SIO352: The Picard Maneuver... IT. COULD. WORRKKKK! Says Bryan the Astrophysicist

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 352. I'm Thomas, and I am so excited to bring you another astrophysics episode. Now, if you are anything like, which maybe you are if you were listening to this, this stuff is so fascinating, it really is, it's like the fundamental stuff of our universe, it is just so cool to me, I'll never get over it.

And it kind of blows my mind that there's like so many people, probably most people just don't have any interest in this kind of stuff. And it's just, I don't know, it's always been so fascinating to me, you know, relativity and what space and what does the universe and all those things. I've always thought about those all my life. So it has been such a pleasure to record with Brian on just a tiny taste of those topics. This episode is a lot of fun.

I've got a two parter for you, but it's pretty distinct part. So it's really just like two episodes with Brian. You'll see. They're pretty related. The first one is we saw a Star Trek. We watched an early Star Trek Next Generation where there was something called the Picard Maneuver, which you might think is kind of silly, kind of crazy sounding. It involves jumping into hyperspeed and then appearing in two places at once.

But I Brian Gillis, astrophysicist, is here to tell us maybe it's kind of plausible. Possible. And so in part one we're going to explore that, we're going to talk about the show a little bit, then in part two we're gonna learn everything about special relativity, you're gonna become an expert on special relativity, no, not really, but we're gonna learn a ton about it. And so that's what's coming.

Now patrons, I'm gonna release them both pretty quick, so obviously you have this one and then I'll I'll release part two, I don't know, 12 hours or something. Give people time to listen to it. I just want to do something a little extra for patrons. And so part two will be coming right away. And for normies, apologies, but you might have to wait a day or two to hear the part two and to know how the universe works.

You have to walk around just aimlessly, not knowing exactly how anything works until then. Also want to say that this was, I mean, we're almost at the end of the first month month of kind of relaunching the show again. And I want to thank you all for your patience and your support and bearing with me as I tinker around. I know I got to a bit of a late start in the month, so I had to post a lot.

I'm hoping April that we get on track, that we're on a regular schedule. We get lots of stuff to you. I fully intend to do that. And so it'll be a little more regular release schedule. I think it's probably going to be like Sunday night and maybe another night, maybe uh Wednesday night or something like that. So that's what's coming.

I've got lots of recordings done, I've got more to do, and it's it's looking, it's looking up, it's lookin' bright, there's just so much to talk about and I can't wait to bring that to you. So thanks for sticking with this, you know, bumpy first month, but here's to April being like a real month, like a normal, just we won't even think about it anymore, it'll be a cool normal month of podcasts, and I hope you'll support it.

So after you're listening to this, if you'd like to hear part two right away, go to patreon.com/seriouspod. Support the show, it coming. By the way, ad free. You want to do that because the ads, let me tell you, you don't want the ads. Ad free is better. So great reasons to support the show. Oh, I also, I'm gonna get a bonus episode to for month of March, and that will of course be for patrons only. So lots of good reasons to pledge. But enough about all that. Let's get over to Dr. Brian Gillis, and we're going to talk about Star Trek and the Picard maneuver. Here we go.

0:03:34 Clip: Commander Riker's team is aboard, sir. Help warp one. Engage!

0:03:41 Thomas: I'm joined once again by Dr. Brian Gillis. How you doing, Brian?

0:03:45 Bryan: Doing well today, how are you, Thomas?

0:03:47 Thomas: A minute. There's another Brian to the right of you. I don't know which one to do the podcast with. Oh, no.

0:03:53 Bryan: Oh, worry, it's the new one, it always -

0:03:54 Thomas: Yeah. You had us watch an episode of Next Generation, an early episode, before Riker has his beard, so you know it's going to be a little rough. It's not going to be stellar

0:04:01 Bryan: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, season one, and it's a Ferengi episode on top of that, so, yeah, it got two strikes against it right off the bat. Though I actually looked up some online rankings, and as Ferengis go, this is apparently one of the better ones, so...

0:04:07 Thomas: Oh boy yeah several strikes yeah, right it's It's yeah, that's true, it's really not as bad as a lot of the other ones, but it's still very, very silly, but you know, it's Star Trek, I had a great time, and you wanted to talk about, there's a certain maneuver that's done, uh, I am so curious because you've teased that this might be like more sound science than we think. And I'm very curious to hear why that might be. So, uh, why don't we, we get, get into it when we talk about the episode as

0:04:23 Bryan: Yeah, yes, yes. So let's start with just a brief summary of the episode here. So to sum things up, the Enterprise is out, encounters a Ferengi ship who has a very suspicious gift for them, which they hand over, not asking for any money, which, if you know the Ferengis, is perfectly in character for them. They give free gifts with no strings attached all the time, and yeah,

0:05:11 Thomas: Aaron likes to say over on philosophers in space, they are space Jews of the worst kind of stereotype Uh very weird. I don't know if they still do that in star Trek. I hope not. But anyway, in 1980, whatever, seven, this was it's space Jews. OK.

0:05:23 Bryan: Yeah, well, the Ferengi are still around, and they still have that culture, but there have been more attempts to give them breath. And actually, in this episode, we see some of that as well. The main Ferenghi villain isn't out for profit at all, so even from beginning, they do, yeah...

0:05:41 Thomas: Hmm. He's just out for revenge. You know, just one of those wholesome causes.

0:05:45 Bryan: Something that isn't a bad negative, do stereotype at all. Yeah, yeah,

0:05:49 Thomas: You're telling me he's just conniving for revenge is what you're saying. There's nothing. No.

