The Entropy Effect

[ceebeegee]

I'm re-reading one of my favorite Start Trek (OS) novels now, called The Entropy Effect. It's really good, very well-written. It's about a convicted criminal who's a physicist--he specializes in temporal physics (i.e., having to do with time), and he's been sent to some prison and the Enterprise has to transport him. The ship is actually called away from another mission--the Enterprise is in orbit around a naked singularity. (I'm not exactly sure what these are--I know it has something to do with black holes which means time, because black holes are so dense that nothing can escape, not even light, and that slows down or stops time, right? Doesn't relativity mean light, time and matter are all interconnected? tenner or any other physicists here, feel free to explain it--I've always been fascinated by temporal physics and relativity but have never studied physics.

Anyway, the ship is orbiting the singularity so Spock can study it, and they're called away to transport this prisoner before he can replicate his first round of calculations. But he knows that something is really messed up with the universe's time, and according to his preliminary observations, entropy is building up way too fast, and we have something like less than a century left. The prisoner is picked up and kept in the brig...



...but he seems to escape and ends up on the bridge screaming that Kirk has ruined his life, and pulls out a gun and murders him. It's a fantastic scene--Spock mindmelds with him to try to help him with the trauma, and feels him dying, and Kirk "pulls away" at the end, to spare Spock's life. And the gunman uses some sort of terrorist "bullet" called a spiderweb that infiltrates your vital systems when it enters the body. Anyway, everyone on the ship is devastated, of course. But the thing is--Spock figures out this wasn't supposed to happen. No one can figure out how the prisoner got loose, because he didn't--the guy who killed Kirk was the prisoner from the future, His own experiments have royally messed up time, and Spock has to somehow go back to make it allright (I can't remember how he does it, though). But the book sets up the moral parameters well--at first, McCoy, in his grief, is trying to convince Spock to go back in time, and Spock says no, he can't strain the space-time continuum like that. That when they've time-traveled in the past, it was to correct an error, not just to undo a bad thing that they didn't like. It's only later, when he realized, in effect, that Kirk was never supposed to be murdered because the future version of the gunman should never have existed, that he decides to time-travel.

So I was wondering--in the 4th ST movie, The Voyage Home, they find out Earth is doomed because they killed off the whales 200 years ago. Kirk & Co. decide to go back in time to get whales, to bring back to the future, to communicate with the giant floating tube sock that's about to destroy earth. Not that I want the earth to be destroyed, but that seems a rather cavalier reason to...y'know, tear up time. It's not as though the universe was going to be destroyed, it's just Earth. Okay, that sounds bad. It's just that they weren't correcting an error--they were introducing one. I happen to love that installment (Duncan, you definitely need to watch it, it's hilarious) but it's something to consider.

Comments

[darksheik.livejournal.com]

Humpback... people?
Whales, Scotty. Whales.

Duncan has never seen Star Trek IV?!? WHA huh?!?
Did he live with me?

I always wondered what the whales were saying in those 5 minutes when they are finally talking to the probe. "Yeah, they were a race of assholes, but they seem OK now. You can go."

[king-duncan.livejournal.com]

Oh, I've seen The Voyage Home. I LOVE it.

[ceebeegee.livejournal.com]

It is hilarious. "One damn minute, admiral." "They are not the hell your whales."

[planga.livejournal.com]

And my favourite, which I have heard a variant of used at the Spanish Harlem post office, "Double dumbass on you!"

[planga.livejournal.com]

So to follow up on our conversation last night, I looked up singularity here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_singularity

Basically, it's a black hole without an event horizon, which just blows my mind (not that black holes didn't blow my mind before, but now that I've accepted them as natural, I can't handle these differing types).

Since I can only do Interweb from work, I am so glad that my websearch for "naked singularity" did not pop up a lot of pictures of nude unattached people.

But now that I'm thinking of a physics-themed porno... oh, the possibilities!

"Think you can handle my eleven dimensions, baby? Yeah, I'm talking about a superstring here."

And the music will still be funky phat bass-driven, but 12-tone.

[ceebeegee.livejournal.com]

Wait--an event horizon is the perimeter within which everything is sucked in, correct? Hmm. I thought the book talked about how the Enterprise had to maintain their distance because of the event horizon--I'll have to re-read it.