star trek antimatter universe

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The Alternative Factor

• Episode aired Mar 30, 1967

Existence itself comes under threat from a man's power-struggle with his alternate self, with the Enterprise's strained dilithium crystals presenting his key to a final solution. Existence itself comes under threat from a man's power-struggle with his alternate self, with the Enterprise's strained dilithium crystals presenting his key to a final solution. Existence itself comes under threat from a man's power-struggle with his alternate self, with the Enterprise's strained dilithium crystals presenting his key to a final solution.

• Gerd Oswald
• Don Ingalls
• Gene Roddenberry
• William Shatner
• Leonard Nimoy
• Robert Brown
• 53 User reviews
• 12 Critic reviews

• Captain James Tiberius 'Jim' Kirk

• Mister Spock

• Charlene Masters

• Assistant Engineer
• Transporter Chief

• Lieutenant Hadley
• (uncredited)
• Security Guard

• Anti-Matter Lazarus Being #2

• Enterprise crewmember

• Anti-Matter Lazarus Being #1
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Did you know

• Trivia This is the first time that live two-way communication with Starfleet Command is depicted. In previous episodes, communication with Starfleet Command was through delayed radio messages.
• Goofs At the very beginning when Spock is reporting the atmospheric composition of the planet he has scanned he says "Oxygen Hydrogen atmosphere". This would be a very explosive combination. He meant to say "Oxygen Nitrogen atmosphere" (similar to Earth) but just got his line wrong.

Spock : I fail to comprehend your indignation, sir. I have simply made the logical deduction that you are a liar.

• Crazy credits The closing credits are set against a combination background of stills from that episode and previous episodes.
• Alternate versions Special Enhanced version Digitally Remastered with new exterior shots and remade opening theme song
• Connections Featured in Mr. Plinkett's Star Trek 2009 Review (2010)
• Soundtracks Theme From Star Trek Written by and credited to Alexander Courage

User reviews 53

• ErasmicLather
• Feb 26, 2007
• March 30, 1967 (United States)
• United States
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• Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park - 10700 W. Escondido Canyon Rd., Agua Dulce, California, USA
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Technical specs

• Runtime 50 minutes

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Warp Drive & Transporters: How 'Star Trek' Technology Works (Infographic)

The original "Star Trek" television series featured technology that had first appeared decades earlier in science fiction stories. Pulp heroes had been wielding ray guns, flying faster than light and teleporting from place to place since the 1930s. But perhaps the true inspiration of Star Trek’s superscience is the revolutionary physics discoveries of the early 20th century. Relativity, discovered by Albert Einstein and quantum physics, pioneered by Max Planck  revealed a universe far different than ordinary human experience might suggest.

Although Einstein’s theory  forbids matter to accelerate past the speed of light, the demands of sci-fi storytelling require that people be able to travel between the stars in a reasonable amount of time, usually hours, or at most, days. Enter the space warp drive, or as it was called in "Star Trek’s" pilot episode, "hyperdrive."

Warp drive in Star Trek  works by annihilating matter (in the form of deuterium, a kind of hydrogen gas) and antimatter in a fusion reaction mediated by dilithium crystals. This produces the enormous power required to warp space-time and drive the ship faster than light.

The Evolution of 'Star Trek' (Infographic)

The crew of the Enterprise measures velocity in warp factors. Warp factor 8 equals the cube of 8 (8 times 8 times 8), or 512 times light speed .

Even this velocity is too slow to allow starships to travel as quickly as they appear to on TV. In reality, the script writers arbitrarily allowed the Enterprise  to get to wherever it was going, as fast as was convenient for storytelling. By the era of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," the warp speed scale was recalibrated. Under the new scale, a starship could get from Earth to Alpha Centauri  in about 37 hours at warp factor 8.

USS Enterprise Evolution in Photos (Gallery)

Science fiction author E.E. "Doc" Smith describes a spaceship traveling at a speed "thousands of times greater than that of light" in his novel "Skylark of Space," written between 1915 and 1921 and serialized in "Amazing Stories" magazine in 1928.

The technology and style of " Star Trek " was influenced by the 1955 film "Forbidden Planet." United Planets Cruiser C-57D (above) used its quanto-gravitic hyperdrive to greatly surpass the speed of light. The cruiser travels to the star Altair, 16.7 light-years from Earth, in 378 days.

In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre proposed moving not a spaceship, but space itself, faster than light. All that would be required is to distort the fabric of space-time into a bubble surrounding a spaceship. Enormous energy would be required, but once created, the bubble would move independently of the rest of the universe, even faster than light.

The bubble moves by compressing the space-time in front of it and expanding the space-time behind it.

The Top 10 Star Trek Technologies

NASA scientist Harold "Sunny" White believes as-yet-undiscovered "negative energy" could be used to create the space-warp bubble , using a smaller amount of total energy than Alcubierre thought possible.

A plausible alternative to traveling across space is the wormhole, a shortcut between two widely separated points in space-time. Scientists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen first proposed the wormhole, or "Einstein-Rosen Bridge," in 1935. Wormholes have not yet been observed in nature, but they are not forbidden by our current understanding of physics.

If they exist, wormholes would permit travel faster than light and backward through time (at least to the time when the wormhole was created).

In "Star Trek's" Transporter device, normal matter is converted temporarily into energy, then beamed to a target point for restoration to its original pattern and structure. The Transporter has a range of about 16,000 miles (25,750 kilometers).

The "Vibra-Transmitter" described in Frank K. Kelley’s 1933 story "Into the Meteorite Orbit" functions similarly to Star Trek’s Transporter. The human body is "reduced to vibration traveling on a wave-channel" and then reintegrated into matter in a receiving chamber.

In real-world science, subatomic particles can be quantum teleported, but this only transmits a quantum state between a pair of entangled particles, not the particles themselves. The human body contains an immense number of atoms, about 10^27 (one followed by 27 zeroes). Recording the quantum states of all these atoms would require an unrealistic amount of data storage. Even worse, quantum physics prevents the precise measurement of the individual atoms.

Deflector shields (or "screens") are an invisible force-field barrier activated automatically by the ship's computer when needed. Screens can be maintained continually for 20 hours before the ship’s power is exhausted. Transporters cannot be used when the screens are enveloping the ship.

Navigational deflector beams sweep the space ahead of the ship to shove aside obstacles such as small asteroids. Anything too large to be deflected triggers the ship’s computer to change course to avoid collision.

