them on an ion.

When the team sped the ions in the accelerator rings with significant energy, the ions nearly collided, allowing the photon clouds surrounding them to interact and form an electron-positron pair — essentially, matter. They published their work in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Scientists observed what Einstein predicted a century ago, Teresa Carey, Free Think