Resources on the "Scientific Unrealism" of Trek

[Kurgan]

This is tangentially related to the debate over categorizing Star Trek vs. Star Wars (Sci Fi vs. Fantasy), if you're curious, but I am looking for any good resources on the Scientific Unrealism of Trek, preferrably handy online resources.

Now I read Mike's entire page sometime between 2003 and 2005, but I don't have it all memorized and frankly haven't looked through it in years. I remember the canon database talked about some things, but I don't recall precisely where stuff was laid out specifically.

What I'm really after are Trek episodes I could point people to that have some extremely bogus "science" in them, or examples of obvious "fantasy," not just general inaccuracies like characters who are "human alien half breeds" or sound in space, etc.

Like Voyager's "Threshold" or TNG's "Genesis" for mangling of science, and episodes like "Who Mourns of Adonais" and the various Q episodes for fantasy. That sort of thing.

Like the episode in TOS where sonic weapons are effective against the Enterprise or they find a crack in the event horizon of a black hole in Voyager. Or the episodes where people get possessed by super beings or magical "evolution" type episodes. Yes, I've seen every episode of Trek, but it's been six years, and I don't have the time anymore to go back over every single one. So I appeal to y'alls superior collected knowledge.

Thanks in advance!

PS: If you think this belongs in "Pure Trek" then my apologies.

[Captain Seafort]

"The Chase" (TNG series 6) springs to mind as an example of evolution being mangled almost as badly as Threshold.

[Darth Wong]

This is pretty old now, so it's nowhere near comprehensive, but the old Empire site still has the database on it, and you can do a quick search of realism-related entries:

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Dat ... ry=Realism

It would have been nice if I had the time to keep up with each new series as it came out, but I never kept it up, so it stops partway into DS9. I would love to take the time to go back over the old database and bring it up to snuff, but there are sooo many things I'd love to have the time to do.

[Samuel]

Any episode with psionics.
Any episode with ghosts.

Psionics occurs in the pilot, is the backround for Troy, Spock and Kes and is blatantly magic. There are also individual episodes like The Traveler where it goes beyond just messing with people's minds and into physically manipulating reality like classical magic.

[Kurgan]

Thanks for the link, Mike!

Yeah, thanks, individual episode names would be best!

I remember "inoculation against radiation" being featured in First Contact (and at least one other TNG episode, maybe more).

"Where No Man Has Gone Before" dealt with ESPers in TOS as did "The Cage" (also the unaired pilot).

What was that DS9 episode where they found those artifacts that manipulated the laws of probability and made people on the station start having bad luck?

And what was the name of that Episode where Dr. Crusher had the boyfriend who was a ghost (sorry "anaphasic lifeform")?

[Samuel]

Rivals and Sub Rosa respectively.

Don't forget Eye of the Eholder with empathetic echo!

[Kurgan]

Any episode with Phasers "vaporizing" people I guess would count too.

TOS is a big offender with godlike beings... was the one with the Organians "Day of the Dove"?

Then there's "Charlie X" with the boy wonder.

But I think most of the time when people think of "scientifically accurate" they are thinking of NextTrek.

[Darth Wong]

It seems almost unfair to me to go after TOS for scientific realism, since they had no pretensions of such when they made the show. TNG, on the other hand, absolutely did have pretensions of scientific realism.

[Batman]

But I think most of the time when people think of "scientifically accurate" they are thinking of NextTrek.

When the reverse is true. Yes, TOS didn't follow the laws of physics any more than TNG+ Trek did, but at least they usually didn't try to pretend otherwise by making up (usually nonsensical and occasionally FACTUALLY WRONG) technobabble explanations.

[Kurgan]

Yeah, and I should have asked this, but I wonder if this would mean my friend would classify TOS as "fantasy" while NextTrek would be "Sci Fi"?

I swear there was a TOS episode where Kirk was talking to Scotty over the intercom to save the ship by "reversing the polarity" and apparently all that meant was turning his screwdriver handle around (LOL!).

[Batman]

Oh, and how about TNG's either/or depiction of radiation damage? You were exposed to it for too long, you died. If you WEREN'T, you...were perfectly fine, with no ill effects AT ALL. Even when you were exposed to within SECONDS of the lethal threshold. I'm no radiologist but I'm reasonably certain that's NOT the way it works in the real world.

[Darth Wong]

Oh, and how about TNG's either/or depiction of radiation damage? You were exposed to it for too long, you died. If you WEREN'T, you...were perfectly fine, with no ill effects AT ALL. Even when you were exposed to within SECONDS of the lethal threshold. I'm no radiologist but I'm reasonably certain that's NOT the way it works in the real world.

Yeah, it's downright hilarious to watch some of those episodes. "Lethal exposure in 2 minutes. 60 seconds. 30 seconds! 20 seconds! 10 seconds! Whew! We got away just in time!" As if it's a time-bomb.

[Flagg]

Didn't they use some form of "radiation inoculation" or something along those lines?

[Darth Servo]

or they find a crack in the event horizon of a black hole in Voyager.

That would be Parallax.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zdOyxjVJBs

I recommend watching all of Chuck's videos as he rips the episodes several new assholes each.

[bz249]

There was a DS9 episode where a little device manipulated the laws of probability (don't remember the title) to a level that even the spin of neutrinos was altered... yet it had no more effect than who was winning on gambling. Nice example of the deep non-understanding how quantum-mechanics works (for a series who use quantum three times per episode).