0:05:55 Bryan: We don't actually start getting good Frangie until Deep Space nine-ish, yeah, So let's negative stereotypes, types are, are there, unfortunately, but yeah, okay,

0:05:58 Thomas: Right. Right, Right, right. We don't have a stereotype scientist on today, we'll, we'll talk, we'll break those down a little later date, let's talk about the science, um, what a weird episode, a lot of it, because I've seen, you know, I think I've seeing all the Next Generation at some point, but I, you know, it's been a while and I didn't remember and I was like, oh yeah, battle and there's gonna be a Picard maneuver, I'm excited for this, this should be, you know, action-packed, filled with adventure, but it's just a weird, like, soap opera, it's like a really slow episode where Picard gets a bunch of headaches and, like, that's pretty much the whole plot lot, yeah, right,

0:06:32 Bryan: Yeah, That's actually one of the interesting things about the plot is that it starts out, the big inciting incident, Picard has a headache, now in the future they've cured headaches, so this actually is a big deal and would be a very nice future to live in.

0:06:48 Thomas: Right. I know, but they still do the thing, I know I complain about this all the time, they still doing the thing where for some reason Picard doesn't, like, okay, in the world in which you've cured headaches, they give Crusher, Beverly Crusher they give her a pretty appropriate reaction, she's like, yeah we shouldn't have headaches, like that's not a, that's not a thing, but Picard still has the attitude of like, what it's a headache, come on woman it's it's a headache. Why are you? It's like he grew up in this world too, right? He's also

0:07:11 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, he should have had zero headaches outside of head injuries throughout his life.

0:07:18 Thomas: Right. And, and he should be like, what the F is this? I, the, my head is killing me. I thought this was the year two, 25, I don't know. What year is it? Do you know something?

0:07:23 Bryan: Yeah. 2,400 something.

0:07:32 Thomas: 2400. And I have a headache? Are you kidding me? But you know, it's kind of weird to make him the character who's like us, I guess. Maybe you want to stand in for us.

0:07:39 Bryan: Maybe. Another And thing about that is that he starts acting really erratically throughout this episode, and there really should have been a point where Dr. Crusher steps in and okay, he's not medically fit for duty. I'm relieving him of command, that's what should be happening there.

0:07:51 Thomas: Yeah. No kidding. Right. I Would think in a, a world in which you've eradicated headaches, the minute you had a headache it would be like, well, okay, you're, you're off, and now, uh, Riker, Riker, grow a beard and you, you're the new captain for a while.

0:08:00 Bryan: Yeah, yeah, Turns out that the Ferengi have smuggled in an artifact on the Stargazer, that's the ship they've brought as, as a gift. It turns out, um, no one, that this was indeed a trap, and this art of fact is called a thought maker, which basically, um, Picard, that he's reliving events from seven years ago, yeah.

0:08:25 Thomas: Yeah I don't really know why his headache starts before all this though, but it's kind of weird but

0:08:29 Bryan: That isn't really clear, maybe it has very long range.

0:08:33 Thomas: So they come, they've got a gift, it's a, it's an old ship, turns out it's Picard's old ship, he's already having headaches for some reason, it's his old ship from a battle, famous battle, that's, you know, they teach it in the academy, that kind of thing, and yeah and

0:08:39 Bryan: Uh, yeah, but Picard himself is forgotten about it, he has to be reminded by everyone else what a hero he was, something.

0:08:51 Thomas: Funny though, is they kind of undershoot the years though, because it's like, isn't it, doesn't he say nine years ago, he says I'm pretty sure he says nine, and like, nine years to go to, look, I'm only 36 or whatever I am, nine years ago feels like yesterday to me, that's nothing. If I if I, I was 50, or whatever the heck, he's supposed to be 40. I mean, like, I, you make it, make it 25 years ago, you know, you can't have it be nine years, that's, yet, Obama was like in his second term nine years ago, that's yesterday, that just happened, I wouldn't be like, Obama, who, what, who, what president is that, yeah.

0:08:58 Bryan: Like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it yeah, and And this battle also resulted in them all having to abandon ship, it was that disastrous, and Picard has completely forgotten about it, Maxio.

0:09:32 Thomas: And they teach About it at the academy, boy. Two on the not fit, fit for duty. Like, are you serious? You don't remember the thing you're that's named after you like the, Oh, maybe.

0:09:41 Bryan: Maybe this is actually an effect of the artifact, it's messing with his memories, um, could be. Anyway, so yeah, so what happened at this battle, the Stargazer, um, encounters some unknown ship attacking them, go badly, is, well, he describes himself as a helmsman, but I think he was the captain, formerly a helmsman. And he orders them to do a desperation maneuver, which is basically, he aims the ship right at the attacking ship and orders maximum warp for a short time. So the ship jumps forward, and then from the perspective of the other ship, what's happened is the Stargazer has suddenly split into two. There's one where it originally was, one image, other ship takes a guess as to which is real, shoots at the old one, which, if you think about it from their perspective, something new shows up, you think, okay, the new one's an illusion, I'm going to keep shooting where I was. But it turns out the, the new one is actually the real Stargazer, they have the space, they're not getting attacked, they can fight back, and they're able to win the battle, although they do eventually have to abandon ship.

0:10:57 Thomas: So when you say, in aim right at them, which, that part seems slightly unnecessary, cause you're really just trying to, like, just, you know, create a decoy. It doesn't have to, it seems dangerous to be like pointed at them and go warp speed for, you know, just like a second, just eyeball it. Just give me like a, you don't have a second.

0:11:14 Thomas: I always love too, the, the, the process with these precise things in the Star Trek universe, the idea that all that, that what has to happen is he has to give an oral command and then someone on the ship has to hear it. Was that for me? Am I? Oh yeah, okay, so hit this. And that all has to be done with like precise timing, it always cracks me up, but How would you do warp? Okay, we're so, here's what, as, as always, I'll go with them. There's warp speed.

