"Probe outside the galaxy"...what did they expect?

[ToddPence]

Spock as a Vulcan has telepathic abilities, which would presumably rate him high on the ESPER scale. Yet he is unaffected by the trip through the barrier which mutates Mitchell and Dehner into superbeings.

Later on the Enterprise leaves the galaxy with another telepath, Mirana Jones, onboard. And she is also unchanged by the encounter with the galactic barrier.

 

[SchwEnt]

^^^ I've heard it suggested that the barrier affects only those with *latent* high ESPer ratings (Dehner and Mitchell weren't practicing telepaths)

Spock and Miranda Jones were active telepaths, so were not affected. Or something.

 

[Christopher]

Spock as a Vulcan has telepathic abilities, which would presumably rate him high on the ESPER scale. Yet he is unaffected by the trip through the barrier which mutates Mitchell and Dehner into superbeings.

Later on the Enterprise leaves the galaxy with another telepath, Mirana Jones, onboard. And she is also unchanged by the encounter with the galactic barrier.

In the first case, Spock's telepathic abilities hadn't been established when the second pilot was written.

In the second case, I don't think the writer intended the story to have anything to do with the barrier. If you consider just the scripted dialogue, it sounds as if the writer confused the concepts of "galaxy" and "universe" and thought that leaving the galaxy would mean entering some bizarre, incomprehensible realm with alien laws of physics. The FX artists represented that realm with visuals that resembled the effects used for the barrier in earlier episodes, so fans have tended to interpret it as the ship being inside the barrier or something, but that's not what was scripted. Basically that episode disregarded past continuity and fans have subsequently tried to patch over the inconsistencies.

 

[xortex]

Maybe Asimov was right and Spock was some unassuming god from the beginning.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Another forgotten Spock bit from WNMHGB: "Deflectors say there's something there, sensors say there isn't!" thus adding to the whole everything coming back "negative".

 

[Timo]

...And that, too, is something we can loop back to modern technobabble, where deflectors/shields are subspace technology of sorts. Even if the Barrier is by nature something that 2260s sensors aren't tuned to, a "broadband" subspace device might hit (among other things) the specific subspace domain of the Barrier and give an echo.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Shon T'Hara]

Except that "negative energy" probably doesn't exist.

There is "negative energy density," which is a concept that shows up in theoretical models of time travel and wormholes.

Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein’s general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out. I was one of the first to write about the conditions under which this would be possible. I showed it would require matter with negative energy density, which may not be available. Other scientists took courage from my paper and wrote further papers on the subject.

Since Star Trek has time travel and wormholes, negative energy density must exist in universe.

 

[Christopher]

Except that "negative energy" probably doesn't exist.

There is "negative energy density," which is a concept that shows up in theoretical models of time travel and wormholes.

Hence the "probably." But even the theorists who talk about it in hypothetical terms consider it unlikely to be real -- except through something like the Casimir effect, which is just relatively negative compared to the vacuum energy of adjacent spacetime. And yes, clearly some sort of negative energy density exists within the fiction of the Trek universe, but I was responding to the claim that a negative energy barrier was not unbelievable, in the context of a discussion that was comparing the Barrier to things in reality like the "ribbon" at the heliopause. The other poster set the standard of real-life comparisons, and I was pointing out that by those real-life standards, negative energy is not particularly believable.

 

[xortex]

There's alot of negative energy going on in these boards, for good and bad.

 

[Wingsley]

Consider this possibility:

"negative" energy = dark energy and/or dark matter

If the "negative energy" barrier at the Galaxy's edge is interpreted as so-called "dark energy", it might explain Spock's statement: "Deflectors say there's something there, sensors say there isn't." If the barrier is composed on some kind of difficult-to-detect dark energy, maybe the only way for the ship to interact with it measurably would be through contact with the ship's navigational deflector.

 

[Christopher]

Consider this possibility:

"negative" energy = dark energy and/or dark matter

If the "negative energy" barrier at the Galaxy's edge is interpreted as so-called "dark energy", it might explain Spock's statement: "Deflectors say there's something there, sensors say there isn't." If the barrier is composed on some kind of difficult-to-detect dark energy, maybe the only way for the ship to interact with it measurably would be through contact with the ship's navigational deflector.

Well, the "sensors say there isn't" line supports my interpretation that he wasn't saying "negative energy" at all -- he was saying that there was no reading for energy, mass, or radiation. It was "negative" as the formal way of saying "no" in the idiom Spock tended to use -- the opposite of "affirmative" rather than the opposite of "positive." The "negative energy" idea comes solely from "By Any Other Name," and I consider it a continuity error. At the very least, we're given two conflicting versions of the barrier (and, by the way, the term "barrier" is also exclusively from BAON).

And I don't buy dark energy as an explanation. It doesn't seem to manifest on such a localized scale. To quote Wikipedia, "It is known to be very homogeneous, not very dense and is not known to interact through any of the fundamental forces other than gravity." Which means it wouldn't be concentrated in a barrier and wouldn't have any noticeable effect on a ship even if it were.

 

[Nerys Myk]

There's alot of negative energy going on in these boards, for good and bad.

Thanks Oddball.

 

[xortex]

Maybe the negative energy ribbon was a nexus to the studio executives at NBC.