Dilithium Crystals -- What's the Point?

[Christopher]

Rick Sternbach,

Why not just use the dilithium as part of the warp-nacelles being required to regulate the warp-field rather than regulate the matter/anti-matter reaction? That seems to make a lot more sense if you ask me...

I'm not Rick, but it seems to me that they were just following TOS's precedent. "Mudd's Women" established that the crystals are used for channeling ship's power, and "Elaan of Troyius" established that they're contained within the engine room itself, not the nacelles.

 

[darkwing_duck1]

^That's an after-the-fact justification. The real metatextual answer is, "lithium crystals" were invented in "Mudd's Women" purely as a McGuffin, something the ship needed to function and had run out of, putting them in a crisis and requiring them to seek out "lithium miners" in order to advance the plot. At the time, they hadn't even settled on matter/antimatter as the power source of the ship (that clearly didn't happen until after "The Alternative Factor"). They were making stuff up as they went, and it served the needs of that particular story to claim that the ship required some special mineral to function properly, because it served to bring Mudd's women into contact with some lonely miners and leave Kirk and the Enterprise at their mercy.

And once that was established, later episodes had to stick with it, though they tweaked the name of the crystals to something less mundane. "Alternative Factor" even claimed the crystals were the source of the ship's power rather than a component of the circuits that channeled it as in "Mudd's Women." But then, their science researchers pointed out that matter/antimatter power would be the best energy source for the ship, so they started referencing that in the scripts, so dilithium went back to being a means of channeling power. And then, decades later, Sternbach and Okuda took that accumulated conceptual baggage and tried to come up with a reasonable-sounding explanation for why dilithium was needed.

Actually, the use of litium crystals was mentioned as far back as the 2nd pilot. Delta Vega was a "lithium cracking station".

 

[Myasishchev]

Of course, the real reason they use dilithium is that TOS's writers made up (di)lithium crystals as a plot McGuffin without bothering with the technical details, and later creators had to work with what they were given.

This is very true, and always important to bear in mind.

During TNG, Sternbach, Okuda et al stated (unofficially... ie, in the TNG TM) that dilithium is used to "moderate" the reaction... which really isn't quite the right term (since "moderate" usually means "help bring together" in this sense... and instead, the dilithium is really helping to keep them apart. Or rather... it ensures that the reaction is "on particle at a time" or something to that effect... a relatively small, continuous stream of energy instead of a single massive BLAST.

I don't personally prefer that explanation, by the way... I'm just restating one of the more popular "conceits" about what Dilithium does.

In my "personal canon," Dilithium is something entirely different. I base this upon my own personal interpretation of everything I've seen in TOS and TAS, and less on what came along afterwards. But it fits everything seen in TOS and TAS, and isn't directly contradictory with anything seen on-screen in TNG or other TNG-era shows (although it is contradictory to what's in the TNG TM).

See, for me, I look at the TOS crystal, which was a flat "slab" of crystal with a pair of terminal knobs cut into the crystal at either end. This sort of configuration for materials is not unheard of in real electronics design... and was more common at the time of TOS (when all components were "discrete" and the concept of the "integrated circuit" was still just a concept, not reality).

The "dilithium crystal" seen in TOS looks very much like a photodiode might.

A photodiode is the exact opposite of an L.E.D. With an L.E.D, you put voltage in, and get light out. With a photodiode, you put light in and get voltage out.

When I see this TOS crystal, I see a device that, if subjected to certain types of high-energy radiation (and we know pretty well what EM output a matter/antimatter reaction produces, because we've experimentally determined the answer), produces a high output voltage.

We know (from "sparks and electrical shorts" and so forth) that the TOS Enterprise uses, at least in SOME situations, and frankly, it seems to be in virtually ALL situations, "simple electricity" as the primary internal power source.

This is not unreasonable. Electrical power distribution is a pretty fundamental "laws of nature" thing... used by nature, used in our brains and bodies, used in all of our technology. There is no REASONABLE argument by which you could conclude that "they won't use electricity in the future" which wouldn't be a clear, "bad science fiction conceit."

SO... to me... dilithium crystals are the means by which the high-energy reaction products from the matter/antimatter annihilation reaction are converted into usable energy (in the form of some type of electrical power).

I actually do rather like this, Cary. I'm not abandoning my gamma-mirror notion yet , but this is still really good.

Regarding non-TOS stuff, though--you say it doesn't contradict it--where would the plasma fit into this conception?