0:11:14 Bryan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:11:38 Thomas: No problem. I'll go with warp speed we can we can gladly.

0:11:40 Bryan: You don't have Star Trek if you don'T have warp speed.

0:11:42 Thomas: No, yeah, totally. But are you engaging for warp speed in a short enough amount of time to only go like, I don't know, 100 yards? I don'T even know what that was. Like, it'S not very far, right?

0:11:53 Bryan: They never clarify in the episode. If you go to the Star Trek wiki, they say it's a distance of 30 light seconds, which is actually quite a large distance.

0:12:00 Thomas: Okay. Yeah, that'S really far away. But if you're 30 Light seconds away, I know it takes how long, long does it take for light from the sun to get here? Six seconds or six minutes? I can't remember, something like, like that. Okay.

0:12:03 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. I

0:12:13 Thomas: I think it might be six minutes, if I remember, that's just from my memory, so That's pretty far, um, what, what do you think off the top of your head, what is something comparably 30 light seconds away, like, are there any of the planets, or, oh,

0:12:11 Bryan: Think it's a minute. Yeah, yeah.

0:12:26 Bryan: Geez, I'm not good at the solar system. That'd be another planet.

0:12:27 Thomas: Not good, that's Okay, well, We Know We Know it's something Like I don't know, if I'm guessing six minutes for the sun, then we can do the little math of something like a 12th of that, and I'm, all I'm, the point I'm making is I don't think you can see a ship from that distance. Now, it's outside the window, but are we doing the thing where, like, somehow they have a camera? That's another Star Trek, like, convention of Star Trek as a show, where

0:12:29 Bryan: Yeah yeah.

0:12:49 Bryan: Well, Presumably everything looks a lot closer than it realistically would be, But even think about, on Earth nowadays, real life, any aerial fights between planes take place outside of visual distance, uh, Uh, fighting is basically a thing of the past, It's all about using missiles to hit planes that you can't even see yet. So going a few hundred years in the future, that's only Going to be more so.

0:12:53 Thomas: Yeah. Really? Right. Right. Sure. All right. So we'll go with them that there's like, I don't know, drone footage of the, they always have like, what do they say? On screen.

0:13:19 Bryan: They've Got A Telescope on Board or Or Their magic sensors, whatever, However, Their Sensors Work. Yeah, yeah,

0:13:21 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, sure. Magic sensors. Okay, So They have That zoomed in, we'll say it's so that's quite a ways away, I mean, 30 light seconds, that means well, but that means also your phasers are taking 30 seconds to get there, right? Do that, do phase Do The, do the phaser blast go, it faster than light in that world? I don't think they do.

0:13:34 Bryan: Yeah, that, um, far as I know, no. And this is actually important to the plot that they don't. Because if they did go to faster than light, we would potentially have a problem.

0:13:39 Thomas: Oh, Yeah, Yeah, Wouldn't you have just all-time, all, like, a billion phaser images, false images, everywhere? Okay, We're getting ahead of ourselves, so anyway, I'm Already calling a little bit of BS on any of that, because the, the distances don't make any sense, but we'll say, I don't think 30 light seconds can possibly be right. I don'T you think that's like somebody put that in as a fan and that can't work because how, yeah, yeah.

0:13:52 Bryan: Yeah, you know, yeah probably or it was in a novelization or something.

0:14:09 Thomas: What would you say is your opinion of what might make more sense as a distance for any of this to work?

0:14:14 Bryan: Into too many impossibilities before I can even and discuss the practical distances. We'd have to figure out how phasers work, first of all. The way they look, they seem to disperse too quickly to be practical. And they don't exactly seem to be lasers because you can see them as they travel. We talked a bit about this in the previous episode that blasters in Star Wars, phasors in Star Trek are visible beams of light, which would make them very impractical lasers because they would be losing a lot of energy all along the way, and you have to think, how are they visible in space? And the

0:14:16 Thomas: Oh, that's fair.

0:14:32 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:14:49 Bryan: Only explanation I've heard for this that is at all plausible is that they're actually bolts of plasma being shot out, and that plasma illuminates light as it travels. But make that a practical weapon, and you have to be a lot closer together. So at this point, yeah, I think we just have to go with it.

0:14:59 Thomas: Okay. So, we've already broken it, but well, okay. Okay, we'll try to, I like to try to figure out how to make it work. So we'll say they've got to be closer, but if you're too close, this whole going at hyperspeed directly at the ship, I mean, that's got to be, okay, we're going to go with hyperspace. We'll say two light seconds. I love it. Two light seconds, I can believe that they're shooting lasers two light seconds away or whatever, phasers, you know?

0:15:18 Bryan: Yeah. I think 30 light seconds, but honestly, you only need maybe two light seconds for this to be practical. Yeah, and that's something that within the course of battle, it takes two seconds to hit. Sure. It is A ridiculously long distance, and so remember the speed of light is 300 million meters per second, so let's say it's three light seconds away, that's taking 300, that's going to be 300 million metres away, or 300,000 kilometers. So that is still very far away, but not going to able to visibly see the other ship.

0:15:35 Thomas: Yeah, sure. Okay ,we'll go with that.

0:16:01 Bryan: But maybe the, oh, yeah, expecting solar system quizzes.

0:16:01 Thomas: Yeah, that is something like the moon from the earth distance, isn't it? Something somewhere around that, or oh, that's

0:16:08 Bryan: This is one of my weak points, sorry, yeah.

0:16:10 Thomas: Okay, I right, Brian, um, not going to tell anybody that we had to pause to look up some distances. Don't worry, this, this isn't going to make it into the show. Nobody's going to know that we had to pause to look up some distances.