In earlier sci-fi, deflectors for diverting meteoroids out of a spaceship’s path show up in "The Ethical Equations” by Murray Leinster, published in "Astounding Science Fiction" in 1945. 

Lawrence Krauss, in his book "The Physics of Star Trek," supposes that to bend light (or phaser beams), deflector shields would have to warp space-time around the starship. But if warp drive is possible, deflector shields that work this way are perhaps also possible.

Tractor beams are a form of reverse deflector beam, pulling instead of pushing. The tractor beam has a range of about 100,000 miles (160,930 km).

E.E. "Doc" Smith uses the exact term " tractor beam " to describe force beams for grabbing objects in space in his 1931 story "Spacehounds of IPC," published in "Amazing Stories."

In real-world science, microscopic particles of matter have been manipulated in the laboratory with laser beams. Starships are much more massive. Tractor beams that work on an electromagnetic principle might be plausible in theory. However, Newton’s laws require that if the Enterprise pulls on another object with its tractor beam, the Enterprise itself will be moved toward the object. The Enterprise must fire thrusters to remain in place during the operation.

A phaser is an energy beam that can be "phased" to interfere with the wave pattern of any material object. Settings include dematerialize (converts matter to energy), disrupt (breaks down molecular cohesion), heat (increases molecular velocity) and stun (impacts the nervous system of a living target). Phasers can also be adjusted for use as cutting torch or welder.  A phaser set to overload creates a powerful explosion. The ship's main phaser batteries can destroy matter over vast distances and are powered directly by the warp engines. 

The Martian heat ray in H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel " The War of the Worlds " is very much like a ray gun or death beam. In the 1920s and 1930s, some scientists, including Nikola Tesla, believed that a death ray capable of killing at a distance was feasible. Toy Buck Rogers guns began appearing in the 1930s, one of which was called a “disintegrator pistol.”

Weapons exist today that are capable of stunning the human nervous system (the taser, for example). However, tasers require physical contact to deliver their charge. Due to the inverse square law by which energy decreases as distance increases, to disintegrate matter at a distance a phaser weapon would have to generate an incredible amount of energy. Military research continues into developing directed energy weapons capable of shooting down missiles.

A photon torpedo is an energy pod of matter and antimatter separated by a magno-photon force field. They can be fired directly as torpedoes, laid in a mine field or scattered in an enemy’s path like modern-day depth charges. Electrochemical, proximity and other fuses are available. 

Photon torpedoes require a quantity of antimatter. Generating even a few atoms of antimatter uses up an enormous amount of energy. The starship’s warp drive, powered by antimatter, also has this problem.

In theory, the explosive yield of one gram (0.04 ounces) of antimatter and an equal quantity of matter is about 43 kilotons (possibly lower in actual practice). Background material for the Next Generation series says that photon torpedoes carry 1.5 kilograms 3.3 pounds) of antimatter. 

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Perhaps the most amazing thing about antimatter is that it was conceived of at all. In 1928, British physicist Paul Dirac set out to solve a problem: how to reconcile the laws of quantum theory with Einstein's special theory of relativity. Through complex mathematical calculations, Dirac managed to integrate these disparate theories. He explained how things both very small and very fast -- in this case, electrons near the speed of light -- behave. This was a remarkable achievement in its own right, but Dirac didn't stop there. He realized that his calculations would work for an electron with negative charge, but also for an electron with positive charge -- an unanticipated result. Dirac argued that this anomaly was in fact the electron's "antiparticle," the subatomic equivalent of the "evil twin." In fact, he asserted, every particle has an "antiparticle" with nearly identical properties, except for an opposite electric charge. And just as protons, neutrons, and electrons combine to form atoms and matter, antiprotons, antineutrons, and antielectrons (called positrons) combine to form antiatoms and antimatter. His findings led him to speculate that there may even be a mirror universe made entirely of antimatter.

EXTERNAL LINKS For more information on antimatter: Antimatter: Mirror of the Universe

For information on the antimatter experiments at CERN: Antimatter Factory ATHENA ATRAP ASACUSA

What Star Trek Teaches Us about Antimatter

Phil kesten.

Antimatter powers the warp engine on the USS Enterprise . Prof. Robert Langdon wrestles with it in Dan Brown’s novel “Angels & Demons.” Even if you’re not a Star Trek or a Dan Brown fan, you’ve probably heard of antimatter. Let’s wonder a bit about this curious part of physics.  

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Recap / Star Trek S1 E27 "The Alternative Factor"

Edit locked.

Original air date: March 30, 1967

Opening shot: a lovely view of Spock's back. Just as he's giving his survey analysis of the uninhabited iron-silica planet the Enterprise is orbiting, everything rocks violently and we get a double exposure image of a nebula. Yeah, get used to this effect, you'll be seeing it a lot. Make a Drinking Game of it if you wanna get hammered. Once everything stops shaking, they realize that the planet is no longer quite so uninhabited.

Kirk, Spock and more Red Shirts than you can shake a stick at beam down to Kirk's Rock to find a crashed Flying Saucer . They also meet Lazarus , who rants about death and destruction as he takes a pratfall off the rock he's standing on.

Lazarus rants about a "monster" that destroyed his civilization that must be destroyed. According to Spock, there is no other life form on this planet. And... overlay of the nebula again.

Lazarus, meanwhile, has enormous mood swings and a scrape on the forehead that seems to disappear and reappear. And that beard goes from thin to thick after every ad break.

The Alternative Tropes:

• Alas, Poor Villain : Despite all the trouble and threat Lazarus caused and posed, a troubled Kirk is left wistfully pondering his bitter fate that will last an eternity. Kirk: "Everything's alright, Mr. Spock, for us." Spock: "There is, of course, no escape for them, sir." Kirk: "There is, of course, no escape. How would it be... trapped forever with a raging madman at your throat... until time itself came to a stop. For eternity. How would it be?" Spock: "Captain... the universe is safe." Kirk: "For you and me. But what of Lazarus? What of Lazarus?"
• Ambiguously Human : Lazarus and his alternate universe counterpart: were they human, or Human Alien? The episode itself seemed confused on this point.
• And I Must Scream : Both versions of Lazarus end up trapped in the same dimension between their universes, with no escape and eternally fighting with each other.
• Antimatter : There are two versions of Lazarus, one made of matter from our universe and one made of antimatter from a parallel universe. If they ever get together in either universe, the results will be disastrous.
• Artistic License – Chemistry : Spock declares the planet they are orbiting has an "oxygen-hydrogen atmosphere". This is extremely unlikely, as oxygen and hydrogen are highly reactive and react rather violently with each other, producing water. Specifically, this is the strongest chemical reaction per weight unit we know about, and we use it in rockets like the Space Shuttle to get satellites and other equipment into space. Very likely Spock wanted to say "oxygen-nitrogen" instead, describing an atmosphere like the one we currently enjoy on earth.
• Artistic License – Physics : Nearly everything anyone says about antimatter. For one thing, matter-antimatter annihilation happens on a much smaller scale than people and antipeople, so antiLazarus should have exploded the first time he encountered any matter, not just the lump of it that happened to be shaped like him. Also, while the resulting explosion would have been quite dramatic in human terms, it would hardly affect anything beyond the planet, let alone threaten the entire universe.
• Ax-Crazy : Lazarus demonstrates himself to be this with the following outburst with regards to Anti-Lazarus: Lazarus: He'll kill us all if we don't kill him first! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!
• Big "NO!" : Lazarus lets out one of these when Kirk vanishes into an antimatter universe.
• Bittersweet Ending : Kirk is able to save both universes from destruction, but in order to do so is forced to condemn both versions of Lazarus to a horrific fate, locked in combat with his other half for all of eternity , a prospect that leaves the Captain perturbed.
• Everything Sensor : The failure of the sensors is sufficient proof that a parallel universe is involved: Spock: Our ship's instruments are specifically designed to locate and identify any object in our universe, be it energy or matter.
• Fighting Across Time and Space : Lazarus and anti-Lazarus are engaged in this (assuming Lazarus is telling the truth about being a time-traveler).
• From a Certain Point of View : Kirk: So you're the terrible thing, the murdering monster... The creature. Anti-Lazarus: Yes, Captain. Or he is. It depends on your point of view, doesn't it?
• Go Mad from the Revelation : Matter!Lazarus goes stark raving mad upon learning of the existence of his Anti-Matter double and becomes hellbent on destroying him, even if it means the destruction of both universes.
• Hell Is War : Matter and Anti-Matter versions of the same man are locked in combat forever in the corridor separating their universes.
• Heroic Sacrifice : Anti-Matter!Lazarus views his eternal struggle with his double to be for the greater good of both universes even if he will never be free from his torment.
• Idiot Ball : Held firmly by Kirk and crew of Enterprise throughout most of the episode. Just when strange phenomenon begins to occur in the universe, they find a not-quite-right-in-his-head stranger who might have something to do with it. They then repeatedly leave this obviously unhinged person with no supervision at all, allowing him to roam freely aboard the Enterprise . They were basically begging for a disaster.
• The Klutz : Lazarus makes Chevy Chase look graceful! He falls a total of three times and several times looks like he's about to fall if weren't for that handy wall.
• Large Ham : Lazarus makes Kirk look subtle. It doesn't help that the actor ( Robert Brown , later from Here Come the Brides ) was a last-minute hire, as the original actor, John Drew Barrymore , failed to show up for work the day filming was to begin.
• Meaningful Name : Lazarus was a man who was resurrected. The two Lazaruses (Lazari?) are forever in a cycle of non-death.
• Never the Selves Shall Meet : Two identical men named Lazarus. One is from our universe and insane. The other is from an anti-matter universe. Apparently, if both meet in the same universe, it destroys both of them.
• Omnicidal Maniac : Matter!Lazarus is so far around the bend that he doesn't care if he and both universes are destroyed, so long as his double goes with him.
• Psychological Projection : Lazarus A accuses Lazarus B of having the dire qualities that A himself has.
• Sealed Evil in a Can : If Lazarus and his insane counterpart from the antimatter dimension were ever to meet in the same universe, that universe would be destroyed. Both of them are sent into an intermediate dimension so that this can never happen, and where the two of them will be locked in combat for all eternity .
• See You in Hell : "Come! Come! It'll do you no good! I'll chase you to the very fires of HELL!!!! "
• Stock Footage : The visual of the iron-silica planet from orbit is reused footage previously representing Alfa 177 in " The Enemy Within " and M-113 in " The Man Trap ".
• Swiss-Cheese Security : Lazarus gives the Enterprise security team the slip several times, allowing him (both of him) to steal the dilithium crystals from Engineering and put his plot into motion.
• Temporary Substitute : Scotty and Sulu are absent. For unknown reasons they were substituted in the roles of engineer and helmsman by Charlene Masters and Leslie, respectively.
• Understatement : Kirk remarks that Lt. Masters has a knack for this when she says that the Enterprise will be at risk without the power of the dilithium crystals.
• Vehicular Sabotage : The Enterprise qualifies as a vehicle, right? In this case, Lazarus swaps a few banana plugs in a control panel to cause an electrical fire that will distract the engineering crew long enough for him to steal the dilithium crystals.
• Star Trek S1 E26 "Errand of Mercy"
• Recap/Star Trek: The Original Series
• Star Trek S1 E28 "The City on the Edge of Forever"

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Antimatter in fiction: Spaceships and bombs

By Roger Highfield

12 May 2009

Leonard Nimoy, as Spock, giving the Vulcan salute. In the fictional universe of Star Trek, the Enterprise is powered by a matter-antimatter reaction

(Image: copyright Paramount / Everett / Rex)

The Angels And Demons cast fret about antimatter bombs: from left, Tom Hanks, Ayelet Zurer, Thure Lindhardt, Ewan McGregor

(Image: copyright Sony Pics / Everett / Rex)

Science fiction

Antimatter provides the energy source that enables the Starship Enterprise to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Intriguingly, there have been serious proposals for antimatter propulsion, based on the huge energy of annihilation.

By one scheme, 10 milligrams – the mass of a grain of rice – would be sufficient to send a manned spaceship to Mars (see the film’s website ).

Angels and Demons

Antimatter plays a starring role in Dan Brown’s novel Angels and Demons , now a Hollywood film.

The plot revolves around the efforts of a secret brotherhood to destroy the Vatican with “a bomb of unstoppable power” based on this mirror-image matter. The leading man, Tom Hanks, recently joked that he would even stick his hand into the CERN particle accelerator to create some antiparticles.

But although CERN has been making antimatter for decades, annihilating every single antiparticle ever made would only give off enough energy to light a single light bulb for a few minutes.

At that rate it would take 10,000 times the age of the universe to accumulate the explosive power of a single large nuclear bomb (see CERN’s FAQ on Angels and Demons and the film’s website ).

