Star Trek And Physics, split post Options

[qwerty]

Split from this thread.


Agreed. Unless we all agree to dumb things down by talking about how the writers of Star Trek answered the questions of physicists who brought up the uncertainty principle in relation to the concept of "transporters" (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

This post has been edited by Jill: Sep 26 2003, 03:51 PM

[Matt B]

Agreed. Unless we all agree to dumb things down by talking about how the writers of Star Trek answered the questions of physicists who brought up the uncertainty principle in relation to the concept of "transporters"

was that in the Tribbles episode?

[qwerty]

I don't know (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) I think they mentioned it a number of times, but just very casually. Something like "don't worry, the Heissenberg compensators will filter that out."

Aha, here we go:

Mike Okuda – in a Next Generation episode coined the term Heisenberg Compensator. We had a little break down in the transporter and a technician said 'Well, I think it might be a problem with the Heisenberg Compensator'. And all the physicists in the audience loved that. We got a lot of very, very fun, positive mail from people saying 'Oh that’s so funny!'. So yeah, you guys do appreciate the fact that the uncertainty principle would be a real problem for the transporter. Occasionally people would ask Mike so how does the Heisenberg Compensator work? And he would say well 'Very well, thank you'. Because obviously we don’t know. We were just saying that if you’re going to build a transporter and if you’re going to claim that it does what we claim it does, somebody’s going to have to, somewhere down the road, invent a device that gets you around the problem of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. We have no idea how that might work. If we did, we’d be off collecting our Nobel Prize in Sweden, not working on a TV show, but at least we’ve acknowledged that certain kinds of technologies would have to be created in order to make something like the transporter possible.

(from http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/st/interviews/bo....s/page38.shtml)

[air-dog]

How about this one for you qwerty.

The Running Man is on the tele. How come all movies made in the 1980s, that are meant to be set in the future, look like they are set in the 1980s?

This post has been edited by air-dog: Sep 26 2003, 04:45 PM

[Jill]

sorry, these posts were missing for awhile. Splitting it got a bit complicated, and I forgot to put the posts back in view at the end!

Jill

[qwerty]

Wise move, Jill. This nonsense definitely didn't belong in that other thread. My bad.

Now then...80s "futuristic" movies. I was going to argue against your point by mentioning Total Recall, but then I realized that the parts of the film that take place on Earth look pretty 1980s too. Maybe the issue is the presence of Arnold.

But there were definitely 80s movies that didn't look like the 80s:
Blade Runner, Dune, Hardware (ok, that was 1990, but close)

[air-dog]

>Blade Runner,

I think you'll find that everybody in Blade Runner looks like the members of "A Flock of Seagulls" Bob (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

I reckon Star Trek goes a bit too far in trying to justify its science. I personally prefer a bit of Asimov myself.

In one of his more factual books He mentions something on the lines of - people expect the future to be more scientific - What he was getting at is that although at the moment scientist say that we cant do this and that..... In the future its expected that there will be mayor break throughs that make all this and that possible.

This post has been edited by air-dog: Sep 26 2003, 05:33 PM

[qwerty]

I'd like to believe that those guys from AFOS copied the styles from Blade Runner, but I may be getting my dates mixed up. But Blade Runner was really an attempt to graft science fiction onto film noir, so a lot of the look comes out of that genre (which itself was a variant on German Expressionist cinema).

[BrianR]

German Expressionist cinema!? (Mutter, mutter, mutter....) Good grief - this is getting way beyond this mere mortal. Besides it's 1.10am. Time for bed.

I'll catch up with these fascinating threads tomorrow. Except that will be later today because tomorrow is already today because it's way past midnight. Unless you're in NZ, where you'll already be thinking about the day after tomorrow/today.

Enough! - my brain can't handle this anymore - goodnight one and all. May you have sweet dreams of the German Expressionist variety...

BrianR

[air-dog]

> German Expressionist cinema

qwerty, I'm not familiar with any of these movies. Can you knock a couple of names out here so I can check um out?

Cheers (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[qwerty]

Sure.

Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Dr. Mabuse, Nosferatu, Sunrise. It was a very important genre during the Weimar Republic in Germany. When the Nazis rose to power, a number of the directors emigrated to the US. Fritz Lang is probably the most famous example.

But they were stuck making low budget movies in America, mostly detective dramas. They snuck the themes and visual styles of the work they'd done in Germany into these films, and during the 1950s film critics in France like Andre Bazin (editor of Cahiers du Cinema) started writing about them as Films Noirs ("dark movies"). The Cahiers critics viewed such films as more vital than the so-called "Cinema of Quality" that was popular in France at the time. This led to the essay "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema," which suggested that French film ought to move in that direction as well, and that ((IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/phew.gif) !) led to the birth of the Nouvelle Vague -- the French New Wave.

There's a very important sequence in Godard's A bout de souffle ("Breathless") in which the protagonist is staring at a picture of Humphrey Bogart (a big star in many noir films) and chanting "Bogey, Bogey, Bogey" -- he's a Frenchman trying to be an American tough guy by sort of chanelling his soul from a movie poster.

There you have it -- European Film History 101.

[air-dog]

I've seen Metropolis and I think I've seen Sunrise as well. Nosferatu - thats the Dracular movie isn't it?

So where did everything lead to after Blade Runner - The Terminator, RoboCop?
I reckon RoboCop, the first one, is mint. I was about 16 when it came out and well impressed. conversation at the time was like:

"do you reckon RoboCop could nack Terminator?"
"Narrr... Terminator can run faster then RoboCop"
"arrr ye... but RoboCops got a Human Brain so he could outwit Terminator"
"Ed-209 could do Terminator good and proper"

I still like RoboCop, but these days if anything Sci-Fi and tacky like it comes out I'll general give it a miss until its on the tele.

[qwerty]

So where did everything lead to after Blade Runner

As far as people trying to bring back Film Noir? There've been some "Neo-Noir" movies -- none of them science fiction, as far as I can recall.

Let's see, "Blood Simple" and "The Man Who Knew Too Little" -- both by the Coen Brothers...
"Red Rocks West," "The Last Seduction," stuff like that.

As far as the Terminator vs. RoboCop thing goes, the thing I used to hear a lot when I ran a cinema was the big argument over whether Freddy Krueger could beat Jason Vorhees. And whaddyaknow, they made Freddy vs. Jason this year. At least now the question has been settled (I think. Didn't see it.)

[air-dog]

> Coen Brothers

didn't they start as film editors. I think they edited Evil Dead 2, I know they have a lot of connections with Sam Rami and Bruce Campbell.

[qwerty]

That's possible. I know they've worked with Raimi on a number of projects.

Yup. Just looked up Joel Coen, and he's listed as assistant film editor on the first Evil Dead film.