0:16:19 Bryan: Good. Yes, I'm a professional astrophysicist. I have all of this in the front of my mind. Every distance from every planet at every time is in the front of mind, and I definitely do not need to occasionally look some numbers up.

0:16:28 Thomas: Exactly. That's sort of like how genius mathematicians, you can ask them like to multiply really high numbers. And they're like, yeah, I know all that. Because in order to get to the high level math, you have to first beat the number. You got to do every. Every.

0:16:43 Bryan: Yeah you've got to install a calculator in your mind. That's how it works.

0:16:46 Thomas: And I'm such a good editor that we know there's no way that this will make the air, and they will, they will think we knew the distances. But no, I was about right. I thought it was six minutes. It turns out it's a little over eight minutes for the sun. So I feel like that was pretty good for not the astrophysicist.

0:17:01 Bryan: Yeah.

0:17:02 Thomas: But OK, now we're talking about the moon. We're trying to get roughly what two light seconds is, because I think we're saying maybe two light second. Seconds works for the battle. Maybe you don't even need that much. Right. Maybe one would might work.

0:17:10 Bryan: Yeah yeah, so the moon, uh, just a bit over one light second away from the earth on average, so yeah

0:17:16 Thomas: Okay okay so if we're talking small ships, you're definitely not seeing it, but you know, okay, we, that, now we have some sense of the distance

0:17:24 Bryan: Yeah okay, people, mind where we are, the The Stargazer is coming at the Ferengi ship, and it doesn't actually have to be right at them, but he does have to be in their direction. That is, yeah.

0:17:37 Thomas: That makes that make more sense, like you got to go toward them all

0:17:40 Bryan: Yeah, you go towards them, right at them, or close to right at them. If you can get really up close and give them a scare, it works well, but you also don't want to accidentally crash into them. So, something like that. You jump right at them, and then from their perspective they'll see two copies of the Stargazer at once, and hopefully they'll pick the wrong one. It turned out in the past they did, and they fired at that one, and by the time their phasers reached that one, traveling at the speed of light, it had vanished. Their, their, did nothing, and then the new one was able to fight back, destroy them, and and save the day.

0:18:18 Thomas: I already see several problems here, first off, I know we're saying we're trying to make this work, I get it, I'm trying to, but like, we obviously you can't see the ship, so you've got the sensors, super sensors, but like, how are the super sensors tracking the ship, like if in normal battle you're moving around like crazy, you're whatever, so like we got to assume there's some sort of way that it fixates on the ship, the super censors, and then furthermore, why it be both of them in the camera view, of that doesn't work, does it, I guess, if I guess we were still, yeah

0:18:20 Bryan: Okay. Yeah.

0:18:48 Bryan: Let's imagine how this might work. Let's say you're setting up a starship and you want to do it in a way that works with technology we have today. So one thing you want is you want it to be able to look in any direction, at least out to some distance. So you're going to set up an array of cameras, probably a minimum of six, ideally more, that cover the whole sky, so that if something shows up suddenly it'll show as a sudden change in one of those cameras and you can focus to some extent, so we'll call these the wide field cameras

0:19:05 Thomas: Okay. Mm -hmm. And we'll say they're super -duper advanced, so they're super cool and can see stuff really well.

0:19:23 Bryan: Yeah they've got really good resolution and good frame rate, they can detect quickly, and then after that you're going to want to have cameras that can zoom in on anything of interest, and again, you're, you're going to need to hit pretty much any direction.

0:19:28 Thomas: All right. Sure.

0:19:41 Thomas: Mm-mm.

0:19:41 Bryan: And so you're probably going to want an array of these. Let's say, again, a minimum of six, probably more than one.

0:19:46 Thomas: Why? I I was going to say, I feel like the whole outside of the ship is now just cameras. And it might be. Like, maybe.

0:19:52 Bryan: Because yeah. Well, these are big ships. There's plenty of rooms for cameras. So you're goingto want deep field cameras. We'll use them to borrow an astronomy term. Ones that, once you know there's something there that you want to look at, we'll zoom in on it. And get a good view and be able to track it.

0:19:56 Thomas: Yeah. All

0:20:12 Bryan: They'll use automatic image recognition to figure out where the object of interest is in their field of view. And if it's a bit off center, they'll shift the camera and then use a bit of extra math to predict its trajectory and try to follow it so that it remains centered. So this is all stuff that we can pretty much do with modern technology. And going 400 years into the future is only going to get better.

0:20:12 Thomas: Right, sure.

0:20:27 Thomas: I like it. Yeah. Right. With you.

0:20:38 Bryan: This case, what happens? The Ferengi ship is in battle with the Stargazer. They've got their deep field cameras aimed straight at it, following it. And then suddenly their wide field cameras pick up a new object. The computer runs processing on it, sees it's another ship, a Federation ship, which to them is the enemy. So the computer probably automatically will one of the deep field chambers that's free and can point at it and have it point at it and give them a view of that.

0:20:49 Thomas: Hmm. Okay.

0:21:08 Bryan: So they're seeing everything here, we're assuming, just through light. Aren't using any magic technology.

0:21:14 Thomas: Like it. Great. Yeah, I think it works.

0:21:16 Bryan: Question here is, why does the physics work? Why are you seeing two images of it? So do you have any idea of why this works?

0:21:19 Thomas: Yeah. Well, have a lot of skepticism. I feel like even if we get, okay, first off, right than light travel mean that time travel is possible? Like, isn't it like, how could you have one but not the other?

0:21:26 Bryan: Works Okay. Oh.

0:21:36 Bryan: Getting a bit ahead in the episode, we'll get to that. Okay.