Btw, I of course fully agree with you that electricity is still going to be the power for the mundane aspects of starship operation (ultimately I figure virtually everything is electrically powered in some fashion, but I mean electrons-moving-down-a-wire electricity, not crazy-plasma-induced-electrical-potentials-or-whatever--not a field I have a lot of knowledge in). Given this assumption, though, it always puzzled me that gravity can stay on when the power's out, but the flourescent overhead lights won't run off the batteries.

 

[Christopher]

Actually, the use of litium crystals was mentioned as far back as the 2nd pilot. Delta Vega was a "lithium cracking station".

Not quite. Although Delta Vega's lithium cracking station was mentioned in "Where No Man," there was no reference in that episode to lithium crystals. Spock's line about Delta Vega was, "We may be able to adapt some of its power packs to our engines." There is a later reference to Delta Vega being "rich in crystal and minerals," but "lithium" and "crystal" are never directly linked until "Mudd's Women."

It's worth noting, however, that "Mudd's Women" was one of three scripts under consideration for use as the second pilot, along with WNMHGB and "The Omega Glory." Inside Star Trek implies that MW was written before WNM; at the very least, all three scripts were written (at least in first-draft form) before the second pilot was filmed. So it's likely that WNM borrowed the "lithium crystal" concept from MW, but only referenced it implicitly.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Regarding non-TOS stuff, though--you say it doesn't contradict it--where would the plasma fit into this conception?

Well, that's sort of a challenge.. I don't recall the phrase "drive plasma" or anything similar being mentioned in TOS - am I mistaken?

However, it's clearly HEAVILY used in the TNG era, and one would assume that this is an applicable issue in TOS as well (since it's doubtful that they would have had a total context-shift in terms of the basic technology).

When I envision "warp drive" I see the reaction-products being focused into what is, for all practical purposes, a "semi-singularly" (in the TOS ship, that would be happening in the aftmost nacelle sphere, as I envision it). This is where the "warp" originates.

Of course, I don't see that as being a stream of matter, or "semi-matter" particles. I see it as being EM energy.

So, why plasma?

Well... maybe the plasma is used to direct and manipulate the reaction output? I can't see how that would be the case, but that's the explanation which best fits the TNG TM explanations.

In "my personal canon," you wouldn't have "drive plasma" at all... the only fluid matter involved in the engine system would be the reactants (which is annihilated entirely) and the coolant.

However, when you start thinking about electrical power, it's worthwhile to consider what you're talking about... moving electrons from atom to atom. Now, if you consider what "plasma" is... entirely dissociated matter, where the electrons are no longer tied to a particular nucleus but are completely unbound... I can see how you might use plasma as a "high tension line" conductor for power distribution throughout the ship, rather than using (for example) copper wire.

If I were inventing "Treknology" from scratch, that's probably what I'd do. And that's largely consistent with MOST of the TNG-era treknology we see, with the sole (albeit major) mis-match being "how does 'warp plasma' function?"

Maybe it's serving that purpose in the TNG ship as well... ie, maybe the warp engines are totally electrical, taking electrical power from the "dilithium chamber" through charged plasma conductors?

This might also relate to why there have to be pairs of engines... maybe one engine takes the "positive" charge when the other one is negatively-charged? Maybe its the interaction between this (possibly alternating, of course) "charged nacelle pair" which is central to the TNG-era warp drive system?

Given this assumption, though, it always puzzled me that gravity can stay on when the power's out, but the flourescent overhead lights won't run off the batteries.

Well, the "real" reason for this is that it's damned expensive to do zero-g SFX.

But Sternbach/Okuda/et-al came up with a reasonable explanation for this in the TNG TM. Gravity on the ship is generated by a network of hypervelocity centrifuges in the interstitial deckplate regions... and is then "redirected" into gravity plates.

If power goes out, the devices continue to spin due to their own inertia for a period of time, continuing to generate "gravitons" (which, remember, are really fictional particles... nobody's ever really identified any such particle... so they can behave however the scriptwriters want them to!) as the centrifuges "spin down." It might take the better part of a day for these devices to spin all the way down, and during that time you'd see a gradual decrease in gravity (undetectable by TV-viewing standards).

Not a bad "cheesy sci-fi TV show" solution to the issue. And this was consistently used 'til the sequence on "Enterprise" where Archer's shower lost gravity. But even that could be related to the "redirection" of gravitons rather than the generation device failing.

