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By Michael Eilers
Arizona Daily Wildcat
November 14, 1996
If any fan or relative of yours is a "Trekkie" (or "Trekker," as the serious ones insist on being called) then you are aware of the dominant personality trait shared by all "Star Trek" fans: they are amazingly anal nitpickers. For a group of diehard fans, the post-episode discussion can go on longer than the show itself.
Yet their nitpicking takes place inside the show, within the universe created by Gene Roddenberry and his writers/cronies. A universe where all aliens (including first-contact species) speak English, the laws of space and time are routinely ignored, and there's always a subspace anomaly when you need one.
Enter The Physics of Star Trek. This slim, sparkling purple volume takes "Star Trek" to task, subjecting that fantasy world of physical impossibilities to the harsh reality of hard science. Author Lawrence M. Krauss, who's credentials aren't mentioned (though they must be formidable) covers everything from basic Newtonian physics to extremely esoteric quantum theory in surprisingly plain speech and with canny examples.
Not happy with merely listing the many ways the "Star Trek" writers have been "wrong," Krauss makes the point numerous times that the Trek writers are often surprisingly near the truth, and even ahead of their time. In fact, an early episode featured a "black hole" over a year before the phenomenon was named or seriously documented. Concepts such as "warp drive" and wormholes in space are not only theoretical possibilities, but serious topics of discussion in the field.
Krauss' talent for synthesis is well-developed. He manages to run the gamut from Newton to Einstein to Stephen Hawking (who provides the foreward to the book) and from pool table physics to quantum esoterica keep both himself and the reader sane. The last time I had in a hard science class was in high school, yet I managed to "get" most of the things Krauss discussed.
It was actually a guilty pleasure to see the most basic tenets of the "Star Trek" universe shot all to hell as total impossibilities. Transporters, warp drive, antimatter propulsion, phasers - all the basic ingredients of the series tend to fall to pieces under the lens of science. Not that this was any surprise. Finding out that the amount of energy needed to "transport" someone is equivalent to the power of one thousand one-megaton hydrogen bombs really didn't faze me, nor break my heart.
This book is in serious danger of a "so what's the point?" attack - after all, most people don't watch "Star Trek" for physics lectures, they want to see special effects and alien cleavage. So Scotty won't be beaming me up anytime soon-who cares? People still went to see "Star Wars" even though the ships made sound when they exploded in a vacuum.
The truth, so they say, is in the telling, and this is where The Physics of Star Trek succeeds. There's enough good, basic science in this volume to make quantum physics accessible to the common man, and dammit, that's a good thing. Even life-long English majors such as myself can get a grasp on time/space dilation and the four-dimensional universe. A friend of mine at the University of Illinois said this book is assigned in some 200-level science classes as basic reading.
The only thing this book needs is more illustrations-the skimpy line drawings are pretty lame. Chalk that up to Paramount's brutal licensing fees. All in all, this is a surprisingly solid book with some nice sideline discussions on the nature of science fiction itself.
And for those nitpicking trekkers, there's a comprehensive index.
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