Re: New ST Movie is awesome!!

Once upon a time, Jeffrey Kaplan <gordol@xxxxxxxxxx> said:
There was no treknobabble provided (thank $DEITY) for how it
works, but my guess is that it acted as a catalyst, +converting+ mass,
not creating it.

No, it had to have created mass. Aside from the fact that you wouldn't
get much of a black hole from collapsing a planet, the movie shows the
black hole at the end (created from red matter, Spock's ship, and the
mining ship) pulling the Enterprise in with a force the engines cannot
overcome.

A black hole does not change the pull of gravity; for example, if you
could collapse the Earth into a black hole, all the satellites in orbit
would keep going in their existing orbits. The black hole would still
have just the mass of the Earth, and the gravitational pull would be the
same (actually, low-orbit objects like ISS would have a more stable
orbit, because the outer reaches of the atmosphere would no longer cause
drag).

The new Enterprise was apparently built on Earth, so it can overcome
Earth's gravitational field to reach orbit. It should have no problem
overcoming a much smaller gravitational field of the two other ships.

Trek has artificial gravity, but that requires a mechanism and energy to
create. There's no sign that the mysterious red matter can generate and
sustain a massive gravitational field (since there's no mechanism or
energy source that survives the creation of the black hole).

Again, I enjoyed the movie; it is just that the science was worse than
normal. If you want to create some new planet-destroying effect, that's
fine, but don't call it a singularity or a black hole, as those already
have well-defined meanings, and the representation of a black hole in
the movie is rather silly. I would hope scientists of the future would
be able to tell the difference between a black hole and a mysterious
"lightning storm in space".

--
Chris Adams <cmadams@xxxxxxxxxx>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.

.

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