Science After Sunclipse

THE PROBLEM

In the sixth-season episode "Starship Mine", the crew of the Enterprise vacate the ship so that a routine maintenance procedure can be performed. During this procedure, terrorists sneak aboard and try to steal MacGuffin juice from the ship's warp core, which they plan to make into explosives. Through a fortuitous accident, Captain Picard is trapped on the Enterprise and takes on the terrorists, but the "baryon sweep" is moving forward and will kill anyone with whom it comes into contact.

The episode has some nice features. In the B story, down on the planet surface, we get to see the android Data try to reproduce another feature of human behaviour, but in a mild subversion of the SF standard "I want to be a real boy!" syndrome, the skill which Data has picked out — making smalltalk — turns out to be really irritating, and his human colleagues rapidly try to get out of his way. Aboard the ship, we get to see Jean-Luc Picard hunt terrorists with a crossbow, and no part of that ain't awesome.

In the annals of nitpickery, "Starship Mine" has a certain infamy. The "baryon sweep" which causes the evacuation of the ship is, we are told, a periodic maintenance procedure which must be performed in order to clear away "baryon particles" which build up when a starship travels using its warp drive. Any stickler for jargon accuracy will happily tell you that baryons are a class of subatomic particles which includes protons and neutrons, so that sweeping away the baryons would rip apart every atom in the Enterprise.

Several responses to this are possible. First, one could say — or, rather, sing — "It's just a show; you should really just relax." Alternatively, one could point out, "You're missing what's important about this episode: Jean-Luc Picard hunting terrorists with a frickin' crossbow." Both of these responses have merit, and in fact, I consider them complementary to the third reaction, which I shall now describe.

THE EXPLOITS OF CONSERVATIONISTS

Physicists started classifying particles into families like "baryons" and "leptons" when particle accelerators began to turn up a whole slew of subatomic oddities which reacted in different ways. When you have four dozen-odd different particles, and the most unstable ones exist for a zillionth of a second before breaking down into decay products which in turn disintegrate after two zillionths of a second and so forth, you look for some way to bring order to the madness. Of all the myriad possible reactions among these fleeting particles, are there any rules which tell which interactions are physically possible and which will never occur? In 1938, the Swiss physicist Ernst Stückleberg proposed one such rule, which was eventually known as the conservation of baryon number. For each reaction, with particles going in and some other particles going out, one could compute a tally based on the ingoing particles, counting some of them as +1, others as -1, and the rest as 0. After the collision or the disintegration, the particles present would be different, but this overall tally would be the same. This quantity was given the name of baryon number, the word baryon having been cooked up by Abraham Pais in 1953 (from a Greek word for "heavy", as baryons tended to be massive particles, comparatively speaking). A proton or a neutron counts as one baryon, an antiproton or antineutron counts as -1 baryons, an electron counts as 0, and so forth. For example, a neutron left to itself can decay into a proton, an electron and an antineutrino; the total baryon number before the neutron decays is +1, from the neutron itself, and after the decay event, it is still +1, as the electron and the antineutrino both have baryon number 0.

(Electrons and neutrinos obey an analogous rule, the conservation of lepton number. It works in the same way: the electron gets a +1, its antiparticle the positron gets a -1, a neutrino gets a +1, and so forth. The proton and neutron both have lepton number 0, so again, the neutron decay reaction obeys the conservation law.)

Well, after years of finding new particles and looking for conservation rules and such to group them into families, physicists figured out that many of the particles involved in the mess were composite entities, made of constituent particles put together. These components go by progressively sillier and sillier names, like the up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top quarks. A baryon is a composite particle made of multiple quarks bound into a unit which can interact via the strong nuclear force. All of the baryons known to exist today are made of three quarks: the proton is two up quarks and one down, the neutron is two down quarks and one up, the Omega-sub-b has two strange quarks and one bottom, and so on.

A SOLUTION

Of all these particles, only the proton is stable (at least, its lifespan is so long that a proton decay has never been observed). As mentioned earlier, neutrons decay if left to themselves, but they are stabilized when inside atomic nuclei. So, if protons and neutrons are the only baryons which the Enterprise could contain, the "baryon sweep" would destroy them all.

However! We are told that the "baryons" which must be removed build up when a starship is travelling at warp speed. When you move through warp space, you travel at the speed of plot: the laws of physics are those which make for convenient storytelling. Who's to say that quark combinations which fall apart in ordinary space can't endure in warp or subspace? As it happens, in the sixth-season episode "Schisms", a substance called "sonalagen" is trotted out which is said to be stable only in subspace, so within the framework of the show there's precedent for this kind of dodge. The name of the "baryon sweep" would then be understood as a shortened form of, say, "residual exotic baryon sweep", said elliptically for convenience's sake even though the short version carries an unfortunate connotation if read naïvely. Inconvenient notations and awkward jargon held onto for "historical reasons" are common enough that this could well count as unexpected realism!

Having resolved the jargon issue to our satisfaction, we can then get on with the important business involving crossbows and things that go boom.

I went on at some considerable length about this rather silly point of throw-away jargon because I think it's a rather prototypical example of the good and the bad things which happen when science goes on TV. Taken at face value, "Starship Mine" seemed to get the science wrong, at least at first glance. By poking the matter a little more deeply, however, we found that if we wanted to take it all too seriously, we could explain the issue away, and we could even have learned something. It's possible that we conveyed a physics lesson in a humorous and memorable way.

