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Andre Bormanis - Star Trek Science Advisor
What Do You Do, Then?
The role of the science advisor on the show.
Basically, my job is to help the writers and producers with science ideas in stories and technical language in dialogue. For example, we might do a story that involves a comet and the writers will ask me, what exactly is a comet made of, how big is it, how fast do they travel through space? When the first draft of the script comes out, I’ll read it over and make sure that the descriptions are reasonably accurate and fix any language that needs to be fixed.
Physics, Astrophysics, Computing
What background gives you the knowledge to do all that?
I studied physics and astrophysics at university and went on to do some work in the microcomputer field. I also did a lot of technical writing and happened to develop an interest in television and creative writing.
I also had a NASA fellowship and did policy work for the space programme for two years in Washington DC.
Scientific Input
In the original series the input of real scientists was quite ad hoc. By Next Generation it became a permanent role.
When Gene Roddenberry developed the original series he wanted to make sure that the science was fairly credible. For example, he spoke to a number of scientists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California – the NASA facility that does all of the unmanned probes to the planets. He also spoke to scientists at The Rand Corporation - a think tank in Santa Monica that did a lot of work for the airforce after World War Two, looking at the future of military technology. So it was a little ad hoc in the early days.
With Next Generation, it became clear that the audience in the 1980s and 1990s was a lot more technically sophisticated than the television audience in the 1960s. Gene realised that it would be a good idea to have somebody permanently available to handle technical issues in every script. I think that was the third or fourth season of Next Generation.
Big Science
Is that unusual that you would have that level of science input to a sci-fi show?
Well, certainly none of the other shows that were produced in the 1960s had science advisors and even into the 1980s there wasn’t a lot of science fiction on television until the Next Generation really revitalised the field. It is pretty rare. Most of the other shows don’t employ, in any real capacity, a scientist to do this kind of work.
The X-Files has a virologist, as their shows tend to be a lot more about strange creatures and biology and so forth. Babylon 5 eventually hired a couple of scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to look at their scripts.
I would say that Star Trek has a well earned reputation for trying very hard to credibly portray the future of science and technology. A great deal of our audience is scientifically-literate people and also real scientists and engineers, so we definitely want to make sure that that audience is liking our work.
Filling Space
Where do you get the ideas from?
Yeah, so much new knowledge is being generated every day and every scientist who is working is a specialist. There are very few generalists in science any more. There is such a tremendous amount of research going on in so many fields, it’s a matter of just keeping up.
I try to read about 10 or 12 different science journals per week. I just sort of skim through them, seeing what’s going on, what the new ideas and looking for terminology and technical language. For example, what are the terms that are showing up in cosmology or in planetary geology that could be fun to interject into a Star Trek script?
Plus, we invent new terms too because certainly in the next 400 years, in the far future represented by Star Trek, a lot of new language is going to have to be invented for the new discoveries that are going to be made. So we wouldn’t be doing our job well if we didn’t invent some new language from time to time.
Stretching the Imagination
Tell me how the script arrives with you with holes in it.
Typically, when I receive a first draft script there will be a few places in the script, usually in dialogue, where I will see the word 'tech' all in capital letters. That’s sort of my cue to fill in the blank.
For example, the writer isn't sure what an appropriate term might be for a piece of technology that one of the characters is working with or some new phenomenon in space that the crew is encountering. So I will try to find the most appropriate word in real science.
If it’s something that is much more on the side of fiction, then I will try to invent appropriate language for that phenomenon or technology.
Random Coincidence
Do you find they push you to make connections and make solutions?
Yeah - one of the fun things about doing this job is it’s really forced me to stretch my imagination quite a bit. When I first started as the science consultant, which was the final season of the Next Generation, I was always trying to find something from real science that would work in that place in that script.Sometimes I just couldn’t, but what I then realised is, I really have to think farther into the future. I have to take what we know today and try to extrapolate and also acknowledge that there are going to be things discovered hundreds of years in the future that we have no idea about today. There are going to be some things that are discovered that will contradict some of the things that we think we know today.
So, it’s allowed me to use my imagination a little bit more and to play a little bit with the ideas of science and the language of science. And, hopefully, still make very credible stories.
It is a sort of an iterative process. I make suggestions and if they don’t like them, then I will give them some alternatives and sometimes we’ll come up with something together. I’m not just sort of preaching from the science mountain here and telling them :'You need to say this...'
Thinking the Future
What happened when Star Trek was accused of inside knowledge?
Shortly after the original series began airing on television here in the United States in 1966, there were several scenes that played out in the ship’s sick bay. When Gene was conceiving the Enterprise he said that, on this starship that’s going to travel to all of these different planetary system, sometimes people are going to get injured so the ship will need some kind of a sick bay.
Gene knew that technology was advancing, and if you wanted to get information quickly about the condition of one of your crew, you wouldn’t want to have to stick a thermometer in their mouth and take their pulse. So he thought; 'Well, what if they laid down on a bed and there were sensors in the bed that could read all of their vital signs, and display them on a screen above the bed so that the doctor could see the basic condition of his patient.?'
There were some developments - ultrasound, CAT scans, that had not been invented in the 1960s. But I think it was pretty clear to anybody who really considered the way technology was evolving, that things like that would some day have to be invented. So Gene just decided; 'Well, let’s put that in our sick bay.'