0:21:38 Thomas: Okay, all right. Well, I'll leave that aside for now. Let's say, okay, I will just talk about the visual part. Why a distinct second image is my question. Like if you're warping, you know, why not like sort of like an old Windows screensaver where the, you know, like there's like a trail of ship kind of thing that you see. Why like a distinct like photographic image in one location?

0:22:02 Bryan: So we're assuming here it warps for a bit and then stops, so there's just one tiny fraction of a time, like a tenth of a second or so, that it's in warp, and then it spends a good two seconds in front, it just stopped in space, so it was stopped before warps quickly stops again. So So you see the distinct image from both of those times.

0:22:05 Thomas: Right.

0:22:24 Thomas: Mm-hmm, and it seems to last a while, so I'm again, I'm kind of skeptical of this

0:22:28 Bryan: In show, it lasts a while, but that depends on the distance. So let's go maybe thinking about this in more mundane terms. We'll help figure out why it can last a while. So let'S take things back down to Earth, and we'll do a thought experiment of something that could be done at Earth's scale. So let's say you go out to a baseball field, set up a pitching machine to throw baseballs at you and put on a blindfold. So the only way you know a pitching mission is there is that you're getting hit by baseballs. Let's say that you get hit by one baseball every second because

0:22:30 Thomas: Oh, I love it. Mm -hm. Okay. Okay.

0:23:05 Thomas: Why am I getting hit by them? Why don't I try to hit them with my bat?

0:23:08 Bryan: You're wearing a blindfold, we're not using light. Light? Using light?

0:23:10 Thomas: Why did I volunteer to go blindfolded to get hit by baseball? All right, fine, all right, leave it aside.

0:23:17 Bryan: Your duties as a podcaster, and you're not allowed to use light because that would be faster than baseball travel, which we've already established is equivalent to time travel. You're detecting the pitching machines by the baseballs it's shooting at you. Let's say, just to put some numbers at it, it shoots one baseball a second, the baseball travels 10 meters a second, and it's 100 meters away. So you run the numbers, it's, there are about 10 baseballs in the air at any given time, and so you use the fact that you get hit to get an idea, oh, that hit me from the right, the machine's over to the right.

0:23:23 Thomas: Okay. I've okay. Hmm. Hmm.

0:23:49 Bryan: And then while it's doing this, um, comes, comes driving along a high-speed car, even faster than 10 meters per second, picks up the pitching machine with one hand, and plops it down 50 meters away from you, all under a second. And then it starts shooting at you again from that position. So while it's doing this, there are still nine baseballs in the air coming towards you from the previous position. It starts shootin' from the new position. Position. Going to take about five seconds for the first one to hit you, but once it does, you've been hit five times from the old position, and now suddenly two baseballs hit you at once. One of the ones that was originally in the air, and one that was shot from the new position. And then this will happen for the rest of the one's that are still in the area. And so the result is that for your ability to see the pitching machine, you're seeing it in two places at the same time.

0:24:07 Thomas: Okay yeah.

0:24:38 Thomas: Interesting. That's it. Okay so it is it guess it is mandatory that it goes towards you more right Right. Because you need to. OK, that's interesting. So because you've the car that picks it up, picks up the baseball machine, travels faster than the baseballs. Right. That's kind of critical. So then then you get the. That'S interesting. OKAY. I see it.

0:24:50 Bryan: One. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is essentially what's going on with the light travel, we see it from the light that's coming off, and so the stargazer is far away, there's a lot of light coming off of it, some of which reaches us, and then when it engages in warp, a lot of the light that's coming off is still in the process of traveling towards us. So then it travels closer, starts emitting light again, and then a later, once the light from the new image has us, we're seeing both of them at once. The old light that was still in the air.

0:25:27 Thomas: Hmm. Oh, yeah. For about two seconds, I guess, or whatever. However long. OKay. I Like it. But do do you not see, um, you not get a lot of light from it while it's traveling, or is that because it's going faster than light you don't

0:25:35 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, this gets into the magical how warp speed works, and so it's hard to say so

0:25:47 Thomas: Really? Oh okay I see that was what I was confused about, where I was like, why would it be a distinct image? You'd get like some sort of blurry screensaver thing, I would think, but of

0:25:58 Bryan: So the they say warp works in Star Trek is that they have this magical substance called dilithium crystals, which when you run electricity through them, locally change, uh, laws of physics so that you can travel faster than light, that's basically it, which is just the simplest way to solve it. You've got got this magic thing that changes the laws of physics, um, they've got a warp bottle, which is where the laws of physics are changed, and they zip across.

And if you look at the artistic renditions, you will see something in the middle, and we actually see this in the episode later on when, um, the Picard maneuver is used in the present, um, see a streak, streak going across as a stargazer goes from its old position to its new one. So by the laws of Star Trek, you do see the streak, but this is only a brief time while it's in warp.

And then aside from that, there's the long period where it's at one position or the other. I actually want to come back and do a correction on this bit talking about what you would see is of the ship as it's traveling between the two positions, so

0:26:06 Thomas: Course naturally okay Really?

0:27:02 Bryan: You were were talking before, um, wondering what, uh, stargazer would look like while it's traveling at maximum warp, and before I said yes that you would see it, um, is true, but what happens is actually, uh, interesting in that you do see it, but you actually see it going backwards

0:27:22 Thomas: Well, did you say that it was, you know, also because of the like Warpfield thingy of the show, like the Star Trek sciencey thing of the show kind of covers for that, but you're saying set that aside and what you would actually see. Words.

0:27:33 Bryan: Even with the warp field, as soon as the light gets outside of it, you'll see this weird effect where it goes backwards, so I think, um, it'll help to go with a real world metaphor to explain, yeah yes

0:27:45 Thomas: Is it because, okay. So because the light coming off the ship is traveling slower than the ship itself, you end up with the thing kind of reversed. Like you, the stuff, the light that starts first gets there last, right? Oh, that's interesting.

