EB Games, aka Electronics Boutique, is still alive and well as a franchise Down Under. They were strong supporters of the first few Art Asylum "Enterprise" action figure waves.
Flux capacitor in Trek lit - Good ol' Doc Brown?
- Thread starter Lorraine Anderson
- Start date
EB Games, aka Electronics Boutique, is still alive and well as a franchise Down Under. They were strong supporters of the first few Art Asylum "Enterprise" action figure waves.
The Terra Prime instance was the best appearance of the prop since those episodes had, the man himself, Peter Weller playing Paxton. but that little doohicky, first made by Greg Jein I believe, showed up everywhere throughout the years of Next Gen on onward into DS9, always as something different of course.
http://www.mattmunson.com/props/misc/overthruster/index.html
I love that thing!
In last week's season finale of The Middleman, an ABC Family show that's constantly peppered with genre in-jokes, a villain stole an oscillation overthruster and a beryllium sphere (Galaxy Quest) as components for building a device to cross into an evil mirror universe where goatees were highly fashionable and the logo of the evil ruling corporation had a very familiar dagger motif. The mirror universe could also be accessed by firing a phased polaron cannon (a Dominion weapon from DS9) at a black hole.
I love the references in Middleman. I don't know a lot of Sci-Fi trivia (other than Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate, and Farscape) so I know there's probably alot of stuff I'm missing. The most obscure thing I've been able to catch was the reference to Frank Herbert in the second or third one.
^^There were a lot of Escape from New York refs in the season finale, and I would've surely missed most of them if I hadn't coincidentally watched the movie on TV earlier that same day.
^^There were also references to other cast members, such as "Agent Van Cleef." Also there was the "King of New York Toy Company," named for Isaac Hayes' character, the villain of the film.
Actually, I was thinking that it could be used to remain in constant time sync with the rest of the universe... After all, how could they get subspace messages when they're traveling in warp speed?
I forget; has warp speed ever been "explained" by technobabble?Ok, shutting up now.
Why wouldn't they? There's no time dilation in warp drive, so time sync isn't an issue to begin with; and subspace messages travel even faster than starships do, so they can catch up easily enough; plus they travel through subspace, which ships in warp are at least partly immersed in.
Not onscreen, since it wouldn't serve the story any more than a cop explaining his car's internal combustion engine would serve the story. But the TNG Tech Manual provides a moderately good explanation, although Dr. Jesco Von Puttkamer's technical notes reprinted in The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture offer a better, clearer one. And Puttkamer's 1978 memo on warp drive foreshadows the theory that theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre put forth in Classical and Quantum Gravity in 1994; both are based on essentially the same principle, though Puttkamer didn't actually do the math to show it was theoretically feasible as Alcubierre did. Since then, there's been a lot of investigation and refinement of Alcubierre's ideas by theoretical physicists, most recently with the work of Cleaver and Obousy, who brought string theory into play and proposed a way to reduce the energy requirement by altering the geometry of one of the universe's "hidden" dimensions (which could be called a sort of subspace).
Of course, even before Alcubierre (and before Puttkamer), it was known that the expansion of spacetime was not limited to the speed of light, so that it was theoretically possible to achieve effectively faster-than-light propulsion by warping spacetime. The concept of "space warp" propulsion, based either on this general-relativistic principle or on the notion of somehow distorting spacetime to alter its physical laws and allow faster travel, has been in use in prose science fiction since the early 1930s. So the basic explanation is grounded in General Relativity. But it was assumed to be merely a fictional conceit until Alcubierre actually found equations that could theoretically make it work. Of course it would've taken more energy than exists in the universe to actually achieve it, but other theorists have found ways to tweak it to the point where it's now believed that an "arbitrarily advanced civilization" with unlimited energy reserves might actually be able to pull off warp travel.
Doc builds guitar amps as a sideline. They go to 11.
And this, folks, is why a bookkeeper like me shouldn't dabble in theoretical physics...Actually, thanks for the explanation, Christopher. I'm not a scientist, nor do I play one on TV, nor have I kept up on science for dummies. I really didn't know that warp travel was theoretically possible.
That's cool. Now, if only we can find the "unlimited energy reserves"...