Several weeks after the show started airing, he got letters from three or four different medical research corporations saying; 'How did what we were planning to do? How did what we were trying to build in the next ten, twenty or thirty years?' And he said; 'I didn’t.' He was just logically extrapolating from where we are today to what our needs would be in the future.
The Two Cultures
So Star Trek became quite an accurate science think tank?
I think it really is, and in many respects it’s something that gives people an opportunity to really think hard about what the future might look like and to stretch their imaginations. So many scientists are so concerned with the immediate problem of the research that they’re working on right now, that they don’t have the luxury of really sitting back and thinking ten, twenty, thirty, or a hundred years into the future.
I think it's often extremely productive to ask yourself questions about what the future might be like and really let your imagination run wild because, sometimes, in that process you’ll come up with an idea that initially seems far fetched, but the more you think about it, the more you realise; 'Wait a minute, there might be something to this. This might not be as hard to implement as we imagined.'
The March of Progress
You don't usually have scientists with a drama and creative writing background - the two don’t normally meet, do they?
I think a lot of scientists have been inspired by science fiction, but until fairly recently the world of science and the world of written science fiction or television science fiction were really two separate, distinct things. I think Star Trek is probably the vehicle that has been the most responsible for bringing those two worlds together.
Today a lot of scientists are openly expressing their interest in science fiction. They meet with science fiction writers and we do conferences together. Clearly, people who write science fiction are very interested in science and people who do real science are interested in fictional extrapolations of where their work may someday lead. I think that that’s been a very fun and, to some extent, a productive interaction.
There is a physicist in Great Britain called Miguel Alcubierre
who started thinking a few years ago about whether or not it might really be possible to construct something like a warp drive. He wouldn’t have asked that question if he hadn't been a big fan of Star Trek and had been inspired by it. He had gone on to earn a PhD in theoretical physics and then started to ask himself the question; ' Gosh, I really wonder if there is some extraordinary device to physically manipulate the structure of space and time in service of propulsion for a starship?'
She Cannae Take It!
In 80 years, what changed between the original series and TNG?
Yeah, between the original series and Star Trek: the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine and Voyager, it was about an eighty year time frame in our fictional Star Trek universe. One of the reasons that Gene Roddenberry decided to put those shows into the future of the original series is he knew that a lot had happened in the real world, in the 20 years between the original series and the Next Generation, and he wanted to incorporate some of those new developments in science into the new shows.
Take, for example, the holodeck. Virtual reality technology did not exist in the 1960s, so we never really saw or heard anything about that in the original series except in a kind of an oblique and accidental way. But holography and the idea of virtual reality was very much established by the time the Next Generation came on the air.
So Roddenberry thought; 'Well, let’s – put this thing called a holodeck onto the ship. It would make sense that crews would need recreation. They would want to at least have the illusion of being on a planet during these long stretches of travelling through the vacuum of space.'
And while he was at it he decide our warp drive is probably going to be more efficient. It’s going to go faster and we'll be able to travel greater distances more quickly. Transporters will have more range, so they’ll be able to do site to site transport very easily – to beam someone from the bridge directly to engineering or from engineering to the surface of a planet.
This was an example of the sort of radical idea that only showed up in one episode of the original series, and was considered very dangerous, that was a common application for this transporter in Next Generation.
Re-engineering
The orignal Warp speed only went to 7 or 8.
Ah, yes the warp. When Gene started the Next Generation he decided he needed to sort of rationalise and re-calibrate the warp speed scale. Those numbers didn’t necessarily correspond to particular velocities in the original series. There was some sense that warp one was travelling at the speed of light and warp 2 was maybe five or six times the speed of light. It was kind of an exponential scale.
Gene decided that, in the Next Generation, we were going to come up with a chart, define these things more precisely, and establish that warp 10 would be equivalent to travelling at infinite velocity.
In the original series we saw the ship go to warp 13 or 14 in some extraordinary circumstance. Typically, we would be travelling between warp 5 and 8. But Gene decided; 'We’re going to say that the Federation Starfleet decided we’re going to recalibrate the scale and bring some order to it.' So sometimes you see some inconsistencies between the original series and Next Generation unless you take into account the fact that the speed scale was readjusted.
Core Breach!
The ship changed quite a lot as well.
We had much less money to spend producing television shows in the 1960s than we do today and the technology of building sets and doing special effects has gotten so much better since the original series.
Gene also felt that if space travel in the future is going to become routine, the ships that they live on will have to be more like a home. They have to accommodate people and, potentially, their families, so they are more like luxury hotels than the somewhat austere and spartan look of the original series Enterprise.
Moving a Long Way On
The new ships can dump their core, can’t they?
Yes. With the Next Generation and the ships of the 24th Century if there is a serious problem with the warp core, and you don’t think that you’re going to be able to solve that problem, the core can be ejected. It's sort of blown through a hatch at the bottom of the ship and with your impulse engines you can get away from it before it explodes in a fireball that would consume everything within several hundred kilometres.
In the original series, that was not an option. Gene had had nearly twenty years to think about how he would do Star Trek differently and he was a great one for discovering what features of the original ship that might have seemed somewhat dangerous or even reckless and how would we address that in the future.
Calculator or Mother-in Law?
Did Voyager have any technical advances?
Yeah, Voyager was considered a state of the art ship when it was launched. One of the advances that we suggested for the Starship Voyager was that it had a series of what we called neural gel packs. The neural gel packs were part of the computer system on Voyager and they were also part of the navigation system.