 

[Myasishchev]

I think of warp plasma as effectively transferring the energy released by the annihilation reaction to the warp coils. As I've said before, warp coils are pretty much a "black box," and there's no sense in trying to understand what they are or how they work--other than that they might turn electromagnetic energy into gravitational energy, producing gravity without mass, and using gravity to curve space to their specifications.

Whether this is plausible or not I'll leave to more advanced minds to judge, but it does seem to be almost required by screen evidence that always-attractive gravity can be generated out of charged electromagnetism.

I do laugh at the lights going out and the gravity staying on, but on reflection, the actual energies involved are not very dissimilar. In comparison, it takes a miniscule amount of electromagnetic repulsion to counter the gravitational attraction of an entire planet. You mention that gravitons have never been detected--a (probably) massless particle that does almost nothing likely is hard to detect. If it's already a given that electromagnetic energy can be converted into gravity, I guess I shouldn't have a problem with it being pretty much among the lowest-power systems on the ship. Makes you wonder how badly Kronos One must have been screwed.

I do like your take on all this, though.

 

[Saquist]

They sound cool. That's why they were introduced.

How can one rationalize their appearance?

M/AM reactions produce gamma rays(~40%) and neutrinos (~60%).
Gamma rays are immediately usable, without any magical dilithium crystals.
Neutrinos - not so much. They'll just disperse into space without interacting with anything. Let's say the dilithium crystals are there to convert neutrinos into an usable form of energy, greatly increasing the M/AM reactor's efficiency.

Or if the crystals interact like water can sometimes to neutrino's on a larger scale then perhaps the extra 60 percent of energy from the M/AR can be capitalized on.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

If it's for the purpose of channeling the ship's power, I think it would be best to place them crystals in the warp-nacelles. Channel the energy into making warp-fields.

If it's for the purpose of getting at least some if not all of those 60% of the neutrino's produced in the m/am reaction and getting energy out of them, then it belongs somewhere in the engine. Still I would want to place them out of the matter/anti-matter reaction itself. You could line part of the reactor with the stuff, and have the magnetic shield prevent the anti-matter from touching it... but the neutrino's could fly right through the field or be allowed to in one way or another and them dilithium crystals could then get the neutrino's and do something with it, either through particle reactions or some kind of quantum interaction. It is ridiculous to expect something made of matter to be able to not annihilate when subjected to anti-matter (unless it's all like neutrons or something -- which it's not)

As for some kind of power amplification system, like somehow using a series of quantum interactions, to take the energy from the reaction and then get extra energy in the process. I'm not talking about free-energy here, I'm talking about some kind of quantum interaction, like vacuum energy or something else like that. I did remember in the game Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, an old PC game, the episode with Harry Mudd and this alien derelict ship, they found some kind of quantum power-booster... I don't know if this would work in real life, but there are a lot of things in Star Trek that are a bit far-fetched (like transporters)

Ah, who the f*** knows?


CuttingEdge100

 

[Myasishchev]

^Minor note: neutrons annihilate with antineutrons. The process is quark-based, which is why six pions--unstable, dual-bound quarks--are the first thing produced by a proton/antiproton (or afaik a neutron/antineutron) collision, before decaying (probabilistically?) into gamma rays and neutrinos/antineutrinos.

As for the neutrinos, I would like to think they're not wasting a lot of their fuel through neutrino (and antineutrino) flux, but it's hard to see a way to harness it.

 

[Saquist]

If it's for the purpose of channeling the ship's power, I think it would be best to place them crystals in the warp-nacelles. Channel the energy into making warp-fields.

If it's for the purpose of getting at least some if not all of those 60% of the neutrino's produced in the m/am reaction and getting energy out of them, then it belongs somewhere in the engine. Still I would want to place them out of the matter/anti-matter reaction itself. You could line part of the reactor with the stuff, and have the magnetic shield prevent the anti-matter from touching it... but the neutrino's could fly right through the field or be allowed to in one way or another and them dilithium crystals could then get the neutrino's and do something with it, either through particle reactions or some kind of quantum interaction. It is ridiculous to expect something made of matter to be able to not annihilate when subjected to anti-matter (unless it's all like neutrons or something -- which it's not)

As for some kind of power amplification system, like somehow using a series of quantum interactions, to take the energy from the reaction and then get extra energy in the process. I'm not talking about free-energy here, I'm talking about some kind of quantum interaction, like vacuum energy or something else like that. I did remember in the game Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, an old PC game, the episode with Harry Mudd and this alien derelict ship, they found some kind of quantum power-booster... I don't know if this would work in real life, but there are a lot of things in Star Trek that are a bit far-fetched (like transporters)

Ah, who the f*** knows?


