'The City on the Edge of Forever'....51 years ago today

[Pauln6]

Science? The show that neatly splits a man into functional good and evil copies without them apparently losing any mass? heh

Actually, there could be science involved. We know that genes can be switched on or off and we know that our genes affect our behaviour.

If a transporter is a kill and copy machine then popping out two copies instead of one fits with the fictional science.

If the person is instead phased and some sort of quantum linked information is sent but the system adds in replicated matter to make up for any information that leaks away, a malfunction could lead to two copies with a much higher degree of replicated matter than normal I.e. 50%.

The notion of focal points is silly but it was also used in the reboot with Kirk randomly stumbling across Spock in a cave...

 

[Maurice]

But that's not what the episode says. It implies it ripped Kirk into two halves that must be reintegrated, so half of each is made up of... what? Where'd that mass come from? And where does it go when they are reassembled?

And I think it's perhaps easy to read too much into "focal points". So maybe we look to real world examples: people who did a particular thing that had wide-reaching consequences. For instance Dr. Alexander Fleming, who discovered that the Penicillium notatum that had contaminated his Petri dishes prevented the normal growth of the staphylococci. If someone he interacted with prevented him from going on holiday when he did, he possibly would never had made that discovery. And how many people's lives would have gone in entirely different directions as a result? Likewise, in Ellison's original conception there's something about Edith's death that is a lynchpin for history going the way it did. We need not know what it is, just that her continuing living is a trigger for some butterfly effect which changes everything about the history as we know it.

 

[Pauln6]

But that's not what the episode says. It implies it ripped Kirk into two halves that must be reintegrated, so half of each is made up of... what? Where'd that mass come from? And where does it go when they are reassembled?

The series wisely avoided explaining precisely how it's fictional science worked but just because the characters use colloquial terms that the audience can understand doesn't automatically mean we have to apply a literal meaning to them.

If a literal meaning is applied to the transporter, it's a kill and clone machine converting energy to matter, so the answer is the extra matter is converted from energy stores. Recombining the two Kirks just involves converting them to energy, killing both, and reproducing a new version based on the original template. The only reason they need both Kirks on the pad is to preserve their memories in the new clone :-p

 

[Marsden]

Thank you @Maurice for the script excepts.

I always assumed that the guy that stole the phaser wasn't in good health and could have been near death, being a homeless moocher and criminal is not good for health.

People seem to be getting caught up in the mechanics of how Edith changed history, while your excerpt offers a good explanation, I still don't think it's too hard to understand how someone can influence political leaders if they have enough notoriety, which is exactly what is shown in Mr. Spock's tricorder playback of the newspapers.

BTW, I'm not saying discussion is bad, I'm just surprised at how many seem convinced that putting back the timeline wasn't important.

 

[Poltargyst]

I'm not real comfortable as a viewer with the idea that everyone going through the transporter is killed and cloned, and I'm not sure that was ever intended. I always would have preferred that the transporter transports people whole like a stargate, though I realized all along that it does disassemble people.

I think the tranporter's abilities can go too far if brought to their logical conclusion. If you have the pattern of a person in the buffer, can't you always bring them back? Kirk dies on a planet adventure. Oh, well, bring back his most recent pattern from when he beamed down.

 

[Pauln6]

I'm not real comfortable as a viewer with the idea that everyone going through the transporter is killed and cloned, and I'm not sure that was ever intended. I always would have preferred that the transporter transports people whole like a stargate, though I realized all along that it does disassemble people.

I think the tranporter's abilities can go too far if brought to their logical conclusion. If you have the pattern of a person in the buffer, can't you always bring them back? Kirk dies on a planet adventure. Oh, well, bring back his most recent pattern from when he beamed down.

Yes it clearly doesn't work like that even though all the characters say that it does. It's some weird hybrid between the kill and clone and a stargate. That's why I favour the notion if being phased into a different dimension and your atoms replaced by some sort of quantum linked energy displaced from that dimension. It's that energy that gets transported and everything snaps back to normal when the confinement beam switches off at the desired location. Their can only ever be one of you.

But if you accept that some of you always leaks away in transit, replacing that with replicated matter is a neat way of explaining that transporter clones can happen in rare weird intervention cases where people live despite a high portion of replicated matter, which would normally be fatal.

This also makes sense of Kirk's line to boost the 'matter gain' in TMP. Sonak's pattern has degraded . Add more replicated matter and hope for the best.

Edith need not have been the direct cause of historical change any more than Captain Christopher was going to Mars. There are famous suffragettes who inspired the suffragists who probably did as much if not more on the downlow to get women the vote.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

If you have the pattern of a person in the buffer, can't you always bring them back? Kirk dies on a planet adventure. Oh, well, bring back his most recent pattern from when he beamed down.

That could have been an interesting TOS version of VOY's "Latent Image" - Kirk is the only one who has no memory of a mission because of this happening, and the crew try (unsuccessfully) to hide it from him, especially when (instead of having a programming loop as The Doctor did) the bad guys from the ill-fated mission show up again, necessitating Kirk to deal with them.

 

[Marsden]

Yes it clearly doesn't work like that even though all the characters say that it does. It's some weird hybrid between the kill and clone and a stargate. That's why I favour the notion if being phased into a different dimension and your atoms replaced by some sort of quantum linked energy displaced from that dimension. It's that energy that gets transported and everything snaps back to normal when the confinement beam switches off at the desired location. Their can only ever be one of you.

But if you accept that some of you always leaks away in transit, replacing that with replicated matter is a neat way of explaining that transporter clones can happen in rare weird intervention cases where people live despite a high portion of replicated matter, which would normally be fatal.

This also makes sense of Kirk's line to boost the 'matter gain' in TMP. Sonak's pattern has degraded . Add more replicated matter and hope for the best.

Edith need not have been the direct cause of historical change any more than Captain Christopher was going to Mars. There are famous suffragettes who inspired the suffragists who probably did as much if not more on the downlow to get women the vote.

That's very much how the transporters in DOOM work, but unfortunately for them the other dimension was Hell.
I know in 50 years of Dr. Who there's always been transmats and even though they can make you unsettled they never worried about how they worked. I realize Star Trek likes to try to have a scientific "possibility" for an explanation rather than the almost magical science of some other shows, but then part of the original premise was that people accepted their current technology like we accept ours, no one is shocked when someone turns on a light or uses a phone or so on, they aren't too caught up in the transporter. I have a good idea why my car runs, I drive it, but I couldn't design it or build one, I can't fix it either. I think some of the characters know exactly what it does but the others just go with it.