Beyond Star Trek (Book Review)

Beyond Star Trek:
Physics from Alien Invasions
to the End of Time (Book Review)

We live in a world of wonders. As we approach the beginning of the 21st century, it seems that anything is possible. The scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century have surpassed anything that those living in 1900 could have imagined. The pace of discovery in the past decade has been especially amazing.

We live in a world in which we can clone animals, send spacecraft to other planets and then drive them by remote control, and probe matter to its smallest components. We talk about blackbody radiation, DNA sequencing, and top quarks, bottom quarks, strange quarks, and charmed quarks (which is what you get when you visit DS9 with a briefcase full of gold-pressed latinum).

We also live in a world where the media and Hollywood toss around science without much concern for accuracy. Because the general public doesn't keep up with scientific breakthroughs on a daily basis, it takes the media at their word and comes to believe things that are nonsense.

But interest in real science seems to have grown during the '90s, and the number of science books written for the general public has increased with it. The real movement for popularization of science began much earlier with Carl Sagan and his book Cosmos and the Cosmos television series. Then in the early '90s Michio Kaku released the popular book Hyperspace. The trend continued in the mid-90s when physicist Lawrence Krauss authored a book called The Physics of Star Trek. This was a great little book and one that found an immediate home among Trekkers.

I know what you're thinking: Oh great, another book for people who like to spot every little problem with an episode and then talk about it on the Net until their fingers go numb. But one doesn't have to be a nitpicker to enjoy a book like this. Simply knowing what is and isn't plausible can make the viewing experience much more enjoyable. Whether or not implausible aspects ruin the story is up to the viewer.

The success of Krauss's book spawned a whole series of works from various authors that included The Biology of Star Trek, Star Trek Science Logs (by series science consultant Andre Bormanis), and the very dense The Metaphysics of Star Trek ,which I challenge even the most dedicated of sci-fi/science fans to wade through. Not to be outdone, Krauss has followed up his first book with Beyond Star Trek: Physics from Alien Invasions to the End