0:27:58 Bryan: Exactly so so for a real world analog to this, you, you can think about what happens when a plane is traveling faster than the speed of sound. Sound waves that it's emitting build up behind it and lag behind it. And then as those sound waves catch up, you get a sonic boom. So if could travel faster than the speed of light, light, you would get some sort of luminous boom effect out of this. Be more or less a boom depending on where you are.

So for instance, if the stargazer is coming directly at you, you will get a bright flash of light as all the light that built up in front of it catches up all at once.

If it's going a bit off to the side, you'll see a streak going backwards because the light farther away takes so much longer to get to you than the light that's much closer, that you see that the from when it was farther away later, so you'll see an image of the stargazer go back from one to another, and the net effect of this is the Picardian maneuver, for most of the time it's in effect, would actually create three images of the ship rather than two.

So the first step, one will suddenly appear where it's warping to, and then that one will split into two, one staying stationary and another going backwards in time from that to meet up to the other. Then as soon as it does meet up, the original one, both of those will vanish, and you'll only have the new one.

0:28:08 Thomas: Oh interesting.

0:29:32 Thomas: Yeah. That makes it even more tricky. Cool.

0:29:35 Bryan: In addition to the extra image, you're going to see a third moving image, and that's going to really baffle people.

0:29:42 Thomas: So would it really be a third or would the second one kind kind of travel backwards. You think it would be a distinct image?

0:29:50 Bryan: Actually be a third. The middle one, depending on the exact angle it traveled and how the warp bubble worked, might well appear a bit smeared, but it will be a distinct third image. So you want to think about this, you could imagine like going back to our pitching machine example, just is somebody has a pitching machine sending balls, a lot of balls are in the air at the same time, then they suddenly travel by in a car, pick it up and come towards you faster than the speed it's shooting out balls, but while they're driving it shoots out a few balls, um, those balls it shoots out while it's driving will eventually get to you and will track

0:30:28 Thomas: Right. Well, this doesn't totally work, right? Because light is different than virtually everything in that when you shoot the ball from the pitching machine, it can't go any faster than the speed of the pitching machine, right.

0:30:29 Bryan: Yeah so we're assuming here that they all come off at the same speed despite the Fact: That it's moving in the middle

0:30:44 Thomas: Yeah. Normally when you're driving in a truck or something, and you throw a ball on the truck moving, you would add that to the velocity, but with light, it, don't, doesn't work that way, right? Okay yeah so

0:30:53 Bryan: And and actually when you're going faster than light, the rules get broken even more as all of our transformations are for slower than light travel, so we're imagining that somehow it could emit light while traveling faster than light, which if you look at all the illustrations of this in the Star Trek universe, that that seems to be how it works there, so they've yeah, result of this is that the Picard maneuver, as it's set up, once you accept that you have faster-than-light travel in this universe, is actually a legitimately clever application of this, that's both clever in-universe and out, as it's not immediately obvious to people in-univers that you could do this, and the fact that Picard does it makes it a maneuver worth membering. It's like, oh, that would work. And so they start

0:31:15 Thomas: We're just going with that, okay, fair I know

0:31:46 Bryan: Teaching it.

0:31:46 Thomas: But I gotta gotta say once again, call Thomas Smith in this universe BS, where I'm like, hey guys, we've been fighting with ships that have hyperspeed travel for, I don't know, hundreds of years or whatever, um, I think someone would have tried this, like the first, the first thing you would do when you think, crap, I'm being fired upon, is punch it, like I feel like we would have had a lot of examples

0:31:57 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, oh okay. Here, and as evidence to back that up, we don't have light travel in this universe, and yet one of the writers for this show thought of it. So yeah, and so whichever writer, or maybe

0:32:15 Thomas: Yeah, but okay, but for maybe we, maybe, okay, I'm trying to still help, maybe everybody in the past is like, oh, we gotta warp speed away, we gotta get away from him, you was the first one to be like, but if we go toward him then it'll do this whole thing. I don't know, that's still far-fetched, but you know oh

0:32:31 Bryan: The inaccuracy in warp that you can't travel those short distances very accurately, and that was just at the threshold where the the computers could be that accurate to do a short-range warp like that and not risk overshooting them or crashing into them.

0:32:37 Thomas: I see like it was right and no one would try to because it's so dangerous, but he's like, you got to do it, okay, I think we've made this mostly work, that's cool, so so you, and then the the one that came at you, though, is the real one

0:32:47 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so this is where the episode starts to get it wrong, as the Picard maneuver only works one way. It's the old image, and then the new is always the real one, the one you would want to interact with. And, you as the episode goes on, just to give a brief use a thought maker, which is a glowing orb, which you can think back to that.

0:33:17 Thomas: Okay we don't need to talk about the science of that

0:33:20 Bryan: Yeah, we can think Back to that mimic image of Trump, King Solomon and President Dalsisi all with their hands on an orb. And it looks exactly like that. Um yeah

0:33:27 Thomas: That's right but any thought changing for Trump would have been an improvement, so we would have noticed, like, whoa, he's speaking in complete sentences yeah

0:33:34 Bryan: The orb is called a thought maker so there's really, it's only positive there, yeah

0:33:35 Thomas: Yeah yeah, stay, one of the funniest things of the episode, I know it's, it's not exactly the science, but, uh, a part of the plot too, um, now the Ferengi have, or at least I guess this one captain I suppose has faked like of Picard that actually you know, there's a bunch of innocent orphans in the ship, and Picard was just like, I'm killing them anyway, and my favorite thing is in this universe in which we have all these perfect cameras, we've got faster than light travel, we've apparently mind control devices, they're like, but that sounds just like Picard, no, wow, there's the, this is the first time we've ever heard of cloning someone's voice in this universe, we could do that now already, funny, yeah

0:33:47 Bryan: Yeah yeah oh I mean, obviously they could do it, but the reaction in character was pretty good, as Reicher is here that, okay, well, obviously Picard didn't do that, and Picard is that, well, well, I don't know, I've been having these headaches recently. So yeah, but the reaction from other people, Riker knows Picard. Okay, that is completely out of character. And they want to find proof of this just to dot all their T's and cross all their I's. And Data looks up and says, oh, the checksum doesn't match, which, yeah, that's a good thing. That is a legitimate way to do it, but not

0:34:28 Thomas: So who knows what I did, yeah sure but it just is really funny, it's like in a world with real magic, someone is like, was this your card, and they're, they're like, oh my God, how did he do that? I think that's a trick, but I don't know, I'm not sure.

