I often praise TOS for being the one iteration of Star Trek that is actually science fiction, the rest being sf-ish, but not really sf. This is, in part, because in the 60s, Trek was the pinnacle of a literary sf tradition, with many of its authors submitting scripts to Trek.
(interestingly, as of
December '66, sf authors were being told "no thanks" and Trek was instead turning to Hollywood writers. Why? SF authors wanted too much money!)
Despite the sfnality of Trek, there are a lot of head scratchers. The latest one came up on Galileo Seven, in which the Enterprise investigates a "quasar or quasar-like phenomenon."
This is what I'm writing in my latest review. This is written from the perspective of someone living in January '67:
For those who don't know what a quasar is, they really are quite interesting, and probably nothing like the phenomenon depicted in the show (which is more like some kind of nebula). Quasars are actually cutting-edge astronomical science. When humanity first started turning their radio telescopes to the stars, they discovered sources of radiation that had hitherto been invisible. But they blazed like beacons in low frequency radio waves.
They seemed no bigger than stars, but they clearly were not stars. So they were called "quasi-stellar radio sources" – quasars for short. No one knew if they were extremely small, close-by entities, or extremely powerful far away ones. A few years back, it was noted that every quasar had an immensely red-shifted spectrum. That is to say that all of the light coming from any quasar, every single wavelength of color, was stretched, as if the body were receding from us at great speed. You've probably heard of this phenomenon before: the Doppler effect you hear when a train whistle is heading away from you.
This red-shift indicated that the quasars were actually very far away, billions of light years. They also offered proof that the early universe (since if the quasars are far away, they must be quite old – the light took billions of years to reach our eyes, after all) was different from the current universe since there are no nearby quasars. Thus, final conclusive proof that the universe arose from some kind of Big Bang, as opposed to always existing, as Fred Hoyle and many other prominent cosmologists suggested.
What this all means is that Kirk and co. could not have investigated a quasar, for there are none close enough to Earth for his starship to reach! He did cover up with the possibility of it being a "quasar-like" object, whatever that means (a quasi-quasi-stellar source?!)
I can usually squint my ears and forgive this scientificish wishiwash, but it drives the Young Traveler crazy.
