Daystrom Institute
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Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
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Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
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I and the physicists I know will go to the mat on the principal that the Alcubierre Drive is the first real life physics closed form proof of a warp drive.
For the purposes of this discussion though, the more fundamental point is that Alcubierre’s theoretical proof of concept for warp drives was created in the mid 1990s nearly 30 years after TOS first broadcast and TNG had completed its run.
As I have said here before, following the norm in mathematics-based theory development, Alcubierre started with a tractable corner case. This means he set a number of obviously necessary parameters to zero to make it possible to get to a closed-form solution that didn’t rely on crunching numbers.
His objective in his PhD thesis was prove there was an exception General Relativity that makes warp drives possible theoretically.
He did that, and as is usual with corner solutions, came up with something fairly absurd that would involve massive amounts of exotic matter and couldn’t steer a course due — simply because he intentionally set those parameters to zero for the purposes of the proof.
It’s a misunderstanding of the way theoretical reasoning and research gets done to say that Alcubierre’s warp drive isn’t the one in Star Trek, simply because he chose the simplest case for his proof. The Star Trek warp drive would involve setting these parameters to positive values - but that doesn’t mean it’s a different theory at the fundamental level.
As usual, more realistic applications of the theory, with nonzero values for those parameters that would:
are very likely to involve massive amounts of numerical approximations calculated by a computer and advances in materials science.
Unless someone finds a mathematical trick to get around the numerical approximations with a better closed form solution — and comes up with a materially different basic warp drive equation — whatever we get eventually from this line of research will still be viewed as Alcubierre’s drive. Or, also likely an Alcubierre-OtherPerson drive.
Probably the most salient point - one cannot credibly claim that the warp drive was "based on science" that hadn't yet been published, and wouldn't be for three decades.
I was not saying that the warp drive was based on the Alcubierre drive. My pont was that the warp drive was more grounded in physics than the spore drive, so much so that it inspired the Alcubierre drive.
That's circular reasoning, though.
The fact that Alcubierre was inspired by Star Trek to come up with something (theoretically) workable does not mean that the warp drive as originally conceived was somehow "grounded in physics." At the end of the day, the similarities are pretty superficial.
I'll go ahead and concede my point. I haven't watched enough original Star Trek and definitely dont have enough knowledge in physics to argue this further. My understanding was that the warp drive was kept just vague enough to be argued to be theoretically possible. But honestly, I'm not a physicist, so I am probably missing something obvious.
Yup.
And that Alcubierre’s effort, as a theoretical physics PhD student, to prove mathematically that there was a an exception to General Relativity that would make warp possible, was inspired by Star Trek’s fictional drive and not vice versa.