0:34:51 Bryan: Yeah.

0:35:00 Bryan: Yeah. And honestly, using a checksum to detect a forgery is ridiculously low-tech, and whoever made that forgery should be embarrassed for not passing a checksums. A checksum is basically, yeah, what's the total size of this file? Or adding up all of the digits in it. And so if you want to make a forgery, you make the forgery a bit smaller, then you add junk data to the end of it to build it up to the original size, and you pass the checksum. Now, even in modern days, yeah, in 1980, Plausible, modern day now, we don't really use checksums for this. What we use are hashes, which are more complicated than a checksum. It's basically you put in all the data and you get what seems to be a random number out, except it's a predictable random number. You put in the data to the same function, you'll get the same hash value every time. But if

0:35:12 Thomas: In the year 24 something. Yeah.

0:35:29 Thomas: Yeah, now in 1980, whatever, that must have sounded like really complicated computer stuff.

0:35:58 Bryan: You change the data even slightly, the output hash is completely different. So this means that if you're making a forgery and want to keep the hash the same, you've got to go through a ridiculous amount of work trying

0:36:09 Thomas: All right, so this is more encryption-y stuff, like some Diffie-Hellman type stuff, right?

0:36:11 Bryan: Yeah. So you've got to try billions, trillions, quadrillions, however complicated the hash is, amounts of junk data to add in to get one that passes the hash. And hashes, it's pretty easy to make a more complicated hash, but very hard to crack one, just like modern encryption.

0:36:34 Thomas: Well, until we get quantum computers and then the whole thing is done, we just, you know, it's over do they ever have that in Star Trek, or do they not even think of that? Hmm.

0:36:36 Bryan: Yeah. Quantum computers could potentially solve this. That's a good question. I don't recall them ever bringing up quantum computers.

0:36:43 Thomas: We'll have time for another day. Yeah. Yeah.

0:36:46 Bryan: Question to look into. But, the time, a checksum plausible, if it were written in modern day, they would have said hash instead. Instead. But yeah, anyways, it's an obvious forgery. But I think the only purpose of it was just to give a little bit of push. So basically what the Frankie are doing is they're gaslighting Picard. They want him to doubt what his reality is. They're putting this false message in. They're giving him headaches. They're feeding him false memories. And this all adds to, he, he doesn't know what's real or fake. And so he puts Riker in charge, and then he starts thinking he's the captain of the Stargazer again and transports himself over to it and starts captaining the Stargaser like he's right back in the Battle of Maxia. So he goes through, is recreating all of the events from that, which include the famous Picard mover. And then we go over to the Enterprise, surprise, and this is where everybody suddenly forgets how things work. Raygrass, Data, uh, there any countermeasures to the Picard maneuver? And it says, no sir, none. Riker says Well, make one.

0:37:51 Thomas: It's never been cracked, can't be done.

0:37:54 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, we knew from the battle before that it was the new one that was revealed, and we know he's going to do exactly the same thing he did before, but it might not be the new one that's real this, this time. No, yeah,

0:37:54 Thomas: Yeah.

0:38:05 Thomas: Because he'll hit it reverse, they're like, put it, and then he's just like reverses super speed after doing. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah.

0:38:13 Bryan: The Picard mover works, it's always going to be the new one that is the real image. The universe, data says, well, there are trace amounts of gas in space. And by detecting the gas, we can see which one is real, which basically technobabble for how much of a link it has to the reality.

0:38:33 Thomas: Why would that even matter, because like it's the gases

0:38:36 Bryan: That one of them is a pure illusion that is not actually there, but the Stargazer was there. And the only way this works at all is if they can sense the gas at faster than light speed. You have to assume they can do that or it makes no sense. And there's also a problem that, yes, there's gas, but there is a ridiculously small amount of gas. It's on the order of one particle per cubic meter. And you would have to have very good sensors to pick up where that's disappeared. And it gets even less than that when you're out in deep space. Theoretically, if you have faster than light sensors to pick out the gas, you can aim those at both of them and see, oh, it's disappeared from that position and reappeared

0:38:36 Thomas: Yeah. But it's Not. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Wow.

0:39:21 Thomas: But then you could just do that with the ship couldn't you? Like if you're sensing that.

0:39:22 Bryan: At that yeah yeah you can you just use your fast and light centers to look at whether the ship is there or not

0:39:29 Thomas: Yeah you don't need. So that's all nonsense. I guess that it would have a little anticlimactic to be like what's the counter? Oh it's easy. It's just the You just shoot the ship that moved. That's it. That's all. It's the only way to do it.

