The Onion Strikes Again...

[Klaus]

Sci-Fi Writer Attributes Everything Mysterious To 'Quantum Flux'



...reminds me of Data's "employing multimodal reflection sorting"...

 

[Goliath]

Hehe.

That actually reminds me of a story from the Golden Age of SF.

John W Campbell published a story called "Space Rays" in a 1932 issue of Wonder Stories, in which, as the title suggested, he invented all sorts of different rays with all sorts of different properties.

The editor, Hugo Gernsback, thought it was a parody, and wrote in his introduction that he had been strongly tempted to retitle the story "Ray! Ray!"

But it seems that Campbell had been serious, and was quite offended by this.

So, technobabble has a long and dishonourable history in sci-fi. Trek--and The Onion--are merely carrying on this fine tradition of pseudoscientific bafflegab

 

[Middle Earther]

Hmmm...I'm very interested in "Cherokee flux" now...

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Eh. I usually blame chronoton particles. Those damn things get into everything.

 

[Snaploud]

It's all wibbly wobbly timey wimey to me...

 

[Davros]

Reverse the polarity of the nutron flow.

 

[Middle Earther]

Reverse the polarity of the nutron flow.

Are you insane? That will destabilize the acceleration of negative proton exchange!! Have you learned nothing???

 

[Goliath]

^Not if you remember to remove the optical impulse pin first.

 

[Middle Earther]

^Not if you remember to remove the optical impulse pin first.

Well...that's a different story entirely!