Another nice unscientific thing is the use of technobabble... which sounds like Scientific English. But Scientific English is an artificial language only used in written articles and sometimes in conferences. Close colleagues never use it because they knew what equipment is referred as "fuckin shit" or "piece of junk".

[Kurgan]

The inoculation against radiation appears in TNG, I just don't remember what episode(s). First Contact the movie had it, defiantly.

There's an episode where Picard is transported out into space in a "cloud" and yet his soul is somehow able to be sensed by Troi on the Enterprise.

There was a DS9 episode where a little device manipulated the laws of probability (don't remember the title) to a level that even the spin of neutrinos was altered... yet it had no more effect than who was winning on gambling. Nice example of the deep non-understanding how quantum-mechanics works (for a series who use quantum three times per episode).

It was a particularly silly episode, I think it was from the first season (when nothing was happening). My brother and I watched it and both of us thought it was pretty ludicrous, even for a Trek episode.

Technobabble was tolerable when Data was saying it, because it was part of his character to be "ridiculously precise" to the point of annoyance. But it really got old. I guess for some folks it made them feel like they were "in" Star Trek... like it was comforting or something ("ah, just like old times") but it's a part of the show that I don't miss, and yeah, the more you know, the sillier it gets. I imagine its the Scientist's equivalent of watching the Da Vinci Code for a historian or biblical scholar.

[Samuel]

Lonely amoung us.

[Wyrm]

I can't believe we've come this far without mentioning Rascals' RVN bullshit. The reason people mature is because they fucking grow, and during adolescence a hormone bath causes that growth to modify the child body into an adult body. The RVNs, which acquire additional sequences as one ages, and reverses aging when they are truncated, is completely made up fantasy of how the human body works. The closest it comes to reality is in the telomeres, but they shorten as we age, not lengthen.

While one's epigenome does change as one ages, there's no one-to-one correspondance between age and methylation tags/histone changes. If there is any effect of changing the epigenome severely enough to cause deaging, you'd turn into a blob of stem cells, not a child.

[Darth Lucifer]

...was the one with the Organians "Day of the Dove"?

"Errand of Mercy" is the title...but yeah, the one with the non-corporeal alien that feeds of anger and fear is another one of those space ghosts.

"Juggernaut", "Inside Man", "One Small Step", "Workforce," and "Endgame" are VOY eps that feature inoculation against radiation. I'm searching TwizTV.com for mention of radiation inoculants in TNG (will try to post later). And IIRC in "Shattered" there's some kind of inoculant against time. Fucking TIME.

In TNG "Conspiracy" The neural parasites make the host's glands produce adrenaline and make them immune to phaser blasts, except on maximum.

In TNG "Time Squared," the power systems of the duplicate shuttle that was recovered do not work unless they get a "variable phase inverter." Geordi and Data try a positive adjustment, which they say is the right thing to do but it doesn't work. Then they make a negative adjustment (which shouldn't work) and voila! Let there be light! It's like the shuttle came from Bizarro World or something.

[Darth Wong]

The thing about Star Trek is that they sprinkle so many stupid and unrealistic things into their writing that people tend to only point out the really glaring ones. But look at all the little things, like taking an image which is a jumble of pixels, saying "enhance the image" and getting a crystal clear picture. Are these writers honestly so fucking stupid that they think sufficiently advanced computers can actually do that? Just how far does this "it's advanced so it can do anything" idiocy go?

[bz249]

The thing about Star Trek is that they sprinkle so many stupid and unrealistic things into their writing that people tend to only point out the really glaring ones. But look at all the little things, like taking an image which is a jumble of pixels, saying "enhance the image" and getting a crystal clear picture. Are these writers honestly so fucking stupid that they think sufficiently advanced computers can actually do that? Just how far does this "it's advanced so it can do anything" idiocy go?

Of course it can... you can do anything with a jumble of pixels.

Well the result will be much more characteristic to "enhancement function/kernel" than to the original image. If you do it really well you can have the same image whatever the initial jumble of pixels was.

The picture enhancement people are just plain lucky who knows what is intended to be in the picture so they easily find the right enhancement function which creates that picture from any resource.

[Kurgan]

The thing about Star Trek is that they sprinkle so many stupid and unrealistic things into their writing that people tend to only point out the really glaring ones. But look at all the little things, like taking an image which is a jumble of pixels, saying "enhance the image" and getting a crystal clear picture. Are these writers honestly so fucking stupid that they think sufficiently advanced computers can actually do that? Just how far does this "it's advanced so it can do anything" idiocy go?

Definite no-limits fallacy.

Yeah, but as many agree, that's a common cliche in spy films and detective movies too. Sort of like the action/war movie unrealism cliches that are also rampant in Sci Fi.

Not that I don't want to hear about such things... great thread!

[Isolder74]

lets add almost any version of Star Trek Technobabble. When will we get it through writer's heads that stringing together a bunch of fancy sounding words does not make science?

[RedImperator]

Don't forget, phasers don't have trigger guards.

I'm glad Kurgan made this thread, because it's been, like, two days since the last "hurf hurf, Trek sux!" thread, and this forum has a reputation to maintain.

[Captain Seafort]

lets add almost any version of Star Trek Technobabble. When will we get it through writer's heads that stringing together a bunch of fancy sounding words does not make science?

Out of curiosity, are there any examples in Trek of technobabble used properly?