Again, that idea's taking its lead from current technology. Neural computing is a design architecture for computation that tries to mimic the interconnections of neurons in a human brain. Instead of these very simple yes/no sort of binary circuits that are common in computers right now, we’re hoping that in the not-too-distant future we might be able to build computers that actually have multiple inputs and outputs for any given circuit. They can therefore better address questions that involve shades of grey instead of this very simple binary logic that computers today are restricted to. Computers that are built on a neural architecture would be much faster, more intelligent and better able to process ambiguous data.
One of the things that we’ve always been very careful about on Star Trek is we never want the computer to be smarter than the crew. Certainly, we don’t want the computer to be smarter than our captain because then you wonder; 'Why is this captain in charge of the ship? Why don’t they just let the computer run everything?' So we’ve intentionally, I think, reined in computer technology on Star Trek.
At one level I suspect computers will be far more sophisticated twenty years from now than they are on any of the Star Trek shows, but on another level, do we really want computers to run our lives? I can believe that in the not-too-distant future we might make a conscious decision to sort of scale back certain kinds of computer applications. I don’t think we will ever really computers totally make our decisions for us the way that a Captain Picard or a Captain Kirk wouldon how to carry out a mission.
Computers will certainly be informing those decision, but partly for dramatic reasons on Star Trek and, I think, partly just for sake of preserving our humanity, we don’t want the computers to be in the driver’s seat, we don’t want the computers to be in charge, so we can’t portray them as too intelligent.
Android a Go-Go
The ships computer - it’s polite, respectful and quite restrained, really.
Yeah, Majel Barrett did the voice for all of the computers on our ships, starting with the Next Generation. The computer was a device that you could talk to and it talked back to you. It was always fairly respectful and had a very polite tone, although it had a somewhat flat way of speaking. We didn’t want to suggest that the computer was a character with a personality.
We did have the ultimate user friendly computer in the form of Commander Data who is also, in a sense, a walking, talking computer. He is potentially more intelligent than any human, but lacks the sort of human intuition, experience and emotional aspect of the human mind which clearly informs a lot of our decisions when it comes to moral and ethical judgements. So he was very limited in an important way, too.
Being Human
Data was a technical advance to Next Generation, wasn’t he?
In the original series we would occasionally see androids. There was an episode called I Mudd that was about this rather shady character named Harry Mudd who had stumbled upon this race of androids. Their creators had long since departed and these androids were essentially directionless until he arrived and started turning them toward his purpose. But they were very bland, dry, almost thoughtless automatons. They could respond, they could react, they looked like people, they sounded like people. But there was no sense of anything really going on behind the eyes.
Commander Data was much more sophisticated. He was also an android, but he was capable of independent thought. He was sentient and he had consciousness, so that was clearly a technology far beyond the technology that was available to humans or the original series.
Pesky Neutrinos
Data tries to create a child and fails.
Yeah. That was one of episodes which showed Data as a very compelling character because he was someone like Pinocchio. He was an android who, more than anything else, wanted to be human. Just as Pinocchio was a little wooden boy who really wanted to be human. He gave us a very interesting point of view on what it means to be human and sharing in his struggle to try to become human.
For example, when he created an android daughter, this was a very touching and moving episode because he wanted to experience fatherhood, reproduction, having a family. These are very human qualities that he had not had any direct experience of.
Unfortunately, his experiment didn’t work out and it was a very sad and poignant episode. However, as Data at that point in his evolution as a character had no emotional response, we were left wondering; 'How did this experience really affect him?'
Upgrades
Didn’t you evolve a way of checking whether something had a cloaking device?
Yeah, we’d worked that one out by Next Generation. The give away for a cloaking device in the 24th century is that there is a sort of little neutrino leakage from the cloak. Neutrinos are these very ephemeral, sub-atomic particles. They’re produced in stars and trillions of them are passing through your body every second. They have no or very little mass and they have no charge.
Even the best best cloaking system probably couldn't marshal in all of those neutrinos that are coming from sources with, for example, the warp core of a ship. So, if you have good neutrino detectors on your ship, you may well be able to detect a cloaked ship by noticing an unusual level of neutrinos in some location in space and say: 'Hey, where would those be coming from? There’s no star there, there’s no other source of neutrinos. Maybe it’s a cloaked ship.'
16k of Memory?
Weapons, phasers, torpedoes, that kind of thing. How much better were they by Next Generation?
In the Next Generation we still have phasers and photon torpedoes, but you’ll notice that it has more phaser banks, that the phasers can actually sort of move around and the beam can actually be generated from different points on the hull, both the front, the fore and the aft part of the ship. So it seems to be a more sophisticated technology just by virtue of the fact that they can be pointed and combined in a fashion that we never saw on the original series.
Photon torpedoes have a greater yield, it’s a more powerful bang than it was in the original series. Then on Deep Space Nine we suggested a new invention called a quantum torpedo and, presumably, that was kind of like the difference between an A bomb and an H bomb. This is an even more powerful torpedo weapon that could disrupt matter at a quantum level. We’ve never worked out in any detail how because it’s beyond present day science. Photon torpedoes were more conventional kind of explosive weapon that incorporated matter and anti-matter explosions.
Please State the Nature of the Medical Emergency
You invented something called a kiloquad?
The computer technology on Star Trek, as I mentioned earlier, is something that we’ve been careful about reining in. We don’t want our computers to be more intelligent than our characters, but we also don’t want them to look terribly backward when people are watching the show in five, ten or fifteen years.
