"Raziel" writes:

"The Ghost In The Machine" wrote in
message ...
In sci.physics, Raziel

wrote
on Fri, 15 Aug 2003 10:30:09 -0700
:

"The Ghost In The Machine" wrote in
message news In sci.physics, Archimedes Plutonium

wrote
on Thu, 14 Aug 2003 12:09:45 -0500
:

[...]
Even were the missiles equipped with a warp drive motor
to somehow get the Sun to shrink instantly once launched,
it would still take about 8 minutes to see the effect. Nor
is it clear that merely shrinking the Sun would reduce
or increase its gravitational pull on that weirdish "thread"
(I can't think of the actual name right now, but it involved
Whoopi Goldberg :-) ), as the mass is the same.

This is a not-so-subtle point that was apparently lost
on the screenwriters. :-)

yes, their "physics" advisers often blow it. I remember a TNG episode
where they reported the average temperature of a planet as -300 Celcius.
I thought that was rather interesting.

Their "physics" advisors know _very_ little physics, since they happened
to be the Staff Artist Rick Sternbach, and the Graphics Designer Mike Okuda.
Okuda and Sternbach were approached to create ST:TNG's technobabble because
in their other careers Science Fiction Magazine Illustrators, they had at
least _read_ some science fiction in order to know what they should paint,
and therefore knew some of the "jargon." _None_ of the staff scriptwriters
were science fiction fans, and several of them actually _resented_ the fact
that they had been assigned to an SF show, as they considered that genre
to be "beneath" them...


-- Gordon D. Pusch

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