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The Alternative Factor (episode)

• View history
• 1.2 Act One
• 1.3 Act Two
• 1.4 Act Three
• 1.5 Act Four
• 2 Log entries
• 3 Memorable quotes
• 4.1 Production timeline
• 4.3 Cast and characters
• 4.4 Sets and props
• 4.5 Costumes and make-up
• 4.6 Effects
• 4.7 Continuity
• 4.8 Reception
• 4.9 Remastered information
• 4.10 Video and DVD releases
• 4.11 Apocrypha
• 5.1 Starring
• 5.2 Also starring
• 5.3 Guest star
• 5.4 Featuring
• 5.6 Uncredited co-stars
• 5.7 Stunt doubles
• 5.8.1 Unreferenced materials
• 5.9 External links

Summary [ ]

In standard orbit around an iron - silica -type uncharted planet , the USS Enterprise prepares to complete its survey, when the starship is violently rocked twice and everything within sensor range suddenly "blinks", almost as if the universe is on the verge of ceasing to exist. And, in the wake of this, a man appears on the surface of the planet, where moments earlier there was no life.

Act One [ ]

Beaming down, Captain Kirk , Spock , and the landing party encounter a man. " You came! Thank the heavens , it's not too late! ", he exclaims. Dirty and disheveled, he falls from a rock. The landing party returns to the Enterprise with him, where Kirk learns more news – the strange phenomenon drained the dilithium crystals almost completely. Still worse, Starfleet Command issues a Code Factor 1 message – invasion status. The effect experienced by the Enterprise was also experienced everywhere in the galaxy , and far beyond. Starfleet withdraws all nearby ships – Commodore Barstow informs Kirk that the Enterprise is the bait.

In his quarters , Kirk talks to his "guest" – a man named Lazarus , who is pursuing a "thing," a monster who destroyed his entire civilization. He informs Kirk that he will stop at nothing to destroy it. Beaming back down to the planet, Kirk learns from Spock that there is no other creature here. Spock, accusing Lazarus of lying, states " I fail to comprehend your indignation, sir. I have simply made the logical deduction that you are a liar. " Kirk demands the truth – and the universe turns inside out once again. The same "winking" phenomenon occurs again. And Lazarus – first he has a bandaged forehead, and then he doesn't, and then he does again.

Act Two [ ]

Strange energy visible on the planet on the viewscreen

Meanwhile, Spock has discovered a source of radiation that is not there – a "rip" in the universe, where regular physical laws do not apply. The key to locating this source seems to be the dilithium crystals – a revelation which excites Lazarus, who demands the impossible: that Kirk give him the crystals.

The captain refuses, but Lazarus overpowers Lieutenant Charlene Masters as well as an engineering officer and steals two dilithium crystals, nevertheless.

Act Three [ ]

In the briefing room , Kirk confronts Lazarus, but he denies it, blaming his monster. And the evidence suggests he isn't the thief, for the crystals are not aboard his ship. In Sick Bay, Kirk confronts Lazarus with his lies, which Lazarus explains away by claiming that he is a time traveler ; his spaceship is actually a "dimensional corridor gateway"and The dead world the Enterprise orbits is the distant future of his destroyed homeworld; the place and time he has traveled to in pursuit of the monster. At Dr. McCoy 's urging, the crew departs Sick Bay to allow Lazarus to rest and recover from his fall. [[ Having relocated to the briefing room to consider all of the known evidence, Kirk and Spock conclude that the strange energy must come from a source outside the universe. A source in another, parallel universe. There are two copies of Lazarus, and they are periodically exchanging places through a kind of door – and if they ever exist in the same universe at the same time, everything, everywhere, will be annihilated in a cataclysmic matter / antimatter explosion.

Meanwhile, the alternative Lazarus creates a diversion by starting a fire in main engineering, steals the ship's energy crystals, then beams down. Kirk pursues. As he attempts to enter Lazarus' spaceship, he vanishes, hurled through the corridor into the other universe.

Act Four [ ]

Lazarus-A timeship; Lazarus-B timeship was identical except that the dome on top had been taken off

Once there, Kirk meets the other but sane Lazarus-B, and learns the truth. Lazarus-B's people discovered how to pass through the negative magnetic corridor that both connects and protects the two universes. When this happened, Lazarus-A couldn't bear the knowledge that he had a duplicate, and resolved to destroy his opposite. He is mad and doesn't care if this causes the destruction of two universes. Lazarus-B and Kirk realize he must be stopped: if Kirk can force Lazarus-A into the corridor, Lazarus-B can hold him there, and Kirk can destroy his spaceship – which will also destroy Lazarus-B's spaceship. Access to the corridor will be sealed forever and both universes will be safe, but the men named Lazarus will be at each others' throats for the remainder of eternity. Kirk goes back through the corridor and fights in hand-to-hand combat forcibly throwing Lazarus-A into the "dimensional door." Kirk then has the crystals removed from the timeship and heads back to the Enterprise , ordering Lieutenant Leslie to bring the ship's phasers to target the inter-dimensional ship. The two Lazaruses meet once more and fight as phaser beams vaporize the ship, sealing the two for all of eternity, caught together, between universes. Kirk ruminates on the fact that the two Lazarus are going to be at each other's throats for all time and wonders how it would be. Spock reminds Kirk that the universe[s] are now safe. " For you and me. But, what of Lazarus? What of Lazarus? "

Log entries [ ]

• Captain's log, USS Enterprise (NCC-1701), 2267

Memorable quotes [ ]

" I want facts, not poetry. "

" He's death! Anti-life! He lives to destroy! "

" I told you, it was the thing! All white, black and empty. A terrible emptiness. " " Let's get back to the ship. " " He'll kill us all if we don't kill him first! Kill! Kill! Kill!! Kill!! Kill!!! "

" Are you deaf as well as blind?! "

" I fail to comprehend your indignation, sir. I've simply made the logical deduction that you are a liar. "

" Sometimes pain can drive a man harder than pleasure. "

" Jim, madness has no purpose or reason. But it may have a goal. "

" If they meet. " " Annihilation, Jim. Total, complete, absolute annihilation. "

" So you're the terrible thing? The murdering monster? The creature? " " Yes, captain. Or he is. It depends on your point of view, doesn't it? "

" You'll be trapped inside that corridor with him forever. At each other's throats throughout time. " " Is it such a large price to pay for the safety of two universes? "

" Captain, the universe is safe. " " For you and me. But what of Lazarus? What of Lazarus? "

Background information [ ]

Production timeline [ ].