Generally speaking, when a story is good enough on other grounds, the temptation is to rationalize away the relatively minor mistakes — we're storytelling animals, and this is one way we play with the stories we're given! Within the Star Trek world, one of the classic examples is Ricardo Montelban's line in The Wrath of Khan: he tells Walter Koenig's character "I never forget a face," when in the story to which the movie is a sequel, Koenig's character never appeared. Because The Wrath of Khan is so well-regarded, though, we brush away the continuity error and say that the characters met sometime between scenes.

DISCUSSION AND CONTEMPLATION

I'm not particularly a TV person. It's not that I have a deep-seated antipathy to the medium; I just seem content enough to catch shows on DVD a few years after they've come out. That's how I saw House and 24 and Battlestar Galactica and even Firefly — really, everything except Avatar: The Last Airbender. I haven't owned a television in years. You could try to use this to paint me as a cultural elitist, but there's better evidence for that than my TV habits: my writing blog posts in mock Shakespearean blank verse or in Latin, for example. The way I see it, an ordinary elitist refuses to watch TV and condemns it as prolefeed for the Delta-Minuses, but an elitist bastard watches a few shows and declares that he appreciates them on a far deeper level than you do.

I will frankly admit that not watching much television other than cartoons puts me at a disadvantage when discussing a weighty subject like the effect television has on science education. The only part I've seen of The Big Bang Theory, a show which often comes up in such discussions nowadays, is actually a clip in which the geeky main characters do essentially what I did earlier in this essay: geek out over the perceived scientific flaws in visual entertainment, the movie Superman in their case. And thanks to the magic of the Intertubes, I can find that very clip, subtitled in Italian:

If a screenwriter wanted to portray a group of scientists heading out to the pub to exercise their elbows, they could do worse than including dialogue about the merits and demerits of "Starship Mine" and its baryon sweep.

I can sympathize with the screenwriter for a show like House who has to deal with persnickety fans, always hopping on the Internet to fire off flames when the DNA tests come back too quickly, or whatever the error du jour happens to be. Pointing out and arguing over mistakes like that is a natural reaction, though, and even if it has the side effect of making the poor writers upset, you can't stop people having fun on the Internet. We might see a downside, but we'll pick on that scab nevertheless. The best we can do is be honest about it, point out good things as well as bad, and try to maximize the educational potential of the complaints we air. As Phil Plait writes in the introduction to his book Bad Astronomy (2002),

People remember movies, right? Then why not start there? [In The Empire Strikes Back,] Han Solo dodges asteroids in the Millennium Falcon to escape Imperial fighters. In Armageddon, the Earth prepares for the impact of an asteroid a thousand miles across. In Deep Impact, a giant comet explodes over the Earth, causing nothing more than a beautiful fireworks display.

If you've seen these movies, these are scenes you'll remember. That makes them a great place to discuss real astronomy, and not the fantasy represented by the movies. You can find out what asteroids really are like; how easy it is to spot a big one and how hard it is to move one; and just why they're extraordinarily dangerous, even after you blow them up.

My parents thought I was wasting my time as a kid watching those bad science fiction movies. It turns out I was simply laying the groundwork for my life's work.

Arrogant popularizers of science like myself will seize on anything to make a bit of science memorable. If that means joshing a silly mistake in a screenplay, well, that's the price we have to pay. I can't speak for every science nerd on the Internet, but personally, I recognize that you the screenwriter are working under constraints (just as the medium of blogging imposes difficulties on me). Like I said before, make the rest of the story good, and I'll do the work of explaining away the troublesome parts. Get something right, and I'll be downright euphoric. To pick a random example:

Recently, my friends and I have been watching Gargoyles, a dark-and-moody cartoon from the mid-1990s (many of whose voice actors were, oddly enough, former cast members of Star Trek: TNG). The titular gargoyles are creatures from medieval Scotland who sit around in stone form during the day, then emerge from hibernation at night to wreak their general awesomeness. Frozen by a magic spell until their castle "rises above the clouds", they end up sleeping a thousand years until the castle in question is rebuilt atop a Manhattan skyscraper.

The moment went by fast, but when the incantation was spoken to freeze the gargoyles, the Latin sounded right. It really did refer to rising above the clouds. Finally, my education in the classics proved worthwhile!

Later, since the gargoyles were from Scotland, after all, Macbeth enters the picture. (Naturally!) I was impressed to note that the creators of Gargoyles got the names of Macbeth's family correct, as well as the dates of his reign. Except for the whole gargoyles thing, that's more historically accurate than Shakespeare's play.

Dammit, somebody cared. And it felt good.

TO SUM UP

Yes, Virginia, a lot of science on TV is rather silly. Pointing out these mistakes, whether they are due to carelessness or otherwise, is a way to make scientific discoveries memorable, and is therefore a valuable tool of science education. We can, in principle, work together to get things right so that everybody wins, if everybody holds on to their sense of humour.

And I have to live with my uncanny resemblance to Wesley Crusher.

UPDATE: THE BACKSTORY

After reading this post, Tom Swanson wrote the following:

I went to high school with one of the members of the Star Trek staff, Naren Shankar [IMDb], and we kept in much better touch in those days — we still went home for the holidays and got together. He was the science consultant at the time this episode was written (he later joined the writing staff), and was looking for an excuse for the Enterprise to be in spacedock, devoid of personnel — he had in mind some kind of procedure analogous to degaussing a submarine, and bounced the idea off of me. Rather than suggest some new, made-up particle, I suggested a more generic "exotic-antibaryon sweep;" the idea being that there were some long-lived particles, unknown to us in the 20th century, that could be picked up by the spaceship. However, that was shortened to "Baryon sweep" at some point in the script-polishing process.

He also says he tried to use his influence to kill Wesley Crusher. I'm nervous now.