CuttingEdge100

I imagine the crystal would be more useful in some kind of four way pipe because surely the plasma doesn't go through the crystal...

Wait..isn't that a bigger problem?
I mean Hydrogen isn't going to go through any crytsal, right?

It would be better to have a containment vessel with a crystal suspened in the interior. The M/A reaction happens inside that and the crystal transfer the energy to gasseou layer over the crystal (thus the use of kilopascals in canon) The gas layer is kept moving by magnetic fields and channeled down the PTC to the engines and the EPS taps.

 

[Christopher]

I imagine the crystal would be more useful in some kind of four way pipe because surely the plasma doesn't go through the crystal...

Wait..isn't that a bigger problem?
I mean Hydrogen isn't going to go through any crytsal, right?

Depends on how fast it's going. A hydrogen nucleus is a proton -- or a proton and a neutron, if we're talking deuterium. Accelerate those protons and neutrons to high speed and you've got a beam of particle radiation that can penetrate solid objects fairly deeply. (This is what the Van Allen radiation belts around the Earth are -- protons and electrons from the solar wind, trapped and accelerated to high speeds by the Earth's magnetic field. They can penetrate the hull of a spaceship and the skin and tissues of an astronaut quite easily.)

After all, solid objects are mostly empty space. The reason they generally don't penetrate each other is because their surface electrons repel each other. Solidity is essentially a forcefield effect. But any repulsive force can be overcome with enough countering force -- particularly since we're talking about nuclei stripped of their electrons, positive charges that would not be repelled by the electron shells of the crystal.

 

[Myasishchev]

I imagine the crystal would be more useful in some kind of four way pipe because surely the plasma doesn't go through the crystal...

Wait..isn't that a bigger problem?
I mean Hydrogen isn't going to go through any crytsal, right?

It would be better to have a containment vessel with a crystal suspened in the interior. The M/A reaction happens inside that and the crystal transfer the energy to gasseou layer over the crystal (thus the use of kilopascals in canon) The gas layer is kept moving by magnetic fields and channeled down the PTC to the engines and the EPS taps.

Going with a mirror hypothesis, dilithium would have to have holes, precisely drilled, to permit controlled release of gamma rays into the plasma "transmission fluid."

 

[Saquist]

I imagine the crystal would be more useful in some kind of four way pipe because surely the plasma doesn't go through the crystal...

Wait..isn't that a bigger problem?
I mean Hydrogen isn't going to go through any crytsal, right?

Depends on how fast it's going. A hydrogen nucleus is a proton -- or a proton and a neutron, if we're talking deuterium. Accelerate those protons and neutrons to high speed and you've got a beam of particle radiation that can penetrate solid objects fairly deeply. (This is what the Van Allen radiation belts around the Earth are -- protons and electrons from the solar wind, trapped and accelerated to high speeds by the Earth's magnetic field. They can penetrate the hull of a spaceship and the skin and tissues of an astronaut quite easily.)

After all, solid objects are mostly empty space. The reason they generally don't penetrate each other is because their surface electrons repel each other. Solidity is essentially a forcefield effect. But any repulsive force can be overcome with enough countering force -- particularly since we're talking about nuclei stripped of their electrons, positive charges that would not be repelled by the electron shells of the crystal.

The M/AR is nothing more than a supercolider.

I imagine the crystal would be more useful in some kind of four way pipe because surely the plasma doesn't go through the crystal...

Wait..isn't that a bigger problem?
I mean Hydrogen isn't going to go through any crytsal, right?

It would be better to have a containment vessel with a crystal suspened in the interior. The M/A reaction happens inside that and the crystal transfer the energy to gasseou layer over the crystal (thus the use of kilopascals in canon) The gas layer is kept moving by magnetic fields and channeled down the PTC to the engines and the EPS taps.

Going with a mirror hypothesis, dilithium would have to have holes, precisely drilled, to permit controlled release of gamma rays into the plasma "transmission fluid."

You see that's kinda what I'm talking about. We know that crystal breaks down over time. The canon has been pretty consistent on that so obviously it's being decomposed. Now I don't think that the crystal is providing any mass for the IONIZED GAS that hits the warp engines.

(I believe the intermix formula provides that mass by introducing a greater hydrogen/to anti-hydrogen ratio.)