• Story outline by Don Ingalls : 29 August 1966
• Revised story outline: 12 September 1966
• Second revised story outline: 14 September 1966
• First draft teleplay by Ingalls: 14 October 1966
• Second draft teleplay: 7 November 1966
• Final draft teleplay by Gene L. Coon or Steven W. Carabatsos : 11 November 1966
• Revised final draft teleplay by Coon: 14 November 1966
• Additional revisions: 15 November 1966 , 16 November 1966 , 18 November 1966
• Day 1 – 16 November 1966 , Wednesday – Desilu Stage 9 : Int. Bridge
• Day 2 – 17 November 1966 , Thursday – Desilu Stage 9 : Int. Bridge , Sickbay , Transporter room
• Day 3 – 18 November 1966 , Friday – Desilu Stage 9 : Int. Bridge , Corridors
• Day 4 – 21 November 1966 , Monday – Desilu Stage 9 : Int. Dilithium recharging section , Recreation room (redress of Briefing room ), Sickbay
• Day 5 – 22 November 1966 , Tuesday – Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park : Ext. Planet surface
• Day 6 – 23 November 1966 , Wednesday – Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park : Ext. Planet surface
• Day 7 – 25 November 1966 , Friday – Desilu Stage 10 : Ext. Planet surface , "Transdimensional limbo"
• Original broadcast date: 30 March 1967 , postponed from 2 February 1967
• First UK airdate (on BBC1 ): 8 December 1971
• First UK airdate (on ITV ): 7 March 1982
• Remastered airdate: 1 December 2007
• The original script called for a romantic entanglement between Charlene Masters and Lazarus that was eventually cut due to Roddenberry considering it too similar to the romance between Khan and McGivers in " Space Seed ". As stated by Roddenberry in a Season One memo: " In both 'Space Seed' and this story, we have a crew woman madly in love with a brawny guest star and flipping our whole gang into a real mess because she is in love… do they have to do [this] in two of our scripts? " [1]
• There is no officer played by Larry Riddle as noted among the cast for this episode in the Star Trek Concordance (1st Titan edition, p. 28). Lieutenant Larry Riddle was Charlene Masters' jealous boyfriend in the first draft of the script. [2]

Cast and characters [ ]

The navigator and Leslie

• James Doohan ( Scott ) and George Takei ( Sulu ) do not appear in this episode. The absence of Scotty has been remarked in several commentaries as being highly unusual, given the extensive exposure in the episode of engineering matters, such as the theft of Dilithium crystals, as well as Lazarus sneaking about engineering and attacking various engineering crew members. (Cushman, Marc, "These are the Voyages", Jacob Brown Press, 2013)
• Curiously, in spite of a higher ranking officer serving as the navigator, this was the second episode that Leslie was seen in the command chair, and the first episode in which Eddie Paskey is credited in the ending credits, albeit misspelled as "Lesley".
• Richard Derr , who plays Commodore Barstow in this episode, later played Admiral Fitzgerald in the episode " The Mark of Gideon ".
• Actor John Drew Barrymore (father of actress Drew Barrymore ) was originally contracted to play Lazarus. Barrymore was scheduled to begin filming on the second day of production, 17 November 1966 , however, the previous afternoon he sent word to the studio that he will refuse to show up to work. Barrymore's replacement, Robert Brown , on the recommendation of his friend, William Shatner , was contacted the same night, literally dragged to the studio and offered the job on the spot, starting the next morning. He recounted the filming to be very tight and tense. ( These Are the Voyages: TOS Season One 1st ed., pp. 415-416)
• The Star Trek production team filed a grievance against Barrymore at the Screen Actors' Guild, which led to him being unable to obtain acting work for six months in 1967. ( Inside Star Trek: The Real Story , pp. 201-202; These Are the Voyages: TOS Season One 1st ed., pp. 415-416, 420)

Sets and props [ ]

• Along with " Friday's Child ", this is one of the only two episodes where outdoor planet scenes were filmed both on Desilu Stage 10 and on location (both times at Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park ). Originally, all planet-side scenes were scheduled to be filmed on location, but due to the turmoil during production, director Gerd Oswald couldn't finish shooting at Vasquez. Matt Jefferies and the art department prepared a spot on Stage 10 which could accommodate the missing "alternate universe" sequence. ( These Are the Voyages: TOS Season One , 1st ed., p. 418)

New "recharging section" of Engineering

• This episode introduces a new set, a small subsection of engineering, described in the final draft of the script, dated 11 November 1966 , as the "Lithium [sic] Crystal Recharging Section", which was described as " A portion of Engineering where there are bins into which dilithium crystals are placed for recharging. " Part of the dilithium energizer panel in the set used the same controls as the neural neutralizer from " Dagger of the Mind ".
• Although Lazarus's spacecraft resembles a flying saucer, James Blish describes it as "cone-shaped" in his novelization of the episode in Star Trek 10 .
• The dome of Lazarus' time ship was later reused to encase the Providers in " The Gamesters of Triskelion ".

Costumes and make-up [ ]

• Periodically throughout the episode, the two versions of Lazarus exchange places. One of them has a wound or bandage on his head which McCoy treated: this is the "insane" Lazarus from our universe; the other is his rational counterpart from the antimatter universe.
• Although Masters is referred to as a lieutenant and works in engineering, she wears a blue uniform of the sciences section, and it has no rank stripes, which normally denotes the rank of Ensign.
• Lazarus' costume was later worn by an extra playing a Babel Conference delegate in " Journey to Babel ".

Effects [ ]

The word "SCRIPT" is misspelled

• The visual of the iron-silica planet from orbit is reused footage previously representing Alfa 177 in " The Enemy Within " and M-113 in " The Man Trap ". This planet effect was reused again as Argus X in " Obsession " and Ardana in " The Cloud Minders ".
• The footage of the two Lazaruses fighting was created by filming two stuntmen fighting in a smoke-filled room with orange and purple walls, then double-exposing its color negative footage over an astronomical photograph of the Trifid Nebula . ( citation needed • edit ) By actual count Lazarus changes between the universes about eight times.
• In the closing credits of the show, the title billing for Script Supervisor is misspelled "SCPIPT SUPERVISOR".
• Unique to the original series are the angle of the Enterprise as it fires its phasers to destroy Lazarus's ship, as well as the use of a single phaser beam and the lack of a sound effect when the beam is viewed from space.