It’s possible that computers that are sitting on your desk will have an extraordinary memory capacity - a gigabyte, two gigabytes, ten gigabytes of data on a single drive. When we started getting scripts where we were asked to put a number on the amount of memory in a computer storage module, Michael Kuter decided that it would be a bad idea if we said, 50 gigabytes, and tried to portray that as an extraordinary amount of information from a very advanced 24th Century computer when, in fact, your palm pilot has that much storage capacity five or ten years down the road. So we decided the word 'quad' - I believe Mike invented that. Kiloquad, megaquad, gigaquad. The quad is sort of a logical extension of byte.
I asked Mike when I first read that term; 'Well how many bytes in a quad?' And he said; 'We will never decide that. We will never say it’s four bytes to a quad because otherwise our computers will look that much more primitive when we talk about their memory capacity.'
Micro Machines
Another progression by the time we got to Voyager was the emergency holographic medical program.
The holodoctor is another innovation that was first seen on Star Trek: Voyager. Basically, the idea is that if you lose your ship’s surgeon and staff, you might be able to call upon a programme that would generate a hologram. The hologram would be animated with force fields so that it could hold instruments, scanners, laser scalpels or whatever tools he might be using.
That idea of holograms takes its cue from the fact that today we’re developing expert systems - databases that you can ask relatively intelligent questions of about medical issues. They’re getting to the point where they’re almost as good as somebody who is fresh out of medical school. Not as good as an experienced physician, but a lot of medical knowledge can be codified and put in to a computer program. If you design the architecture of the program well enough, you can draw logical conclusions from sets of symptoms and rule out certain kinds of illnesses and describe the likelihood of others.
I remember when my uncle, who was a surgeon, first saw the holographic doctor. He said; 'Oh great, now I’m going to be replaced by a computer.' Fortunately he was thinking about retiring anyway. Expert systems is another recent development in computer technology that we knew we would have to think about as we designed our technologies for Voyager and the holographic doctor is sort of the ultimate expert medical system.
De-Assimilation
Nanotechnology arrived with the Borg.
We didn’t hear about nanotechnology in the original series. That wasn’t discussed much in the real world of science and engineering. Richard Feynman, in a fairly famous lecture some time in the early 1960s, asked the question; 'How small can a machine be and still be a functioning machine?' People didn’t really seriously start to investigate that question until the 1970s and ‘80s.
Then it became a very active area of research thanks to people like Eric Drexler and some others who actually started to develop techniques for assembling very, very, very small, microscopic machines and potentially, for building machines from the ground up, atom by atom, molecule by molecule. This became known as nanotechnology – nano being the prefix for a billionth in the metric system.
A lot of science fiction stories started to appear describing what could be done if we built machines that were so small that they would fit inside a blood cell and so forth. So, when the Borg were introduced on the Next Generation and we saw that they use some bizarre technique for assimilating human beings and turning them into drones, someone decided that nanotechnology might be the appropriate thing involved in that process.
But it became clear that when the Borg inject these tubules into your arms they must be sending something more than a drug in to your arm because it started to transform the unfortunate victim in to a machine. Someone decided; 'Let’s say that these are "nanites".' These are little sub-microscopic machines that go in and start infusing your tissues with Borg technology and slowly but surely turning you into a drone.
Black and White and Retro
There’s hope because you can be turned back into a human.
Yes. We saw with the Seven of Nine character in Voyager that the assimilation process was not irreversible. It was very difficult to reverse and we saw that as well with Captain Picard on the Next Generation in The Best of Both Worlds. He was assimilated and we managed to get him back from the grips of the Borg and return him to his original humanity.
It’s interesting in another sense that the Borg represent some of our greatest hopes and fears, which is why they’re such an effective villain. They represent the dark side of technology, but there is a very hopeful side to this kind of technology as well. For people who are suffering from injuries or diseases that currently cannot be effectively treated by medicine, these sub-microscopic machines may some day be able to address those problems. But, of course, every new technology potentially has a dark side.
I, Robot
The Borg just look good.
They look great, they’re very black and white. They’re kind of retro in a sense. The interesting thing if you look at the Next Generation is that the uniforms are all very primary colours - red, green and blue and so forth. The Borg were black and white and that was kind of an interesting contrast that made you, I think in a subconscious way, think back to some of those terrible 1950s zombie movies and the scariness of the undead. They had that pallid look of a corpse which added to their creepiness.
Mappa Mundi, Mappa Galactica
Did you mention that some scientists have experimented with an actual implant?
Yeah, there is a lot of work being done today in nanotechnology and I think there is at least one scientist who has implanted an electrode in his arm that is actually connected to one of his major nerves. He can control the electrical output of this electrode purely through thought, which is rather astonishing when you think about it - that we’re that close to being able to create implants that are not terribly different from what we might be seeing in the Borg.
Credible Co-Ordinates
The quadrants - is there a kind of Star Trek map?
Star Trek has always been about exploring the Milky Way galaxy, the one that we live in. The sun is just one of four hundred and some odd billion stars in the Milky Way. We’re out in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way, about two thirds of the way from the core.
In the Next Generation, we decided we needed to try to map our Star Trek universe a little more carefully, at least come up with some nomenclature for how the crew would go about describing a destination, co-ordinates, headings and so forth. And so we decided that we would basically divide the galaxy up into four quadrants and imagine this pinwheel of stars and then slicing it both directions.
