antimatter in warp drive - first mentions?

[Christopher]

Yeah, my mileage varies a lot from yours. I think the SFTM was clever and ambitious for its day but has a lot of flaws, and when you get right down to it, was an outsider's interpretation/approximation of somebody else's creation. The idea of holding it up as the single arbiter of "true" Star Trek is downright bizarre to me.

 

[TIN_MAN]

The idea of holding it up as the single arbiter of "true" Star Trek is downright bizarre to me.

That's not what I said or meant, in fact. It's a whole different colored horse.

 

[Kemaiku]

I thought the reveal near the end of Alternative Factor stated that the matter and antimatter universes where joined by an artificial "corridor" of space that the two ships created, that anything passing through it was converted along the way using the crystals but not actually touching.

So that when the integrity of the corridor was low, it momentarily did something to the charge balance of the two universes making them neutral for a split second without physically contacting one another.

That the collapse of it would have then lead to them bleeding into one another causing the proper annihilation?

 

[Christopher]

I thought the reveal near the end of Alternative Factor stated that the matter and antimatter universes where joined by an artificial "corridor" of space that the two ships created, that anything passing through it was converted along the way using the crystals but not actually touching.

The episode didn't establish any of that. If anything, Lazarus-B (the sane, antimatter one) described the corridor as if it were a natural phenomenon:

I call it an alternative warp. It's sort of a negative magnetic corridor where the two parallel universes meet. It's sort of a safety valve. It keeps eternity from blowing up. ... When our people found a way to slip through the warp and prove another universe, an identical one, existed, it was too much for [Lazarus-A].

http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/20.htm

And Kirk and Spock's earlier conversation treated the rift as simply being a point of contact between the two universes, a natural consequence of them touching at that point.

There was nothing about anyone being converted either. The conceit of the episode was that annihilation only happened when identical particles of matter and antimatter met, taking "particles" to mean "entire people." So that if matter Lazarus-A met antimatter Lazarus-B, it would result in annihilation, but if matter Kirk entered the antimatter universe or Lazarus-B entered the matter universe, there'd be no kaboom unless they met their identical counterparts. Which is one of the ways the episode gets physics completely, achingly wrong.

So that when the integrity of the corridor was low, it momentarily did something to the charge balance of the two universes making them neutral for a split second without physically contacting one another.

That's not what they said in the episode, and it wouldn't make any more sense of things if they had said it. (All macroscopic material bodies are pretty much electrically neutral, with positive and negative charges cancelling out; otherwise they couldn't exist as solid matter because their particles' charges would repel each other. So either a matter or antimatter universe is already neutral as a whole.)

Here's how they "explained" it in the episode:

KIRK: All right. What would happen if another universe, say a minus universe, came into contact with a positive universe such as ours?
SPOCK: Unquestionably a warp. A distortion of physical laws on an immense scale.

So the "winking-out phenomenon" has nothing to do with anything being rendered neutral. ("What makes a man turn neutral?") It's supposedly the laws of physics being distorted/interrupted by the temporary contact between universes through the rift at the point of contact -- with the corridor being some kind of cosmic safety valve of unexplained origin.

That the collapse of it would have then lead to them bleeding into one another causing the proper annihilation?

No, the episode itself doesn't attribute the total annihilation to the collapse of the corridor, at least not uniquely. Here's the actual, idiotic dialogue:

KIRK: Do you know what you're saying? Matter and antimatter have a tendency to cancel each other out. violently.
SPOCK: Precisely. Under certain conditions, when two identical particles of matter and antimatter meet
KIRK: Like Lazarus. Identical. Like both Lazarus', only one is matter and the other antimatter. If they meet.
SPOCK: Annihilation, Jim. Total, complete, absolute annihilation.
KIRK: Of everything that exists, everywhere.

So the premise was that if the two Lazaruses, or any matter person and their antimatter counterpart, met anywhere outside the corridor, it would somehow destroy both entire universes (according to Lazarus-B's words later). Now, like you, I've tried in the past to rationalize that by assuming that they really meant that the local explosion would tear open the rift and destroy both universes in that way, but the episode itself never establishes that.

I was wondering if maybe you got these impressions from James Blish's adaptation of the episode, but it's pretty much identical to the original (it wasn't adapted until the 10th volume, by which point Blish was no longer reinterpreting or modifying the stories). I suppose maybe you're just taking the total conceptual mess that was the episode, filtering it through a modicum of common sense, and coming up with a rationalization that's not quite so incoherent. I've actually done much the same in the past, before I just decided that I should ignore the episode altogether (since the rest of canon certainly did).

 

[Kemaiku]

Excuse me for trying I'm sure.

 

[Timo]

The thing is, all Trek physics is just plain wrong anyway. It's quite difficult to see "Alternative Factor" as standing out in this respect...

It all depends on the bit quoted above:

Kirk: "Do you know what you're saying? Matter and antimatter have a tendency to cancel each other out. Violently."
Spock: "Precisely. Under certain conditions, when two identical particles of matter and antimatter meet-"
Kirk: "Like Lazarus. Identical. Like both Lazarus', only one is matter and the other antimatter. If they meet-"
Spock: "Annihilation, Jim. Total, complete, absolute annihilation."
Kirk: "Of everything that exists, everywhere."

It would be pretty simple to accept that matter and antimatter annihilate each other according to the laws of physics in most conditions, but Spock points out that 23rd century science has uncovered that "under certain conditions" something more happens. At this point, Kirk launches into an analogy, evidenced by his use of "like", in which he likens the two guys to particles and antiparticles "under certain conditions".

Significantly, the discussion never results in our heroes trying to keep the two Lazari apart. For all we know, Kirk never thought that letting the two shake hands would result in anything much. Instead, he used the two in his analogy, while fully realizing that the real threat came from the possibility of an interaction between the two universes, figuratively represented by the two Lazari.

And the "special conditions" we today know nothing of? Obviously, the universe-to-universe warp that has already been introduced at this point. The 23rd century is famed for having an understanding of space warps, after all.

Trying to interpret the episode as describing something attributable to today's physics is not only futile, it's ultimately pointless. But that in no way means the episode would be pointless. Of course the calamity postulated there has to be something fantastic in nature, as it is so fantastic in scope! And there is no reason Trek shouldn't be allowed to be fantastic.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

Excuse me for trying I'm sure.

I don't blame you at all for trying to make sense of TAF; as I said, I've made similar efforts of my own in the past, so I sympathize. I'm just clarifying that the episode itself doesn't deserve any credit for your relatively sensible interpretations.

 

[Knight Templar]

The Star Trek Compedium IIRC said that huge cuts and changes were made in "The Alternative Factor" to elimination a potential "interracial romance" idea between the sane "Mirror Lazarus" and Leutenant McMasters.

The book mentions that some early promotion material includes shots of Lazarus and McMasters in an affectionate embrace.