Fact-Checking Inside Star Trek: The Real Story
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Alternative Factor made one of the biggest impressions on me when I was a kid. The execution seems rushed and sloppy, but this doesn't stop it from being compelling.
True! I found it an okay episode as a kid especially with that space/time tunnel effect!
JB
JB
You're hilarious.You mean...*gulp*...there is a parallel universe with an evil version of Trump and Hillary in it?!?!?
I LOVE the ending of TAF. I just hate almost everything else about the episode.
The conversation in the briefing room... the idea laid out of another universe occupying the same space at the same time, as aspect not dwelled on in other stories... The matter anti-matter annihilation idea had just enough of a grain of truth to it to get my dark imagination going. A very formative experience.
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The fact that OUR Lazarus was the crazy one... I've often formed a picture in my head of Lazarus repairing a satellite in orbit, and witnessing the obliteration of the surface... I thought about drawing that. The "off", creepy look of the surface of the planet in the a-m universe, done by using a set instead of on-location for basically the same place... AF isn't just tolerable or "okay", it's a very valuable diamond in the rough.
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The fact that OUR Lazarus was the crazy one... I've often formed a picture in my head of Lazarus repairing a satellite in orbit, and witnessing the obliteration of the surface... I thought about drawing that. The "off", creepy look of the surface of the planet in the a-m universe, done by using a set instead of on-location for basically the same place... AF isn't just tolerable or "okay", it's a very valuable diamond in the rough.
Except it made no damn sense, because "The Naked Time" had already established that the ship used matter-antimatter annihilation as its power source and did not destroy the entire universe by doing so. And the chain of logical leaps they used to get from "one positive, the other negative" to "annihilation of everything that exists" was incoherent -- there was no basis for taking it that far. It's a terribly written scene.
Not once in 50 years of viewing have I thought that there was any conflict here... the matter anti-matter engines, used every day to power the ship, are plain old regular matter/anti-matter annihilation, reactions amongst basic individual particles. Lazarus is, on the other hand, one really big-ass "particle", or two, rather. The extreme difference in scale is what makes the difference.
That's not a matter of writing, but scientific accuracy. Yes, they're playing fast and loose with particle physics. The impact is, of course, diminished, once you find that out. They cross a line they shouldn't cross, but the drama of the idea, based on at least a kernel of actual science of a kind that ordinarily prime time audiences are not usually expected to sit still for... should be undeniable. I put this in the same camp as the first episode of Space:1999, which succeeds brilliantly as SF based drama, with a deeply flawed SF premise. People who throw out amazing pieces of work like that are going to have to be consistent about how they police Trek for scientific accuracy, and throw out perhaps half the episodes. That would be a huge case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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I will always remember the impact this had when I was nine, not a dumb kid, but one who was hungry for valid SF ideas with scale to them, that got the imagination going. I'm not going to throw it on the trash heap for flaws, but remember it for its impact.
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Yes, they're stretching it ridiculously by thinking of Lazarus as a unique, giant "particle" that can obliterate his opposite "particle", rather than being a mass of miniscule identical particles of matter and anti-matter that really aren't any different than those in their engines. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's no Barrier at the edge of the galaxy, either.
Except, first, that's a really, really stupid misunderstanding of physics on the part of the writers. The individual matter atoms that make up Kirk are indistinguishable from those that make up Lazarus, so Kirk touching anti-Lazarus should be exactly as destructive as Lazarus touching anti-Lazarus -- and neither one should destroy the entire universe, because we're only talking about 150 kg of combined reactants, and that would give an explosion of maybe 3 gigatons -- about a third of what detonating all nuclear weapons on Earth would release, certainly enough to be devastating for at least a hemisphere of a single planet, but not even remotely enough to destroy the universe.
Second, the episode never says it's different. It only discusses antimatter in the fantasy context of parallel universes and doesn't even acknowledge the more realistic concept. Indeed, it directly contradicts both "The Naked Time" and "Mudd's Women" by claiming that dilithium itself is the ship's energy source, rather than merely what channels the energy from the antimatter reaction.