Earth is located in the alpha quadrant. There’s also the beta quadrant, the gamma quadrant and the delta quadrant. In Voyager, our ship was hurled 70,000 light years to the other side of the galaxy over into the delta quadrant. In the Next Generation we were mostly exploring stars in the alpha quadrant, as was the original series. In Deep Space Nine we discovered a worm hole that led over to the gamma quadrant, another sort of far corner of the galaxy. And then we talked about sectors within those quadrants.
So we had a kind of a grid system that would allow us to identify specific locations a little more carefully. When we start exploring the galaxy we’re going to have to come up with new co-ordinate systems and new ways of navigation and identifying the different places that we’re trying to travel to.
One's Black, One's in your Lawn
So any astronomer would find all that technically quite accurate?
Oh I think astronomers would find that very credible. This is not a system of co-ordinates that astronomers currently use, but I’m sure most astronomers would agree that that’s a pretty logical way to start sorts of parcelling up the galaxy.
Interesting Misfire
We had black holes in the original series, but by Next Generation we’d got a wormhole. How are they different?
Black holes were conceived probably as early as the 1920s, possibly even before that. There was even some discussion I think that Immanuel Kant mentioned that one could imagine a star so massive its surface gravity would be high enough so that the escape velocity from the surface of the star would be greater than the speed of light. Because light could never escape it, we would never be able to see it.
Such a star would not be stable, but after Einstein developed his general theory of relativity, physicists began to realise that you could compress matter to an extraordinary degree. You could create something called a singularity which is essentially a point of infinite density that could have the mass of several stars and the gravity from that object would be so great that light could not escape it. And that became known as a black hole and that’s the term that’s typically used in in the astrophysics literature today.
They were also called black stars in the 1940s and ‘50s and that’s the term that was used in the original series. In an episode called Tomorrow is Yesterday when the Enterprise encountered a black star and it was through gravitational slingshot effect, shot back toward the Earth, but also back in time. That was either very prescient of the writers, or just kind of a lucky guess where someone might have looked at the literature and seen that black holes could actually, in some circumstances, be used as time machines.
I’m not sure what extent that scientists appreciated that in the 1960s, but that’s been well established today. Wormholes were also something that Albert Einstein and a couple of colleagues realised could possibly exist in our universe in the mid-1930s. That didn’t get out into the popular literature until much later when they were called Einstein-Rosen bridges.
In the 1950s a physicist named John Wheeler coined the term wormhole because it’s somewhat analogous to a worm eating his way through an apple. Instead of taking the long way round, the worm actually takes a short cut from one side of the apple to the other by eating his way through. In Einstein's theory of relativity he seems to suggest that space might be warped to such a degree that there could be these sort of higher dimensional shortcuts to make it possible to travel great distances in very, very short periods of time.
Aluminium Perchlorate
When did wormholes first appear in the scripts?
I think the first mention of a wormhole in Star Trek was actually in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which appeared in 1979. The Enterprise had been refitted and it had a new warp core and so forth and it wasn’t really ready to be launched. There is a desperate need for it to be launched for an important mission so they took off anyway. The engines created an artificial wormhole because they misfired in some interesting fashion.
The wormhole was a really interesting, fascinating moment in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and so we knew that that would be a fun idea to revisit it in later series. It became the benchmark of Deep Space Nine and it is a really intriguing idea that the fans have very much responded to. With our warp drive we can travel from here to the next nearest star in a couple of days. But the wormhole gave us the opportunity to travel 50,000 light years, half the breadth of the galaxy, in a matter of seconds. That was an astonishing thing, even for our 24th Century characters.
Foley Fun
Can you just talk about the original transporter effects?
In the original series, the computers were not nearly as sophisticated enough to do the kinds of special effects work we do on computers today. They had to be very creative and improvise different sorts of optical effects that would look interesting and cool on TV.
The transporter effect was basically created by a person taking little, tiny bits of aluminium foil and aluminium perchlorate, which is sort of a powdery version of aluminium, and then just letting them fall through the air against a black piece of cardboard, illuminating that from the side with a very bright light and then photographing that. When the characters were filmed walking into the transporter they would step on the pads, Captain Kirk would give the order to energize and the actors would then step off. In the lab, after the film was developed, they would superimpose the actors fading out and this fluttering aluminium fading in. It was a very simple, practical optical effect.
More Tech?
What do about the sound effects? Did you ever do any research into those and how did they develop?
There are a lot of really wonderful sound effects on Star Trek. When the phasers would fire, and there was a certain buzzing sound the transport effect had. But then Gene realised that it’s kind of silly to have the engines making a sound out in space and in the second and third seasons of the original series, you never heard the sound of the engines when you saw the ship flying through space.
After Star Wars was released as a feature film, sound became such an important part of selling the idea of travelling at fast speeds in science fiction, so we bit the bullet and went with an engine noise sound in the later series. But I’m not sure where they got a lot of those noises. It wouldn’t surprise me if they recorded a swarm of bees from a safe distance and then amplified that somehow or used a parabolic microphone to record things at a distance.
The people who are called foley artists are the people who do sound effects in films, whether it’s clapping, steps or a dog running on concrete. All of that stuff is produced on a sound stage using fun little practical effects and I’m sure that they did similar things with Star Trek. It would be very fascinating to know where the phaser sound came from. It's such a distinctive, strange sound.
Technobabble
Did science have a high profile from Next Generation onwards? Michael Piller called it Piller filler. Were you writing more tech stuff in there?