Continuity [ ]

• In the opening scene Spock describes the planet as having an " oxygen-hydrogen atmosphere ". Such an atmosphere is practically impossible since a single spark would ignite it, perhaps even explosively.
• This is the first time that live two-way communication with Starfleet Command is depicted. In previous episodes, communication with Starfleet Command was through delayed radio messages.
• Depending on which version of this episode you watch, the closing stills change. The original syndicated version and the VHS version show the still as the Enterprise leaving the Earth-like planet from " Miri ", however, the Sci-fi Channel and DVD version show the still as just a blue planet, possibly Rigel 12 from " Mudd's Women " or Starbase 11 from " Court Martial ".

Reception [ ]

• The Agony Booth website included this episode among "The Worst of Trek ". In their recap, they write that in the episode, " very little actually happens, and what little that does comes about only because Kirk and Company are written to act in such a way that can only be described as severely brain damaged. " The reviewer continues, " I never thought I'd say this, but this episode is making " Spock's Brain " look pretty goddamn good right about now! " He concludes, " this is one of the most poorly constructed fifty minutes I've ever seen. An almost impossibly incoherent script, a damp squib of a finale, and some horrible editing make this one of the true stinkers in the Trek universe. " Also, he mentions that " [John Drew] Barrymore didn't show up for filming. Given the script, I can't say I blame the fellow. The rest of the cast should have done the same thing, to be perfectly frank. " [3]

Remastered information [ ]

"The Alternative Factor" was the forty-ninth episode of the remastered version of The Original Series to air. It premiered in syndication on the weekend of 1 December 2007 and aside from the standard CGI replacement footage of the Enterprise and the planet-of-the-week, this episode also featured several new, modest effects shots of the alternative warp effect, as well as phaser and transporter effects.

Video and DVD releases [ ]

• Original US Betamax release: 1985
• UK VHS release (two-episode tapes, CIC Video ): Volume 11 , catalog number VHR 2295, release date unknown
• US VHS release: 15 April 1994
• UK re-release (three-episode tapes, CIC Video): Volume 1.7, 4 November 1996
• Original US DVD release (single-disc): Volume 10, 21 March 2000
• As part of the TOS Season 1 DVD collection
• As part of the TOS Season 1 HD DVD collection
• As part of the Star Trek: Fan Collective - Alternate Realities collection
• As part of the TOS Season 1 Blu-ray collection

Apocrypha [ ]

• A cat version of "The Alternative Factor" was featured in Jenny Parks ' 2017 book Star Trek Cats .

Links and references [ ]

Starring [ ].

• William Shatner as Capt. Kirk

Also starring [ ]

• Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock

Guest star [ ]

• Robert Brown as Lazarus / anti-Lazarus

Featuring [ ]

• DeForest Kelley as Dr. McCoy
• Janet MacLachlan as Charlene Masters
• Nichelle Nichols as Uhura
• Richard Derr as Barstow
• Arch Whiting as Assistant Engineer
• Christian Patrick as Transporter Chief
• Eddie Paskey as Lesley [sic]

Uncredited co-stars [ ]

• William Blackburn as Hadley
• Vince Cadiente as security lieutenant/technician
• Frank da Vinci as Brent
• Carey Foster as sciences crew woman
• Tom Lupo as security guard
• Ron Veto as Harrison
• Command crewman
• Command crew woman
• Crew woman 1
• Crew woman 2
• Helmsman lieutenant
• Lieutenant 1
• Lieutenant 2
• Navigator lieutenant commander
• Sciences lieutenant

Stunt doubles [ ]

• Bill Catching as stunt double #2 for Robert Brown
• Gary Combs as stunt double for William Shatner
• Al Wyatt as stunt double #1 for Robert Brown

References [ ]

abrasion ; accusation ; all hands ; " all right "; alternative ; alternative warp ; analysis ; annihilation ; answer ; antimatter ; antimatter universe (aka minus universe ; negative universe ) assistant ; " at a loss for words "; " a thing "; atmosphere ; bait ; bandage ; battle stations ; being ; black ; blindness ; body temperature ; " Bones "; bruise ; bull ; captivity ; cartographic section ; censure ; civilization ; Code Factor 1 ; coffee ; commodore ; computer bank ; computer report ; constitution ; container ; contact ; country doctor ; course ; creature ; danger ; deaf ; death ; devil ; dilithium (aka dilithium crystal ); dimension ; dinosaur ; dizziness ; door ; double-talk ; drill ; Earth ; effect ; electrical impulses ; emptiness ; enemy ; energizer / energizing circuits ; energy ; eternity ; evidence ; existence ; experimentation chamber ; explosives ; face ; fact ; Fahrenheit ; fire ; footprint ; forehead ; formula ; freedom ; general alert ; " get to the point "; gravimetric field ; gravity ; guest ; head ; heart ; heaven ; Hell ; hole ; hour ; Human ( Human being ); humor ; hydrogen ; idea ; inch ; indignation ; information ; invasion ; iron ; joke ; justice ; key ; Lazarus' planet ; Lazarus' planet system ; Lazarus' spaceship ; liar ; lie ; life object ; life survey ; living being ; living creature ; location ; logic ; " lost his mind "; madman ; madness ; magnetic communication satellite ; magnetic effect ; magnetic field ; main screen ; mass ; matter ; matter universe (aka positive universe ) medic ; mental state ; Milky Way Galaxy ; mind ; minute ; miracle worker ; mission ; monster (aka beast ); movement ; muscleman ; negative magnetic corridor ; " not hold water "; object ; " of course "; orbit ; ounce ; " out of the question "; oxygen ; pain ; parallel universe ; paranoia ; parsec ; patient ; phaser bank ; phenomenon ; photographic section ; physical law ; physical makeup ; physical warp ; pleasure ; poetry ; powder keg ; power ; priority one ; prison ; pulsation phenomenon ; quadrant ; question ; radiation ; range ; rationality ; recuperative powers ; red 2 message ; report ; riddle ; rip in the universe ; rock ; safety valve ; screening ; search ; search party ; second ; section ; security red ; security team (aka security detail ); self-preservation ; sense of humor ; sensor ; ship's physician ; silica ; space ; spaceship ; speculation ; " stand by "; Starbase 200 ; Starfleet Command ; " strong as a bull "; surface ; terrain ; thing ; threat ; throat ; time chamber ; time ship ; time traveler ; trick ; truth ; understatement ; unit ; universe ; vengeance ; visual section 988-TG ; water ; weapon ; white ; word ; wound ; year ; zero gravity

