Major Loop Hole Discovered

[Dryson]

Star Trek: IV
McCoy: You, ah, realize of course that if we give him the formula, we're altering the future.

Scotty: Why? How do we know he didn't invent the thing?

Scotty asks, how do we know that he didn't invent the thing? The comment made by Scotty must allude to information regarding the actual inventor of transparent aluminum being lost during WWIII. The inventor of transparent aluminum should be a primary course in the history of manufacturing that an Engineer should have taken at the academy.

Therefore, there are a lot of holes for future Threat Forces to go back in time, claim inventing something that was invented prior to WWIII, where the inventor cannot be confirmed due to WWIII that would then allow the Threat Force to alter the future of Earth.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

@1001001 can this be moved to my TVH questions thread in the movies board?

 

[1001001]

@1001001 can this be moved to my TVH questions thread in the movies board?

I can move it to the correct forum, but it would be up to @Peach Wookiee whether to merge it, close it, let it stand on its own. Etc.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Therefore, there are a lot of holes for future Threat Forces to go back in time, claim inventing something that was invented prior to WWIII, where the inventor cannot be confirmed due to WWIII that would then allow the Threat Force to alter the future of Earth.

Why would a faction go back in time just to steal credit for an invention?

 

[Kor]

I think the idea might be, strategically putting the item into hands of someone else of the original time, in a way that would alter the future to their own advantage? Or they work closely with that person to get a bunch of it manufactured on the down-low, or something like that.

Kor

 

[Tosk]

Personally, I have no trouble believing that engineering students are not required to learn the names of everyone who ever invented a material in current use. And even if they were, doesn't mean they all were perfect students, or didn't just plain forgot later in life. "The knowledge must have been lost in WWIII" is a massive leap.

 

[Victoria]

In my copy of the novelisation

"..the point is, Nichols did invent transparent aluminum" (Mr Scott speaking on p170, Grafton Books, 1987).

As the novelisations are often based from the scripts rather than what appears onscreen, I had a look at Memory Alpha but that wasn't any help. It just suggests that it might have come from a "later" copy of the script. (It's possible one of the clever people here might know about that)
At best, that suggests that, although not canon (it did not appear on the screen), Mr Scott did know the inventor and there is no plot loophole.

As an exercise, I tried to find out who invented transparent aluminum in real life. Although I could find a number of copyright holders, the "inventor" seems to be creditted as being a group of people rather than an individual. If I can't find a single individual name now for something invented in my lifetime, it doesn't seem unreasonable that someone in the future would not know a single individual name either.

I can't quite see why claiming to have invented something is really going to pose some kind of threat unless we are talking about copyright wars. Chekov was forever claiming that things were first invented by the Russians and that doesn't seem to have caused any problems.

 

[Chaos Descending]

Why should we assume that the invention of transparent aluminum was SUCH a groundbreaking event in materials science (compared to all the other groundbreaking events and inventions between 1986 and 2286) that every engineer from 300 years in the future would know who invented it?

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

I gather it's like knowing who discovered insulin or invented the electric light bulb.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Apparently McCoy doesn't know what a predestination paradox is.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Apparently McCoy doesn't know what a predestination paradox is.

He's a solo doc.

 

[Ssosmcin]

I'm sure we've taken classes to get degrees and certifications, remembered stuff for the finals and then forgot 98% of the crap we studied because of real world applications.

I hated this scene for the willy nilly treatment of altering events but I hated the novelization's fix even more. It was a comedy. It probably didn't matter who invented it, just so long as it was invented around that time. If Scotty didn't show Nichols, he probably would have stumbled onto the formula himself. Of maybe Lipshitz over at Sven's Plasticarama in Santa Barbara did but patented it before Nichols could.