star trek 19 the search for reality

                                             Mehr Licht

Kirk: "Captain's Log star date 11, 15, 23, 30, 42, 10. No wait those are my lotto numbers. The date is August the the Sixth. We are making our way through the Bolhooks nebula in the Orion galaxy, having just returned from an all night party on Sigma Five. Scotty, are you sure we can't do light drive? Warp Factor One? It would make things a lot handier."

Scotty: "Nae laddie. It's a contradiction in terms. An object cannot travel at the speed of light because light has no speed. It has no mass so it can have no speed. It's an instantaneous multi directional ripple effect. Nothing travels when light happens. There's an energetic ripple in the fabric of reality that's all. Like a sheet being given a good shake by a housewife to spread on a bed. The bit the housewife is holding with her hand travels nowhere no matter how often she ripples the sheet. In any case our ship being an object, and our bodies being living matter animated by soul, we have none, repeat none, of the non particular wave characteristics of light and therefore cannot act like light even if light doesn't in the first place act the way arrogant unquestioning superstitious scientist twits say it does, and even if light is as James Healy claims three things happening at once. We can't even be one of those things without being dead. Asking our ship to go at the speed of light is likenable to asking an elephant to fly like a sparrow. Asking our ship to go at the speed of light is like asking a block of concrete to flow like a river. Asking our ship to go at the speed of light is like asking the Bangles to sing Techno."

Kirk: "I think they might pull it off. With the right producer. That guy Miley Cyrus got. He'd produce anything."

Scotty: "But they wouldn't be the Bangles any more."

Kirk: "Are you sure Scotty?"

Scotty: "Drop the wee stone in the pond. There's a planar ripple effect on the surface there which can help us to create a metaphor for some of the properties of light. As you drop yon wee stone, place a leaf on the surface of the pond. The ripples are there instantly to the edge of the universe or in this case to the edge of the pond or some point in the pond where the plane is interrupted such as a reef or the prow of a boat. The leaf does nae move outward. It just goes up and down."

Kirk: "But couldn't we find some way to ride the ripples of light?"

Scotty: "If we could laddie, we'd get a damn good omnidirectional shaking. Light is omnidirectional remember. Not planar. And we'd be shaking on the one spot without travelling an inch forward or back."

Kirk: "Ocean ships ride sea waves."

Scotty: "Those aren't waves in the sense that sound waves, or light waves, or waves from a stone dropped in a pond. are waves. When you see tides on the ocean the water itself is actually in motion. It's flowing not rippling. Ocean currents, the tides, are water in motion pulled, or so scientists presently believe, by the gravitational influence of the moon."

Kirk: "You think scientists are wrong about the moon causing ocean tides."

Scotty: "Not really laddie. But they've been wrong about so much. The barbarisms of Abortion, euthanasia, condom culture, anti depressants, Mumps Measles Rubella vaccines, easy divorce, promiscuity culture, the speed of light. It's hard to trust them with anything."

Kirk: "But if we found a way to make the ship resonate with light at the same wave frequency perhaps we could harnass..."

Scotty: "You mean by vapourising the ship and ourselves and then coming up with some other arcane industrial process transforming our particles into wave forms. Do ye think we'd be alive at the end of that wee process Cap'n?"

Kirk: "Oh pooh."

Scotty: "Never mind. We've been leading people astray with this hocus pocus for fifty years. Maybe we should all start going to church again."

Kirk: "But how are we going to get home?"