In honor of 'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' season 2, a tour of the physics

Season 2 of the critically acclaimed Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiered June 15 (streaming on Paramount+). So today, Short Wave boldly goes where many, many nerds have gone before and explores the science — specifically the physics — and the science-fiction of Star Trek. Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber chats with two Trekkie physicists about why they love the franchise. Astrophysicist Erin Macdonald is the science consultant for Star Trek, and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a theoretical physicist and author of the book The Disordered Cosmos.

This episode, the trio discusses the feasibility of warp drive, global cooperation and representation and how the transporters that beam crew members from the surface of a planet to the ship might be breaking fundamental laws of physics. They end at the galaxy's edge — and discuss why its portrayal in Star Trek might be problematic, scientifically.

Warp Drive

Space is vast – it takes years for real spacecrafts to travel within our solar system! In Star Trek, characters zip around the galaxy in their starship vessels thanks to warp drive, which let spaceships travel faster than the speed of light. But physics puts a speed limit on anything with mass. These objects have to move slightly slower than the speed of light, which itself has a speed limit. So what's the loophole here?

According to Erin, good ol' suspension of disbelief isn't necessary because, "the math checks out." For that reason, it's one of Erin's favorite pieces of sci-fi in the series. Spacetime is the three dimensions we humans are used to living in, plus time. The universe is situated in the four dimensional fabric of spacetime, with heavier objects "pulling" that fabric down more than lighter — or, weightless, in the case of light — objects. So, spacetime itself could be a loophole to this speed limit. Erin says that to bypass the cosmological speed limit of light, you could simply, "build a bubble of space time around your ship, and then that pushes you faster than the speed of light." This is the various warp speeds. One bubble for warp 1, another bubble around that first bubble for warp 2 and so on.

Of course, Erin and Chanda both point out that using spacetime in this way requires an extraordinary amount of energy — well beyond what humans are capable of at this moment in time.

Transporters

It would be great to teleport to work, as Star Trek characters do thanks to their transporters. Upside? No traffic. Downside? The fear that once you've been broken down into particles and beamed across the city, you might not be rearranged in the right order.

In order for a transporter to work, users would have to know both where a given particle is and its velocity. Unfortunately, this is not possible due to a well known physics conundrum, the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. Star Trek plugs this plot hole with something they call a Heisenberg Compensator that is connected to their transporter mechanics. How it works is never explained. All we need to know is that, in the Star Trek universe ... it does!

So, transporters require a little more suspension of disbelief than warp drive — or good-humored humility if you're Chanda. "I don't think transporters will ever be a thing that we can do. But I always say that it's important for me as a scientist to be humble, and so it may be that there is some science beyond the uncertainty principle that we are just not aware of at this point," she quips.

Galactic Barrier

Warp drive can get ships to light speed and faster in the Star Trek world but space is still HUGE. The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across so, even at Warp 9, it would take the Star Trek crew years to travel the galaxy. It's pretty rare that any starship gets near the edge of our galaxy, but in the 1960s, Star Trek writers had the crew arrive at the "galactic barrier." According to the show, this barrier doesn't let communication signals through, is dangerous and gives characters "strange energies."

Chanda says that the impenetrability of signals is what winds her up most about this fake barrier. "But we see other galaxies all the time, and those are signals," she says. "We see radio observations. We see across the electromagnetic spectrum."

These three sci-fi concepts barely scratch the surface of what "science" — and science — Star Trek uses throughout the series. There's so much physics we didn't cover — and so there will be much more science to dissect in the future.

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Questions about the "scientific" underpinnings of other pop culture? Email us at shortwave@npr.org. We'd love to hear from you!

This episode was produced by Berly McCoy, edited by Rebecca Ramirez and fact checked by Katie Daugert. Josh Newell engineered the audio. Johannes Doerge is our main legal duderino.