If you look at the dialogue in the Next Generation there is probably a lot more technical language than we heard on the original series. There were a lot of interesting scientific phenomena that they encountered: quasars and black stars and they invented some terminology like class M planets for Earth-like planets and so forth. It was more a part of the language of the show because these are scientists and engineers exploring the galaxy and they are technically very literate people. They are on a ship that is state of the art high technology and they are out there to explore, to do research and to learn new things about the physics, astronomy and biology of our galaxy.
Certainly there are times when we probably used it a little excessively. I suspect on the new show we won’t be doing it quite as much because I think we want to try to get back to the more pure adventure and action format of the original series. The technical language will still be a part of the new series though, as these are technically literate, capable people dealing with technical problems and doing scientific research.
Who's Best?
We’ve talked to quite a few actors and they all hate the technical lines. Do you ever come across the actors and they give you some feedback on the stuff you make them learn?
One of my proudest moments was the first time I heard Patrick Stewart say something that I’d put in to his dialogue, which was the term 'microfusion initiator'. I suspect that someone who was trained in Shakespeare and who was a stage actor used to doing a different kind of role probably isn’t too pleased to do a lot of that dialogue.
Teri Farrell, who played Lieutenant Dax on Deep Space Nine gave me a very important insight the first time that I met her about technical dialogue in scripts. She said that she really had no problem speaking all of these technical lines if she was in a scene talking to the computer or just taking data from the screen of the computer. But if she was in a scene where she was interacting with two or three other characters, she had to remember all of these technical terms that meant absolutely nothing to her, interact with those characters and watch her eyeline, and play off of what that character was trying to play. When she had to keep all of those things going and try to speak this language that made no sense to her, that was really hard. And so I always was very conscientious about that. I tried to limit the amount of technical language in dialogue in the scenes that I knew were going to be tough scenes for the actors to do anyway.
When I first met Teri and shyly introduced myself and told her what I did on the show which is; 'I’m the guy who puts all of that terrible technical language into your dialogue', she sort of jokingly grabbed me by the lapels and lifted me off my feet and swore at me rather profusely. Then she chuckled and said that she was just teasing, but it was a somewhat intimidating moment there.
Better, Faster, More
So who are the best babblers? LeVar Burton and Brent Spiner seem to quite like it.
I always like the way that LeVar Burton did his technical lines because there was always an enthusiasm there. He played an engineer who loved being an engineer. When he was tackling a technical problem, you got the sense that he lived to do that.
Brent Spiner just seemed to find a system. I think he treated it like learning poetry in a foreign language because he was a character who was a scientist and an android and one would expect that he would be speaking in much more technical language more of the time.
There was an episode where Spock, our first science officer from the original series, appeared in an episode of the Next Generation. Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock, had several scenes with Brent Spiner who played Commander Data. And one of those scenes involved a fair amount of technical language. In between shooting, Leonard asked Brent; 'How do you possibly remember all of this technical language?' And Brent said; Well, I basically just sort of look at it syllable by syllable and commit it to memory the way that I might commit a poem to memory or even something that might be written in another language.' I was a little surprised that Nimoy found that surprising because he played a scientist and he had some pretty technical dialogue in the original series.
Duonetic Fields
Could you have more elaborate ideas from Next Generation onwards because of advanced techniques in CGI and VisFX?
Yeah, we produce 26 one-hour episodes of Star Trek a year right now, and the two principal constraints are time and budget. Over the last few years, computer generated special effects technology has advanced to the point where we can do a lot of our special effects on the computer and still afford to do it on our budget in time to air a weekly television programme. That’s only really become practical within last three or four years.
From about the 5th season of Star Trek: Voyager on, every new shot of the Voyager starship that you saw on television was a computer generated special effect. The beautiful, six foot fibreglass model that was built at the beginning of the series has been sitting in a box for years. That gave us writers much greater freedom in imagining story ideas and scenes. For example, we could have an alien attack Voyager and tear up half of the hull and blow out a couple of the decks. We would never imagine doing that with that very expensive, lovely model that we built at the beginning of the series. We couldn’t afford to repair it. But when that ship just exists on a disc in a computer you can blow it up to your heart’s content then just call up the file again when you’re ready to show it after it’s been repaired.
We did our first special effects computer generated alien life form on Voyager, which was species 8472. And that technology continues to evolve, so I’m sure that we’re going to see more and more of that in – in the new series, which will be very exciting.
To Beam or Not To Beam
Can you think about some of the lines you’re most proud of, technically?
It’s fun to invent new words and part of the pleasure of working on Star Trek is the opportunity to occasionally coin a word or a phrase that will show up in books about Star Trek years down the road and that fans will remember and ask you about when you meet them. A few things I came up with... this notion of the duonetic field. That was used in the Deep Space Nine Deep Space Nine episode about a planet where none of our devices would function properly because there was some sort of electromagnetic field, presumably, that interfered with the functionality of all of our devices. All of the terms that I came up with that were real physics were just too much of a mouthful or they didn’t really work. They weren’t really supportable on a scientific level.
In the original series they talked about duotronic circuits for the control systems on the Enterprise and I thought, well, if there are duotronic circuits, maybe there are duonetic fields. It’s kind of a play on magnetic, just as duotronic is a play on electronic. And so I thought hey, the duonetic field. That was kind of fun.