I have no trouble denying that. The whole scene is incredibly stupid and incoherent. Not only does it show a painfully idiotic misunderstanding of basic science, but the logical leaps that Kirk and Spock take to arrive at their conclusion are even more incoherent, random, and absurd than the leaps Batman and Robin took to solve villains' riddles in the contemporary series. ("It happened at sea! See? C for Catwoman!")
The only thing amazing about "The Alternative Factor" is how such a completely incoherent and inane script ever got approved for production. The scientific stupidity is of a piece with its incompetence on just about every other level.
For people actually following the fictional tech of the show, it doesn't need to be pointed out that they have matter/anti-matter engines, and that dilithium is only one part of the process. Really, they made quite a big deal out of it, so since we know the ship runs on matter/anti-matter annihilation, obviously the Lazarus version is a very different situation. It's not only one guy running into his opposite, there's the danger of two whole universes co-mingling. That's clearly a much bigger thing than the tiny amounts they use in propulsion.
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Look, the very fact that Kirk already knows that "matter and anti-matter have a tendency to cancel each other out, violently" means that such a thing has been known to occur without the universe being destroyed, otherwise, how would he or anyone know that this mutual annihilation happens? Kirk knows because it's basic to his ship's operation.
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Look, the very fact that Kirk already knows that "matter and anti-matter have a tendency to cancel each other out, violently" means that such a thing has been known to occur without the universe being destroyed, otherwise, how would he or anyone know that this mutual annihilation happens? Kirk knows because it's basic to his ship's operation.
You're forgetting how gradually the show's concepts evolved. At the time "The Alternative Factor" was written, there had been only one prior episode that referenced antimatter as a power source and one prior episode that had mentioned "lithium crystals" (TAF was actually the debut of the name "dilithium" -- the only element of the episode that was ever referenced again). At that point in the show's development, the Federation had barely been introduced, the Prime Directive hadn't been thought up yet, etc. So it's not that the writers knew the audience would already be familiar with the concepts -- heck, at the time the story was first outlined, the show hadn't even premiered yet. It's that the concepts were still up in the air and so the different writers didn't have a consistent understanding of how the show's world even worked. And so a continuity error got through. (Dilithium would not be mentioned again until "Mirror, Mirror," and its use as a power relay would not be featured again until "Elaan of Troyius.")
Your "explanation" makes no more sense than the episode's. You're saying it would somehow make a difference because it's a whole body instead of a particle, but you don't offer any reason why it would be different -- and it really, really would not. A body is made of particles. All subatomic particles of a given type are effectively identical and interchangeable. An antiproton doesn't care whether the proton it annihilates is in Kirk or Lazarus or a rock or a tricorder or anything else. It's a proton. It'll go boom, period. Kirk should've vaporized the instant he arrived in the so-called "antimatter" universe. The idea that he'd only blow up if he met anti-Kirk is idiotically wrong.
That's exactly the point! He knows from experience that a matter-antimatter reaction would not destroy the universe, so there is absolutely no reason for Kirk and Spock to jump to the conclusion that it somehow would cause "the end of everything, everywhere."
Also, the whole point of science is that it lets us make predictions about circumstances we have not directly observed. Antimatter and its annihilation with matter were predicted mathematically before any actual antimatter was ever synthesized. It arose from Paul Dirac's calculation of the wave equation of the electron, an equation that allowed for the existence of positively charged electrons (positrons) as well as negative ones. Dirac made this prediction in 1928, and positrons were not actually observed until 1932. They probably wouldn't have been found if we hadn't already known to look for them. By the same token, if we know the equations that govern how antimatter behaves in small quantities -- which we do -- then we can just plug bigger numbers into the equations and calculate what will happen in larger quantities. That's how I calculated the blast yield of two adult human males annihilating each other in my earlier post -- there's an app for that.
