[Home]Physics and Star Trek/Miscellaneous where they got it wrong

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Here is a miscellaneous collection of Star Trek "gaffes".

In space no-one can hear you scream - a constant feature of any episode is the reverberations of sound: the Enterprise? blasting into warp, firing the phasers, villains' ships exploding. Simple fact - sound is a physical wave, and a physical wave must have a medium to travel through. Space is a vacuum, so no sound is ever possible.

Getting rid of baryons - in the Next Generation episode entitled "Starship Mine", the Enterprise docks at a space station to get those pesky baryons removed. Baryons (we are told) build up on the hull of the spaceship as a result of warp travel, and the ship needs to be "cleaned" periodically. There is a slight problem with this - the only stable baryons known to exist are protons and neutrons, which constitute the nucleus of all atoms, and hence are the core of all the visible matter in the universe. Getting rid of the baryons would unfortunately eliminate the Enterprise entirely.


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Last edited November 8, 2001 4:35 pm by ManningBartlett (diff)
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