Are We There Yet: An examination of how Star Trek violates Heisenberg and Einstein
2004 03 12
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You need to get across town and you're late, lazy, in a rush, or just don't want to waste time, and all you're thinking is how fast you can get there. What's the best way? Bus? Cab? Subway? All of these seem insufficient to your needs as you hit upon the one sure way to get there as fast as you can say "Beam me up, Scotty!" or "Warp factor 9. Engage!" That's right. You head for the nearest transporter pad or docking bay. You've seen it work on nearly every episode of Star Trek from the original series to Voyager, as the glass of water with sparkles in it 1 shimmers away various crewmembers and shimmers them back into existence somewhere else, or the ship snaps out of sight in a blazing light wake. There's only one problem with that futuristic vision of travel faster than the TGV 2; it isn't possible.
The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa." (Heisenberg, 1927)
This states the "uncertainty relation" between the position and the momentum of a subatomic particle, such as an electron, and impacts on such things as the future behaviour of a particle. What does it mean? It means that while we can know where an atom in Captain Picard's hand is now, that's all we can know about it. We can't know where it is now at the same time as knowing where it will be after now; nor can we know its present position and its velocity at the same time. In quantum mechanics, all particles behave in a wave-like manner, and, as such, only objects larger than their wavelengths can disturb them - anything smaller would just slip through the wave crests leaving nary a trace. So, if we wish to scan the properties of an individual atom in Picard's body using waves of light, we face a very significant problem.
The energy of individual particles of light (known as photons) is inversely related to its wavelength. That is, the smaller the particle of light, the greater the energy it possesses. We must decrease the wavelengths of the light (and thus increase their energy) so that the atom we're attempting to scan can disturb them. If we zap an atom with photons of a high enough energy to observe it, we will certainly know where that atom was when observed, but the energy transferred to the atom by the high-energy light waves will alter the motion and velocity of the atom by some amount - by amounts that we cannot predict. Now, if we consider how the transporter works, by scanning an atom after the computers have locked on to their target, we begin to grasp what the aforementioned problem is: By the time we know where the atom we've just scanned is, it's already gone somewhere else - somewhere we can't determine.
The third phase of the transporter process is dematerialisation of the particles just scanned. But, by the time they've been scanned, they've moved, so the dematerialisation unit can't be locking on to what's been scanned - it's not where it was when it got locked on to. Even if Captain Picard stood absolutely still during the transporter process, his insides certainly don't. The transporter would have to completely suspend every single atom in his body, and every part of those atoms, in order for things to be exactly where they need to be between one phase of the transportation process and another. But if we consider the quantum mechanics just mentioned, the energy required to suspend the atoms would change them, moving or altering them in some fashion. The wise techies in the Star Trek universe may have introduced "Heisenberg compensators" that can resolve objects at the quantum level, but they never do explain to us how they work, only state that they do. The very name of those compensators, in fact, implies that the uncertainty principle is just an assumption, not an absolute physical law.
Einstein's theory of relativity is something else we've come to accept as a law, and something else violated neatly by the same wise Trek techies that found a way around Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Part of the theory of relativity says that we cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Yet that's precisely what we're told is happening whenever the warp engines are engaged. A warp engine works by distorting the space-time continuum, pushing a vessel like the Enterprise into subspace, and, by doing so, reduces the Enterprise's mass. Once its mass has been reduced, the Enterprise can overcome the restrictions imposed by Einstein's general theory of relativity (E=mc2) and accelerate to speeds exceeding that of light. Thankfully, this mysterious subspace exists, otherwise the Enterprise would have to find something to do with all the mass they are now pretending doesn't exist. The matter of the universe cannot just disappear as if it had never been. Either it exists as solid matter, or it exists as energy.
The crews of various incarnations of the Enterprise constantly busy themselves using transporter technology and warp engines to do increasingly impossible things, using terminology that sounds plausible to the untrained ear, and teasing us with a future that seems full of light and magic. The transporters would work wonderfully if we ignored the existance of quantum mechanics, and warp would certainly be advantageous if Einstein's theory of general relativity were ignored. Yet not even the contradictory science of Star Trek ignores them completely.
1: This is apparently how the visual affect of transporting was achieved on the original Star Trek series - they shook sparkles in a glass of water.
2: The TGV (Tres Grande Vitesse) is a faster-than-usual train used on the rail system in France.