Unreferenced materials [ ]

biological lab ; chemoscientist ; Riddle, Larry ; rose

External links [ ]

• "The Alternative Factor" at StarTrek.com
• " The Alternative Factor " at Memory Beta , the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
• " The Alternative Factor " at Wikipedia
• [4] "The Alternative Factor" at IMDB.com
• " The Alternative Factor " at MissionLogPodcast.com , a Roddenberry Star Trek podcast
• " The Alternative Factor " at the Internet Movie Database
• 2 ISS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

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Arts & Sciences

Down goes antimatter! Gravity’s effect on matter’s elusive twin is revealed

Marquette’s Tim Tharp part of landmark CERN experiment which answers longstanding question of whether antimatter and matter are gravitationally attracted or repelled

• By Jason Stoughton | National Science Foundation
• September 27, 2023
• 5 min. read

If you dropped some antimatter, would it fall down or up? Scientists now know the definitive answer: down. That is, if you can somehow prevent it from exploding into pure energy long enough to see where it goes.

A scientific paper describing the landmark experiment behind that conclusion is published today in the journal Nature and comes from the international Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) collaboration at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. The ALPHA collaboration’s unique, painstaking experiment has answered the longstanding fundamental question about whether antimatter is gravitationally attracted or repelled by regular matter by observing the downward path taken by individual atoms of antihydrogen. Their work also provides a key piece in one of the most immense unsolved puzzles in science — why is there so little antimatter in the observable universe?

CERN’s ALPHA collaboration is supported by more than a dozen countries and private institutions, including the U.S. through the joint U.S. National Science Foundation/Department of Energy Partnership in Basic Plasma Science and Engineering program. 

“Einstein’s theory of general relativity says antimatter should behave exactly the same as matter,” says University of California, Berkeley, plasma physicist and ALPHA collaboration member Jonathan Wurtele. “Many indirect measurements indicate that gravity interacts with antimatter as expected, but until the result today, nobody had actually performed a direct observation that could rule out, for example, antihydrogen moving upwards as opposed to downwards in a gravitational field.”

Matter’s elusive, volatile twin

Beyond the imagined antimatter-fueled warp drives and photon torpedoes of “Star Trek,” antimatter is completely real yet mysteriously scarce. Our bodies, the Earth and most everything else scientists know about in the universe are overwhelmingly made of what scientists call baryonic matter. That’s the stuff made mostly of regular protons and neutrons, like oxygen, carbon, iron and other familiar elements on the periodic table.

Antimatter, on the other hand, is regular matter’s twin — except that it has some opposite properties depending on the particular type of particle. For example, antiprotons have a negative charge while protons have a positive charge. Similarly, antielectrons (also known as positrons) are positive.

Antimatter also has another property that makes it uniquely challenging to work with:

“As soon as antimatter touches matter, it blows up,” says ALPHA collaboration member and UC Berkeley plasma physicist Joel Fajans. The combined mass of the matter and antimatter is transformed entirely into energy in a reaction so energetic that “explosion” doesn’t do it justice.

Scientists call it an “annihilation.”

“For a given mass, such annihilations are the densest form of energy release that we know of,” says Fajans.

But not to worry. The amount of antimatter used in the ALPHA experiment is so small that the energy created by antimatter/matter annihilations is imperceptible to humans. Instead, highly sensitive detectors must be used.  “Still, we have to manipulate the antimatter very carefully or we will lose it,” says Fajans.

Dropping an antimatter banger

Nearly two decades in the making, the sprawling ALPHA experiment resides in a building labeled “Antimatter Factory” outside Geneva, where antihydrogen is created from scratch by combining antiprotons and positrons in a labyrinthine process. The antiprotons are created and provided to the ALPHA experiment by the CERN particle accelerator complex. The positrons are acquired from an artificial radioactive isotope of sodium which emits them. Both antiparticles are cooled to near room temperature and form plasmas, the fourth state of matter (solid, liquid and gas are the other three).

The antiproton and positron plasmas are then routed into a vertical chamber called ALPHA-g where the gravity experiment will eventually be performed.

“The vast majority of the experimental time is spent doing plasma manipulations to get these antiparticle plasmas into the shape and temperature that we need them to be,” says Fajans. “We have to cool them to about 10 degrees Kelvin — that’s 10 degrees above absolute zero — and we must form them into needle-like shapes.” 

“Plasmas are normally the hottest form of matter,” explains Wurtele. “But we need to cool them to temperatures where almost everything would typically be solid or liquid.”

Once the proper conditions are attained, the plasmas are mixed together with exacting precision inside the ALPHA-g chamber to create the precious antihydrogen atoms.

“Broadly speaking, we’re making antimatter and we’re doing a Leaning Tower of Pisa kind of experiment,” says Wurtele, referring to ALPHA-g’s somewhat simpler intellectual ancestor: Galileo’s legendary (and perhaps apocryphal) 16th century experiment demonstrating identical gravitational acceleration of two simultaneously dropped objects of similar volume but different mass.

“We’re letting the antimatter go, and we’re seeing if it goes up or down.”

The antihydrogen is contained within ALPHA-g’s cylindrical vacuum chamber using a variable magnetic trap, which prevents the antimatter from touching the walls of the chamber and annihilating. The scientists reduce the strength of the trap’s top and bottom magnetic fields until the antihydrogen atoms can escape and the relatively weak influence of gravity becomes apparent. As each antihydrogen atom escapes the magnetic trap, it touches the chamber walls either above or below the trap and annihilates, which the scientists can detect and count.

The researchers repeated the experiment more than a dozen times, each time varying the magnetic field strength of the top and bottom of the trap to rule out possible errors. They observed that when the weakened magnetic fields were precisely balanced at the top and bottom, about 80% of the antihydrogen atoms annihilated beneath the trap — a result consistent with how a cloud of regular hydrogen would behave under the same conditions.

Thus, gravity was causing the antihydrogen to fall down.

“Previously, there have been many indirect observations that strongly suggest that antimatter gravitates normally,” says Fajans. “But none of those observations were as incontrovertible as following the trajectories of antimatter under the influence of gravity; they all relied on much more subtle phenomena.”