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It seems that they were both crazy. We see Lazarus switch back and forth several times (you can tell because one version has a bandage on his face, and one doesn't) and each version is equally nutso.
I think the idea is that if you put some generic matter particle (of, say, bacon) into contact with some other generic antimatter particle (like straw), you'll get an explosive reaction strong enough to power a starship. But if you put some random particle of matter in contact with its exact on-and-only Doppelgänger particle from the antimatter universe, *that's" what caused the total annihilation of everything in both universes.
Again, if that were the case, then Kirk would've been instantly vaporized the moment he entered the antimatter universe -- and Lazarus-B would've blown up the Enterprise the instant he swapped places with Lazarus-A. The episode explicitly claimed that matter and antimatter would not react at all unless equivalent individual people came into contact. That's what's so incredibly stupid about it.
I think the only real idea is that the person who wrote "The Alternative Factor" didn't understand the concept of antimatter as well as the person who wrote "The Naked Time" and thus portrayed it in a much more silly and fanciful way. As for why it didn't get fixed in rewrites, maybe the producers were so busy struggling to make some semblance of sense out of the mess of the plot and characters that they couldn't spare the attention for the technical stuff.
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Yes, I do wonder about the intrusions into oppositely polarized universes not setting off at least a bit of fireworks. But then, I'm never sure which Lazarus I'm looking at, and never know if he's in the wrong universe or not. I probably file this away as yet another inadequately explained thing in a seemingly rushed episode. Maybe minds cross, but physical bodies don't. I know, the band aid.
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They don't say in words that smaller amounts of m and anti-m don't react at all. In fact, Kirk says they do. Lazaruses roaming freely in both universes implies no reaction. Anyway, I never said the ep didn't have big problems. I only said it's far from ruined by those problems.
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Science fiction is not science. Some of the best SF stories take wild leaps that go far beyond what we know, and in terms of science, they fall flat on their face, yet the situation set up can still be compelling and have value.
Again, that's exactly the problem. Any antimatter particle will annihilate with any matter equivalent. There should always be a reaction.
The problem with the chain of reasoning is that it's utterly incoherent. Here:
First off, the idea of the two universes being "positive" and "negative" comes out of nowhere. There's no logical connection between the idea of a parallel universe and a "minus universe." Kirk pulls that one completely out of thin air, yet it's subequently treated as fact.
Another logical leap. Even if the totally arbitrary suggestion of a "minus universe" were true, that doesn't automatically mean an antimatter universe. Antiparticles are just particles with a reversed charge. There are other possible reversals, like negative mass or mirror matter.
Again, this is not just a "tendency" or in "certain conditions." It always happens. Any quantity of antimatter will annihilate with matter if it comes into physical contact. That's why every other Trek episode dealing with antimatter stresses the importance of containment fields, why a breach of containment will destroy the ship. Any and all antimatter has to be kept tightly contained within magnetic fields to ensure it never touches any normal matter, because any physical contact means a guaranteed explosion. We saw this in "Obsession," in "That Which Survives," in "The Savage Curtain," in "One of Our Planets is Missing," and in every modern-Trek episode that ran the term "warp core breach" into the ground. Everywhere else in Trek, it is consistently a given that antimatter can never touch matter at all or instant kaboom. And that's the way it is in reality too. So TAF's insistence that an antimatter reaction will only occur in specific conditions contradicts the rest of the franchise as well as physical fact.
It's a complete logical leap to go from identical particles to identical people. That's more a poetic metaphor than a physically valid concept. People are made of particles. Every proton is identical to every other proton, no matter whose body it's in. Heck, if the reaction would only occur if two entire macroscopic objects were identical, then antimatter engines would be impossible, since if you mined the matter from a planet, you'd have to find an antimatter duplicate planet and mine it in the exact same spot to get the right fuel, and you'd have to make sure that only identical counterpart supplies interacted, and it's just so damn stupid and impossible. Especially when you consider that the episode implies such antimatter duplicates only exist in parallel universes, so how would you get there to mine them?