Actually, Mr Fusion powers the flux capacitor, but not the combustion engine, which is why in BTTF III, it's the lack of gasoline that's the problem. They no longer need plutonium to power (what was originally) a small nuclear reactor in the back of the car, because Doc has replaced fission with fusion and is using (what is presumably) a small commercial fusion reactor to generate the required 1.21 gigawatts of electricity. After all, "this sucker's electrical."
Some BTTF fans believe that it's a predestination paradox--there was always a Marty who went back in time and met Doc, even if he didn't interfere in his parents' meeting, so Doc arranged to "meet" him later on to preserve the loop. (IIRC, there were some references to this in early drafts of the first movie, back when it was a time-travelling fridge and not a DeLorean.)
Then again, once you start down this path, you also have to address "Marty II," the Marty who was raised by yuppie parents but still became friends with Doc and went back in time...and that's when things start to get complicated.
Based on the movie, Doc's amps might go all the way to 12! Somebody call Nigel.
Actually, Mr Fusion powers the flux capacitor, but not the combustion engine, which is why in BTTF III, it's the lack of gasoline that's the problem. They no longer need plutonium to power (what was originally) a small nuclear reactor in the back of the car, because Doc has replaced fission with fusion and is using (what is presumably) a small commercial fusion reactor to generate the required 1.21 gigawatts of electricity. After all, "this sucker's electrical."
But the problem isn't with what component receives the generated power. That's totally beside the point. The problem is with the depiction of the source of the power. For the reasons I explained, garbage can't work as fusion fuel. At most, it can serve as a material source which a fusion torch powered by some other means converts into a working fluid to drive a generator. So even if Doc didn't need plutonium, he'd still need deuterium and either tritium or helium-3, and those aren't easy to come by (since tritium is rare and radioactive, and He-3 is mostly found in outer space).
I am so annoyed with "Trials and Tribble-ations" for introducing that bit of technobabble, because a self-causing loop like that is not a paradox at all in a physical sense. A paradox is a scenario that directly contradicts itself. If history loops back on itself and causes the exact same history, there is no contradiction within the system, by definition. It only seems like a paradox because it defies our common-sense expectations of causality.
It also has nothing to do with predestination; that's a melodramatic term for it. The technical term is retrocausality.
I'm sorry that you're annoyed, but you'll have to take that up with whoever originally invented the term, as it didn't originate with "Trials and Tribble-ations." It's been used for a long time in discussing time travel and time travel in fiction, and I was already familiar with it when "Trials and Tribble-ations" first aired.
Hm. I never heard it before that episode.
I read the term "predestination paradox" in a novel called Up The Line by Robert Silverberg, written in 1969.
Besides, a retrocausality loop doesn't have the zazz to it.
Besides, a retrocausality loop doesn't have the zazz to it.
Well, I like it... (pouts)
Not at all, that's a real physics term. It's best known from Frank Tipler's 1974 paper "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation," which demonstrated that certain paths around a sufficiently massive rotating cylinder (which can be generalized to a massive rotating body such as a black hole) could become closed timelike curves, i.e. paths through spacetime that loop back and overlap themselves in the past. Intriguingly, this was seven years after "Tomorrow is Yesterday" had shown the Enterprise flung back in time by flying too close to a "black star," the term that was then used for the phenomena that John Wheeler would dub "black holes" less than a year later.
Terms such as "timelike" and "spacelike" are used for mathematical reasons; a timelike vector is one that behaves mathematically like time in Einsteinian relativity, while a spacelike vector is one that behaves mathematically like space in same. When talking in terms of the pure mathematics of it, you don't just call them "time" and "space" because mathematics is more about generalized, abstract patterns. And with reason, too. Often a set of mathematics that can be used to describe one thing can also turn out to be useful in describing something different. And that's the case here, too. In certain gravitationally warped regions of spacetime, like that around a rotating black hole or inside a Kerr ring singularity (like the "Kerr loop of superstring material" that created the time warp in "Yesterday's Enterprise," back when Trek tried to stay grounded in physics rather than making up random gibberish), you get what's called an inversion of spacelike and timelike axes: basically, time behaves like a dimension of space, allowing 2-way travel, while one dimension of space behaves like time, allowing only 1-way travel. This inverted spacetime is what makes time travel possible.
So normally a timelike vector is essentially a worldline, a plot of a particle's motion through space as time moves forward. But if you make time reversible, then that worldline can curve back, potentially crossing itself, and the timelike vector becomes a closed timelike curve. See?
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