The osteogenic stimluator. We show the doctors occasionally with someone who’s fractured a bone or broken a bone.They'll wave this device over the break and it starts to heal almost instantaneously. What is that device called? Well I thought how about an osteogenic stimulator. Stimulates the production of new bone tissue. Osteo is the latin word for bone. So that’s fun to do from time to time, but ultimately, I think, that’s sort of the smaller part of a Star Trek script. It’s important, it’s interesting to do, it’s interesting to hear, but I think what really drives the show is the story.
If we’ve come up with a good story, we’ve got great characters and great actors to do those stories. In my mind the shows really take off when we just tell compelling stories that have interesting layers of some important question about life and human nature, played against a science fictional background. So that, for me, the technical language which some people lovingly refer to as technobabble, is fun and it certainly has its place and an important role, but I think Star Trek is really about telling compelling stories about the future.
Combat Forces
Talk about the things you created which make it work.
The transporter is a technology that I would say – you hate to say never, but I would probably be willing to go out on a limb and say the transporter is a technology that will never be invented. At least in terms of how we’ve represented it on the show.
In the original series Kirk had a line about how the transporter disassembles you atom by atom, beams that matter in a stream of energy, somehow, to the target location and reassembles you. That's a neat trick if you can pull it off and I suspect that that as a mode of transportation will never prove to be practical, even if you could possibly make it work. And one of the problems with the transporter is that there is this annoying little law of physics called Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
Basically what that says is that you can never simultaneously know the position and the momentum of a subatomic particle as accurately as you would like to. The better you know the position, the less well the momentum and vice versa. Somebody’s going to take me apart atom by atom, I hope that they’re going to put me back together in exactly the same way and that not only means the positions of those atoms, but how they were moving when they were disassembled because, otherwise, you’re going to be scrambled pretty quickly. So how to get around Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle?
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.
Inertial Dampeners Offline?
The Inertial Dampening Mechanism.
Another problem crops up because of the way we’ve represented space travel on Star Trek. Warp drive allows you to travel many times faster than the speed of light which, in and of itself, is something that seems to violate a basic tenet of relativity. But there might be some clever ways around that. A lot of physicists would agree that there might be a way to get around some of those problems.
When we show, for example, in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Enterprise jumping to warp, that ship is clearly accelerating at extraordinary rates. Probably hundreds or thousands of G forces would be involved in that kind of acceleration. By comparison an astronaut on the space shuttle maybe experiences 3Gs, three times the force of gravity. If you were to just be accelerated at a hundred or a thousand Gs, you’d be crushed like a bug. so how does our crew survive the jump to warp? Well, we coined the term inertial damper.
The inertial dampers basically allow us to nullify the effects of acceleration. Whether it’s when we’re jumping to warp or if the ship is being rattled by an ion storm or rattled by some sort of an explosion from an alien weapon. the inertial dampers basically take the edge off of those kinds of accelerations. How do they work? Well, we have no idea. That's not a technology that is presently possible. But one would imagine that if you can manipulate gravity – and of course on Star Trek we have artificial gravity plates, we have some way of controlling the force of gravity – if you can control the force of gravity and create an artificial gravity environment on your ship, one would imagine that you could also control inertia because they’re, in effect, the same thing.
Acceleration and deceleration are basically the same thing, so the inertial dampers are not only protecting our crew when it jumps to warp and accelerates to this extraordinary velocity, but they’re also protecting the crew when it slows down and stops. So deceleration is essentially the same thing as acceleration. It’s a change in velocity.
No Seat Belts!
When the ship’s hit by phasers from another ship, it shakes a lot. So that’s not the same principle…
Well it is the same principle, ultimately. We do see on Star Trek, for example, the ship will get involved in a tussle with a alien and will be fired upon, and the ship shakes. Well, if we have inertial dampers how come the crew is feeling that shake? Presumably the inertial dampers have a certain response time. It’s not instantaneous, so there’s a little bit of a lag and it’s that lag that creates the shake that we momentarily experience when the ship is hit by phaser fire or a photon torpedo or something.
Timid New World
Patrick Stewart talked about doing bits of ship shake.
That’s yet another new technique that the actors have to learn when they start our show. The actors on the new show, they’re all kind of having to get up to speed on ship shakes and technical language and some of the other things that are features of all of our Star Trek shows.
How to fall over and 'Why are there no seat belts?' which is the perennial question.
A Fascinating Universe
Is Star Trek science so appealing to everybody because people are disillusioned with the slow pace of the space programme in real life?
That interesting question. In the 1960s, when we were shooting the original series, obviously that was the heyday of the American space programme. The Apollo missions were being designed and developed and it was, I think a month or two after Star Trek aired its last episode of the original series that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. So the 1960s were clearly a time when people thought the possibilities for space exploration were endless.
When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969, most scientists and engineers would have told you that by 1980, we’ll be walking on Mars. And by the 21st Century we may be sending people to stars orbiting other planets. It was a time of extraordinary technical development. I had a piano teacher when I was a little boy who was 21 years old when the Wright Brothers flew at Kittyhawk. She lived to see see men walk on the moon. That’s astonishing, that’s an astonishing pace of technical advancement.
What people didn’t expect was that that technical advancement would sort of stall out after the Apollo missions. And it’s remarkable that no human being has set foot on the moon in nearly 30 years. We have certainly not gone farther. And it’s sad and I think – a lot of people are disappointed. Star Trek at least fills the void in the imagination that has been has been left by the fact that the space programme essentially stopped at the moon and it’s going to be some years, in all probability, before we go forward: either back to the moon or on to Mars.