And this is the biggest, most absurd unsupported leap. How do you get from a single violent reaction to cosmic obliteration? This is not explained at all. It's not based in anything they've said at any point in the conversation. The only possible basis for it that I can think of is that the writer completely misunderstood what the word "annihilation" means in this context. (It just means that the reacting particles themselves are annihilated, i.e. transformed completely into energy. It doesn't mean everything ceases to exist.)
Imagine a crime drama where the detectives are investigating a crime. Based on a string of reasoning that they mostly pull out of thin air rather than basing it on any actual evidence, they somehow convince themselves that a man is going to murder his wife.
"Do you know what you're saying? Husbands and wives have a tendency to cancel each other out -- violently."
"Precisely. Under certain conditions, when two married people meet..."
"If they meet..."
"Genocide, Jim. Total, complete, absolute genocide."
"Of everyone who exists, everywhere."
Surely you can see the nonsense of equating a single homicide with the extinction of the entire species. It's just as stupid and incoherent to claim, based on absolutely nothing, that a single matter-antimatter reaction will destroy all reality. The whole conversation is based on a series of arbitrary speculations that Kirk and Spock pull out of thin air and then accept as gospel fact. That is terrible reasoning and terrible writing.
This isn't even about the science. As I just showed with the homicide example, the flaw is in the basic illogic that's used to justify the plot, having the characters just arbitrarily pull nonsensical speculations out of nowhere and yet somehow be absolutely right. As I said, it's uncannily like the preposterous deductive leaps Batman and Robin made in the '66 series, but those were intentionally ridiculous.
And it's about internal consistency. No, a fictional universe doesn't have to be realistic, but it does need to have a consistent set of rules. It can be a pure fantasy universe ruled by magic, but if you establish that, say, magic can't enslave minds under any circumstances, but you then do a story that's all about magic mind slaves, then that's bad writing. If you say that time travel is possible but history can never be changed, it's a flaw in the writing if you then do a story about history being changed. (Warehouse 13 was guilty of this.) And that's the problem here. It's not about the science, it's about the fundamental incoherence of the writing. The scientific idiocy is just a symptom of what a random, nonsensical mess the story is on every level. It's not compelling, it's just gibberish.
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Oh, good God, I know all this already!!! I know!!! I KNOW!!!!!! I'm so sorry I found something of value here. It all has to do more with the bleak mood, other things I have yet to put my finger on. Besides, I was nine and being introduced to SF. I said it has huge problems, but that the situation was VERY compelling, and since I always reconnect with early viewings when watching, it still is. Not to you, but to me. I just said the errors don't completely ruin it for me. They had a core story which had value. I failed to get across what semi-saves the episode for me.
That seemed obvious to me the first time I saw it, 40-something years ago. And I ain't necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer.
You get the point of the episode: drama. Its not a textbook or an issue of Scientific American. If we tried to hold every sci-fi production to some standard of scientific plausibility, most would fail to hold their own, as they are inventing concepts, methods and technology that (almost always) do not exist, and probably never will. For anyone to attempt to tear at the episode in question for those "standards" is missing the purpose of fiction--particularly fiction set in the far future where no present day theory or fact is applicable.
Then again, some throw the demands for plausibility to the wind if its their pet work to protect. For example, take the CBS (now CW) Supergirl series episode "Better Angels"--an episode which (for no rational reason) had the heroine break alien mind control with a speech. Yes, a speech. That was as believable as the ways Tom & Jerry can be split into pieces and reassemble or somehow survive sitting on a stack of exploding dynamite with no more effort than plugging their ears with fingers and closing their eyes.
That kind of anti-scientific absurdity is swallowed with a smile--accepted as believable--but a sci-fi series set centuries from now is attacked....
I can't wait until scientists develop a matter/antimatter engine for my car.
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