How ever I'm sure there is an interaction between those neutrinos and the crystal and this eventually breaks down the crystal. If only we knew why water is the only known substance to interact with neutrinos

 

[Christopher]

If only we knew why water is the only known substance to interact with neutrinos

It isn't. Neutrinos will interact with any particle they collide with directly. The reason neutrinos usually just pass through matter without interaction is because, again, matter is mostly empty space. The usual interactions between particles are due to the action of long-range forces, primarily electromagnetic forces. Neutrinos have no charge, so they're unaffected by electromagnetic forces. They have virtually no mass, so they're virtually unaffected by gravity. They aren't nucleons, so they're unaffected by strong nuclear force. Of the four fundamental forces, the only one that affects them is weak nuclear force, which is only felt at very short range. So neutrinos only interact with particles they come into direct contact with, and since particles are so tiny and the spaces between them so vast, that very rarely happens.

(By analogy, if there were tiny, invisible, soundless, odorless people in existence, they could walk right past you a million times and you'd never know they were there unless they bumped right into you.)

However, "rarely" isn't "never," so if you get any large quantity of mass together, the occasional neutrino will occasionally strike one of its atoms just by chance. So basically a neutrino detector is just a really big amount of stuff, big enough that there's a reasonable probability that neutrino collisions will happen within it on a relatively frequent basis, like every few hours or days. Like buying a million lottery tickets at a time -- the odds of any one occurrence are tiny, but give it a huge amount of chances and it becomes likely you'll get a hit.

The reason water is used as the mass in neutrino detectors is because it's transparent, so the radiation signatures resulting from those rare impacts can be easily detected, and because it's really, really abundant, cheap, and easy to work with, so gathering a large quantity of it in one place doesn't pose much of a problem.

 

[Saquist]

That was a very good explanation.
So all thats really needed is not dilithium but a properly tuned EM forcefield to extract the 60 that's being carried off.

 

[Christopher]

^Uh, if by "the 60" you mean the 60% of the reaction product consisting of neutrinos, then no. As I said, the electromagnetic force has zero effect on neutrinos because they have no charge. The only force that acts on neutrinos is the weak nuclear force, which only acts at subatomic distances.

And actually there's more given off by a proton-antiproton reaction than just gamma rays and neutrinos. It's a lot more complicated.

http://arts.bev.net/roperldavid/Antimatp.htm

Initially, when a proton and antiproton react, the initial results are six pions, two positive, two negative, and two neutral. After 10^-16 seconds, the neutral pions each decay into gamma rays. After a microsecond, the charged pions decay into muons, neutrinos, and antineutrinos. Then, about ten nanoseconds after that, the positive muons decay into positrons and neutrinos while the negative muons decay into electrons and neutrinos.

So ultimately what you end up with is electrons, positrons, neutrinos, and gamma rays. The neutrinos are lost to you, taking away about 55% of the energy produced by the reaction, but it's possible to extract energy from the electrons, positrons, and gamma rays.

So the warp plasma that carries energy to the nacelles may consist largely of electrons and positrons, perhaps combined with some kind of inert working fluid that absorbs the gamma rays and thus stores their energy for delivery to the nacelles.

 

[Myasishchev]

So what's the deal with Trek sensors routinely being able to detect neutrinos, anyway?

Do they have a giant tank of water somewhere (Cetacean Ops?) and do a kind of statistical analysis from the sample, or do they go the other way, and use some small amount of highly compressed, close-to or actually degenerate matter as their "neutrino antennae"?

 

[Captain Robert April]

They just have very very very VERY good sensors.

 

[Timo]

Well, if neutrinos have even the tiniest amount of rest mass, then Trek gravity technology should be able to create a barrier for them out of gravitons. I mean, if the application of gravitons can create a tractor beam capable of towing a starship or a small asteroid, then evidently this technology creates gravitic effects thousands, millions or perhaps trillions of times stronger than "natural" gravity - in other words trillionfolding the mass of a neutrino and making it stoppable that way.

Then again, there's some evidence that Trek sensors are capable of detecting "non-incident" radiation - radiation that doesn't even hit the sensor. In "The Enemy", LaForge's VISOR picks up a neutrino stream from the side, even though neutrinos shouldn't scatter much and thus a beam of them should only be visible from the direction in which it is aimed. And cloakships seem to be able to sense their surroundings without creating a shadow on it, even though the sensing of incident radiation should mean removing this radiation from the universe and leaving a shadow.

Even today's physics may feature some perverse little twist that allows for this sort of thing in theory. Trek physics could treat such things as pretty mundane, compared with warp drives and the like.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

So what's the deal with Trek sensors routinely being able to detect neutrinos, anyway?

Poetic license.