The Televisual Landscape
Buzz Aldrin said that space travel is fantastically slow -it takes 40 years to get to Alpha Centauri and we know there’s not that much there. It’s not as exciting as science fiction.
Yeah, it is somewhat sad that that science fiction is sort of spinning all of these ideas of a galaxy with all of these planets that are populated by interesting and strange creatures and the real universe probably won’t be that way. I suspect that intelligent life in the universe is pretty rare. At least life like us. If it weren’t, I suspect we would already, in one way or another, know about it. And alien abductees notwithstanding, there really is no credible evidence that that there is other intelligent life in this galaxy or any other. So at some level I think Star Trek speaks to the way people would like the universe to be, the way we would like to see humanity evolve.
Who wouldn’t love to get aboard a starship and go off exploring other worlds and seeing these astonishing vistas and meet these strange alien creatures. It’s a little sad to recognise that the reality may fall far short of that. But on the other hand nature has a way of surprising us and there are probably things that we cannot even imagine that are more astonishing than anything that we’ve ever seen on Star Trek or any other science fiction.
One only has to look at a few images, I think, from the Hubble space telescope and some of the probes we sent to other planets to realise that the real universe is full of astonishment and wonder. It may not be filled with bipedal life forms who can talk to us via the universal translator, but it is clearly filled with a great deal of wonder and excitement. And, unfortunately, it might take us a little longer to get out there the way that we would like than we might have expected back in the 1960s.
Art Deco Retro Futurism
Science fiction on television before Star Trek. What was around in the ‘60s?
There wasn’t a lot of science fiction on television that was really geared towards adult audiences before Star Trek. In fact, virtually all of the science fiction that had been on television was very much oriented, I think, toward children. Captain Video, Lost in Space.
The Twilight Zone was, I think, a good example of adult science fiction, but it wasn’t primarily about space travel. The Outer Limits I think also good, adult oriented science fiction, but again not primarily about space travel. Star Trek was the first science fiction series on television that tried to portray the future of space travel in a credible and very adult way. It was an adult show with adult characters and it was clearly something that was that was geared for an adult audience. It captured the imagination of children, but one of the things that I think is very rewarding about working on a show like Star Trek is that we have one of the broadest demographics of any television series that you could name. I have met fans, as young as six or seven years old, and as old as middle to late 80s, early 90s. It appeals to a very, very broad audience.
Never Beam Down
You’re setting something 100 years from now and 100 years before the Enterprise. The original series now looks dated, but you’ve got to go before that, but in the future. Quite a tough job.
The new series takes place 150 years from today, which is pretty far in our future, but it’s 100 years before the era of Kirk and Spock. So what we have to try to do is convince the audience that they’re looking at a crew aboard a starship that is less sophisticated than the original series Enterprise, but clearly much more advanced than something like today’s space shuttle. How do you split the difference? So many elements, design elements on the original series look a bit dated today because, of course, that show was created 35 years ago. I think that they’ve done an astonishing job on the design of the sets for the new series and when you see them I think you’ll agree that it’s probably the best looking ship we’ve ever seen.
Clearly we have much higher production values today in television. We have more money to spend on set design and development and we have more techniques available to us than they did in the 1960s. I don’t think anyone in the audience would expect us to go back to, say, 1950s television production standards to do this new series because it is taking place in an era before the original series. But what we can do is we can suggest a ship that is more utilitarian, that is smaller, that cannot travel as fast, that has technologies that were well established in the original series, but are experimental. in this new series.
The lighting is different. There is a sort of a – claustrophobic is too strong a word, but – there is a sense that they are in something that maybe looks more like a 22nd Century nuclear submarine than a than a hotel, which is kind of how the ships in the other series tended to look. They’re also very, very subtle and I think very, very elegant and there are clever touches in things like the lighting fixtures and the textures of the of the walls that suggest an earlier era. I’m not an historian of design by any means, but there are some touches that almost look a little art deco and at almost a sort of a subtle, sub-conscious level. I think it’s going to suggest an earlier era in the mind of the audience simply because we understand the way design in our day to day lives has evolved over the last 30, 40, 50 years.
Enterprise
Can you tell me about the role of the transporter in this? Apparently it’s only used for cargo because it’s a dodgy thing to travel in?
Yes. One of the new technologies for the crew of the new series is the transporter. That was a well established technology by the time of Captain Kirk and Mr Spock. It was something that Gene Roddenberry invented for the original series primarily for practical reasons. He was doing a show about exploring a new planet pretty much every week and he had to get his characters from this huge ship in orbit of the planet down to the surface relatively quickly. He knew it would be way too expensive to try to land this model starship on a planetary surface model set every week, so he thought well, use some sort of self teleportation device and let’s call it a transporter. They’ll walk into this chamber and they’ll just be beamed down to the surface of the planet. So it was really a practical solution to a production problem.
Today, because we have better special effects budgets we can send our crews from the ship in orbit down to the surface aboard little shuttles. That’s a special effects kind of a sequence that we can do pretty affordably these days. So we’re going to suggest in the new series that the transporter is an experimental technology and this will be another element of the show that will tell the audience that this show takes place well before the era of Kirk and Spock. We are only really using it for cargo as it’s considered too dangerous to use for human transport. Perhaps over the course of a few years we’ll become more comfortable with it and decide that it could be used for transporting people routinely. But again the idea is that that technology which is, again, a far future technology, by any measure, is an experimental technology in the new series.