🚨CALLING ALL TREKKIES🚨 This just in, Star Trek is WRONG!🖖

🚨CALLING ALL TREKKIES🚨 This just in, Star Trek is WRONG!

🖖Learn exactly how "wrong" it is in our episode with Charles Liu titled, "Spacetime, Premonitions, & Brachistochrone Problem with Neil deGrasse Tyson & Charles Liu"

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Science meets pop culture on StarTalk! Astrophysicist & Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson, his comic co-hosts, guest celebrities & scientists discuss astronomy, physics, and everything else about life in the universe. Keep Looking Up!

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[Cato-ep]

" How dare you ?, take that back rn, take it back !" Omg 😂🤣😭

[davidguthary]

"The Orville" (a TV show which is essentially a love letter to Star Trek) has an episode addressing this very issue. Starships in "The Orville" use a "quantum field" to negate the impact of relativistic effects which happen when traveling near or above the speed of light. When the crew of the Orville get stranded in 2015 by a broken time travel device, they simply turn off this field and fly at the speed of light for a few minutes to get back to their own time.

[alphanerd]

The problem with the concept of Star Trek FTL is people keep assuming that the object itself is what is travelling at that speed. That would be what breaks causality. The object is actually rather stationary. It's the fabric of space that is moving around the object that imparts the appearance of FTL travel. Additionally, the idea of subspace communications could have a real world equivalent through quantum entanglement.

[Lechuga]

I don't know a lot about Star Trek, but I thought the "Warp Speed" warps space time to compress space in front of the realspace bubble. As far as I'm aware that doesn't break any laws. A ship doesn't move through space faster than light, it bends space around it faster than the speed of light while moving at subspace speeds.

[jackechan]

`Things are only impossible until they are not.` - Picard

[MarkLLawrence]

Beating a radio signal to it's destination is no different than beating a postcard to it's destination. As long as you aren't traveling backwards in time and interfering with the sending, there is no causality problem.

[wizardsuth]

If I sound a very loud air horn and then fire an artillery shell, the shell may arrive at a target 10 km away before the sound of the air horn does without violating causality. Why would a starship outrunning photons violate causality? People on the destination planet might see the ship appear to move backwards, but that's just an illusion.

[nelsonhunter-valls]

Didn't Miguel Alcubierre author a paper in the 90s outlining how you could travel faster than light without violating general relativity? I agree that wouldn't resolve how they communicate by "Subspace", but an Alcubierre drive at least mathematically would allow a vessel travels faster than light because the vessel itself isn't moving, rather the space around it is warped, and the vessel stays stationary. Much in the same way that a surfer stays stationary on their surfboard as they ride a wave.

[Child_of_woe_]

if there's one thing I've learned it's that just because it goes against our understanding of something doesn't necessarily mean it's impossible because the best thing about science is there's always new discoveries being made so just because we can't do it doesn't mean we couldn't find a way to do it in say 200+ years

[valinn]

Reducing this to a kitchen table level of understanding, jow is this any different from this scenario:

I mail a letter to my neighbors warning them that the trash will be picked up a day early this week, but then I bump into the husband and tell him in person that afternoon. He takes action to make sure the trash is ready to go out early before the letter arrives informing his family. He acted before the information arrived at his home, but we haven't violated Causality.

[DGPHolyHandgrenade]

The problem here is that Warp Speed is kind of a misnomer. The way warp bubbles work is they drop out of space and appear in a different space, this allows things to go very quick but they're not violating relativity or physics as we know them. They're just oscillating in space and punching through to shorten the distance in actual space. This is why you cant track something going warp speed, because it doesnt exist in the fabric of space; there's no speed or trajectory; you have to find when it pops out of warp. This is also why the relativistic time dialations dont have any effects; because they're not travelling at those speeds, they're just covering the distance by warping the space.