0:39:29 Bryan: Yeah yeah yeah now if there is one way you can make make it make sense is let's say, instead of we won't know which is real, change it to okay, he's going to use the Picard maneuver, but we don't know where he's going to, he has to come towards us in some direction, but where exactly we don't know, we don't have that many details on the Battle of Maxia, we just know he's going to appear and immediately start shooting at us and if we, if unless we can uh him immediately, we won't be able to engage any countermeasures, so if you do something like that and then you have the technobabble explanation, here the gas will be compressed in front of him, we can detect the warp field, or we, we can use our deflector dish, it's the magic solution to everything, something like that

0:39:43 Thomas: Hmm. Hmm. Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Flank

0:40:21 Bryan: Yeah That's, that's the most magical of all of those, it's basically the go-to solution when they need a technobabble solution for a, when they've ridden themselves into a corner, yeah.

0:40:22 Thomas: Dirtish.

0:40:31 Thomas: We're just talking Technobabble, then that ruins the show, you know, because there could be Technobabbled for anything. Yeah, Technobaddled. But the yeah, he's going somewhere. Where, but here's what bothers me is once again, I feel like this would just be a very commonplace part of every single battle in space. You'd just be like, oh, we're going to go over here. Then we're gonna go over there. Then we're a hyper, hyper jump over here like I, you know, I don't know why they wouldn't be doing that all the time.

0:40:39 Bryan: Yeah yeah yeah yep yeah apparently they teach this maneuver at the academy, and if it's so good, you'd think that everybody would be using it and then somebody would have figured out a countermeasure to it, but apparently they teach it at the academy and then never use it and never think about how to counter it

0:41:09 Thomas: They teach it, but they don't have the teacher's addition to the book that tells them like the easy. Yeah, you just shoot the new shit, the new one. That's all. It's always the new one, never the old one. And let like, okay, hold on. I think I gotta make it make sense a little bit too. What if also in Star Trek universe, they've developed some good, like, um, know, like the the, hologram at Coachella. They've got that, but for ships and they just are constantly, but this this would also always be a part of battle. You'd have a hundred little like fake ships everywhere that are holograms, but

0:41:11 Bryan: Yeah yeah yeah okay oh well

0:41:42 Thomas: Now like, there

0:41:42 Bryan: They do that in Star Trek Picard in the first season, yeah

0:41:44 Thomas: You go. So now, so now it makes it work because you don't know, is he doing the the Picard maneuver, or is he doing a hologram? Because if it's a hologram, you got to shoot the old one. If it's Picard Maneuver, you gotta shoot the new one. But that would, again, once again, this would just be every battle. There'd be like 600 images of every ship and you'd be like, oh, this is too hard. All right.

0:41:50 Bryan: Yeah yeah there you go, well

0:42:04 Thomas: Let's all agree not to do this.

0:42:04 Bryan: Yeah that Well, that's actually a good link to reality, is that one thing that aircraft do to fool the enemy's sensors is they'll shoot out chaff, which is basically junk into the air that the sensors will pick up, and it'll have a hard time figuring out, okay, what's chaff and what's the actual aircraft? So, yeah, it's already a tactic in the real world. If you can do that in space, of course you would.

0:42:15 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, that's For my money, as a, like, when I think about, when I critique sci-fi, that is the thing that's, it's hard to get right. It's not hard to build cool worlds and interesting stuff, it's hard to then anticipate, like, okay, what do characters who have grown up in this world, their whole lives, how, what is their knowledge of these things. That's the thing that for me, maybe, maybe no one else but me cares, I don't know, maybe it's because the novelty of like you know we're

0:42:42 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, no, I think you've got a good point there. Yeah.

0:42:52 Thomas: Like, we, the viewer, you know, maybe it's the novelty of like, okay, because we, the viewer, like, this is a cool new thing, it's fine for the characters to be like, this is a whole new thing, but for me, I'm always like, yeah, but they know, all that, this all would happen a million times. They're literally, they go to school for this very thing. Like, I feel like they would, they would know this, but okay, that's fine.

0:43:09 Bryan: Yeah.

0:43:10 Thomas: But it's super cool to learn that the, the card maneuver actually makes sense. That that's, I love the baseball machine analogy. That's a really good way of putting it. Ah,

0:43:10 Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. Now if you want to go a step further, we can go back to something you mentioned earlier, saying that faster than light travel is equivalent to time travel. And you right there that you can't, like, goes in both directions, really. If you can travel in time, you can effectively travel faster than the speed of light. So just imagine, you travel somewhere as fast as possible under the speed of light, then you travel back in time when you're there, so it looks like you got there instantly, and time travel turns into faster-than-light travel.

0:43:26 Thomas: Yes. Yeah.

0:43:51 Thomas: I think I'm, I'm cheating because I think I heard Sean Carroll say this. I think he said, if you, if You Have Faster Than Light travel, you have time travel and there's no way around that. So I'm curious. Okay. So that's, that's one direction that you've done it.

0:44:02 Bryan: Is Yeah, so the other way is more complicated to explain, and we have to open up your Phoebe's book, Special Relativity for Babies, in order to explain that one.

0:44:10 Thomas: Oh, please. I would love to.

0:44:14 Bryan: Literally pick up that book. I've got my own notes to go through to explain it to you. Oh,

0:44:18 Thomas: No,

0:44:19 Clip: Make it so, number one.

0:44:20 Thomas: All right, well, that is it for part one. And as we teased a little bit, part two has got all the relativity goodness for you. It is, oh, the speed of light, the ether, why that doesn't exist. You know, how does time work? Like, what is now? I mean, there's so many questions, so many cool questions that Brian answers for us in part two. And like I said, get on the Patreon to get that right away, or, you know, if you can't do it, you can't, and see you in a few days. You know, you'll just, again, you'll have to wonder how time works until then. You won't know. There's no way to know. There's no internet. This is the only source of information in the world, so yeah, you have no choice, you have to pledge. Just kidding. All right, thank you so much for listening. Another big thank you to Brian for the great content and for bearing with my endless questions, and we'll see you next time.