[timomarkson]

Sub space is a novel dimension. It’s a dimension above our space what is smaller than normal space? So the rules of sub space doesn’t apply to ours anything Travelling in sub space travels faster than it does a normal areas. This is why when you look at Trans-warp what the Borg use You find that they actually travel in sub space what allows them to travel across the Milky Way in a matter of hours instead of years like Voyager would’ve done.
If you continue how you are speaking, you can transmit messages to Voyager one what takes hours to get to but we could then travel at half the speed of light and still get to avoid your one before this signal just because you say you can’t transmit a radio signal to another planet before we can get there doesn’t actually mean anything when Every different radio signal travels at different speeds in our universe if you’re going into another dimension in space what are the rules of that dimension?
As there is no rules yet written in our physics for another dimension as we can’t get to one you cannot say Star Trek is wrong because the war drive actually brings you into space slightly that’s where it gets around the coal of Travelling faster than light. This is why you are wrong trying to set Star Trek travel speeds in our physics. Why don’t we go back to the 10th century and try and work out how we’re travelling at half the speed of light you will be home drawn and quoted as an idiot.

[artjackson]

I thought that warp drive contracts space itself in the direction of travel and expanded it behind. The ship itself is not traveling faster than light, but it is space warping. It does not violate the known laws of physics. The universe is expanding faster than light.

[PoppaCYS]

Star Trek basically makes up it's own science with concept of "subspace." Subspace allows them to violate the known laws of physics with an in universe explanation. Subspace is a dimension within spacetime that can be accessed and allows faster than light travel in the Trek universe.

[xVinceCx]

There are several books published in the 1970s on the making of Star Trek, and in those books there are memos Gene Roddenberry and others sent during the development of the show. They pretty much knew all of this but decided on warp speed as a means to condense travel times and make combat more exciting.

[anialator]

Violating causality is always basically described as "because everything is relative, the math works out that time is relative too and it the double effect of relativity stacks to reverse time when you go FTL", but honestly that makes no sense to me.

Its like saying a FTL message reaches a ship going 99% the speed of light 1 year into its journey and they send a reply at FTL that will take 1 year to reach earth, which means the message will have reached earth 2 years after the ship left, which is time travel because the ship actually left earth 7 years ago meaning the the earth would receive the message 2 years after the ship left, but 4 years before the earth even sent the first message the ship is replying to, which just makes no sense. Its double stacking relativity onto itself, Yet somehow that is the logic used by science to explain how it works. Why it wouldn't work just like how you can see lightning long before you hear it, I don't know, despite knowing the twins time dilated paradox exists proving that Time is only relative to the individual, but there still is a Universal time that is flowing at all times and even when you get Time Dilated you still are bound to that universal time (hence why one twin could be 100 years old while the other 20, because the 20 year old despite having time be dilated still is bound to the universal undiluted time flow the 100 year old was subjected to)

[riftwake]

Causality is not violated if you understand for a moment that without time, everything happens all at once. So past, present, future, are all happening in the same moment. A little bit of this is scratched at in the movie Tenet, but the basic premise is that if everything happens all at once but our understanding of it can only happen from beginning to end, then we won't violate any causality laws by reaching the future before our past sends the messages because it is only our understanding that is warped, not actual physical space.

TLDR; The alphabet is arranged from A-Z right? Why? There's no reason for any of the letters to be in that particular order. But there's a beginning, middle, and end yeah? And you can repeat the alphabet in any order you want and it's still the alphabet right? And you can mix the letters up and read them front to back or back to front or inside out and it's still the alphabet. It'll always be the alphabet. It always has been, is, and always will be the alphabet. Think of your own timeline like this... You have a beginning (birth) a middle (life) and an end (death) there's no reason at all scientifically that any of those events have to happen in any particular order without first assigning our understanding to it. Change the understanding and mum's the word.

[mattd]

The radio example of causality is problematic though. Because Broadcast A is sent. You travel faster than light to the destination, and pass on the message before the broadcast is received.

You haven't broken causality. You've just delivered a message faster.

It's no different than a chain of light towers, or the internet, sending a warning message faster than a rider carrying a message.

It'd only ever break casuality if you could receive a message requesting help, and then travel to the broadcaster to a point BEFORE they sent the message.

And even if that COULD occur.... doesn't that just mean our understanding of time isn't good enough and the accepted 'laws' are flawed?

[Alex_Mitchell]

For goodness sake. "Warp speed" is a literary device to make the events of the show's plots possible.

[quinnmortensen]

My father is literally a rock scientist and head designer of the FLIR night vision cameras. It sucked as a kid to watch Star Wars and Startrek with him. All he did was point out what was not possible.