The matter/antimatter mystery

As you’ve probably noticed, there are not antimatter people walking around and annihilating in colossal explosions. In fact, despite some very modest sources of antimatter — like naturally occurring positrons emitted from potassium, including inside bananas — we don’t see much antimatter anywhere in the universe. That is counter to the laws of physics which predict that antimatter should exist in roughly equal measure with regular matter.

“For the most part, we live in a universe of matter. And one big question is ‘why?’,” says Tim Tharp, an ALPHA collaboration member and plasma physicist at Marquette University. “There isn’t a lot of antimatter around, and we don’t really understand why the universe developed this preference.”

Scientists call this conundrum the baryogenesis problem. One potential explanation for the scarcity of antimatter is that it was gravitationally repelled by regular matter during the big bang, causing it to shoot off to some distant part of the universe that we can’t see. That theory no longer seems plausible.

“We’ve ruled out antimatter being repelled by the gravitational force as opposed to attracted,” says Wurtele. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a difference in the gravitational force on antimatter that has not yet been measured, he says. The force of gravity on antimatter may be weaker or stronger than regular matter, which requires a more precise measurement to determine.

“The success of the ALPHA collaboration is a testament to the importance of teamwork across continents and scientific communities,” says Vyacheslav “Slava” Lukin, a program director in NSF’s Division of Physics. “Understanding the nature of antimatter can help us not only understand how our universe came to be but can enable new innovations never before thought possible — like positron emission tomography scans which have saved many lives by applying our knowledge of antimatter to detect cancerous tumors in the body.”

The ALPHA collaboration researchers will continue to probe the nature of antihydrogen in search of some contrarian aspect. In addition to refining their measurement of the effect of gravity, they are also studying how antihydrogen interacts with electromagnetic radiation through spectroscopy.

“If antihydrogen were somehow different from hydrogen, that would be a revolutionary thing because the physical laws, both in quantum mechanics and gravity, say the behavior should be the same,” says Wurtele.

“However, one doesn’t know until one does the experiment.”

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Gravity test: Antimatter falls down, but where did it all go?

From Star Trek to PET scans, antimatter has thrilled and worried humankind. Now, scientists have resolved a key mystery.

One of the great mysteries of physics has been solved: How does antimatter … fall?

It’s not a question that keeps most people awake at night, but some physicists have been waiting for its answer for years.

Keep reading

‘first time’: wild orangutan performs self-medication, china trying to develop world ‘built on censorship and surveillance’, why does nasa want a time zone on the moon, could shipping containers be the answer to ghana’s housing crisis.

Scientists at CERN, the world’s largest particle accelerator in Switzerland , announced Wednesday that a pathbreaking experiment had confirmed that antimatter falls down with gravity — just like everything else. But that only leaves scientists asking more questions about this curious material.

What is antimatter?

In Star Trek, antimatter powered the warp drive of the Starship Enterprise into the 23rd century (and was used in a few of its torpedoes). It’s a tantalising premise, based on a real phenomenon.

In 1928, British mathematician Paul Dirac saw antimatter in a math equation. He was working out parts of quantum mechanics when he realised that an electron – one of the fundamental particles of the universe – could be its own opposite.

In other words, there could be negative electrons (matter) and positive electrons – or positrons (antimatter). In fact, it wasn’t just the possibility: Dirac concluded that antimatter had to be there. The math was clear, even if the particle had not yet been observed. (The Dirac equation is engraved on his tomb)

Until it was, just two years later, when antimatter was discovered in nature in the trails of cosmic rays sensed during a balloon mission. It’s been studied ever since.

Today, doctors use antiparticles in medicine: in PET-scan machines that look through our skin for cancers or heart function. These produce a part of antimatter – the P stands for Positron – but not the whole anti-atom.

It’s not a bad thing that whole anti-atoms can’t be found, because when antimatter meets normal matter – the stuff that makes us and the world around us – the two explode with the most powerful energy release scientists know of. The explosion is so packed with energy that NASA studied using antimatter and matter explosions to power starships to cover enormous distances (the designs remain purely theoretical).

Missing in nature

But it’s the lack of antimatter that remains one of the great unresolved mysteries in physics: If the standard model of physics is correct, the same amount of antimatter as matter should have appeared in those first hot moments after the Big Bang.

The two opposites, if created in equal measure, would have collided, annihilating one another almost instantly, leaving nothing but a white sky full of bristling energy, and no leftover matter at all.

Yet here we are, 14 billion years later, made of matter. Since Dirac, physicists have been scratching their heads, wondering where the antimatter went, or had it ever been there to begin with?

But there is some antimatter right here on Earth: It’s been made, in infinitesimally tiny samples at incredible expense, at CERN. For over a decade, scientists there have been assembling antimatter “atoms” piece by piece and trapping them in hi-tech magnetic bottles.

They want to know how they work, why they aren’t found in nature, and why the universe seems to have “chosen” the matter we’re familiar with.

But mostly, they wanted to drop it, to see if it fell upwards. Because if it did, it would have thrown physics into a total crisis. Gravity would have had a loophole.

The gravity test

Knowing how objects fall has always fascinated scientists because it’s how humans can see a fundamental and invisible law of nature at play.

The ALPHA  experiment at CERN has made just a tiny amount, a hundred-millionths of a gram of antihydrogen, so physicists could perform basic experiments on it. They used CERN’s famous particle accelerator to generate antiprotons. They used radioactive isotopes to produce positrons, similar to how they are made for PET scans.

Then, they learned how to combine them into antimatter “atoms”, trap those in magnetic fields, slow them down, hold them so they wouldn’t annihilate at the edges of their containers, and finally stand those containers upright, rather than horizontally, to test how they react to gravity. Each of these steps took years, new calculations, steady funding, and ingenious engineering solutions.

“We want to test that every property that we know that matter has, antimatter has, or maybe not,” Rebecca Suarez, an experimental physicist at Uppsala University in Sweden who was not involved in the project, explained. “Because any small details there could explain what happened with antimatter.”

Most physicists assumed antimatter would not ‘fall’ upward, but they couldn’t say so until it was proven.

Patrice Perez, spokesperson of an antimatter experiment at CERN called GBAR, tried to summarise the problem in an interview with Al Jazeera in July. If antimatter fell upwards, opposite to gravity, he said, “one of the cornerstones of [Albert Einstein’s theory of] general relativity would be wrong, the equivalence principle [which says] if you drop any object on earth, it should fall at the same rate.”

“If we would find something different, it would be a complete revolution. We would not know what to do… It would mean we don’t understand physics, we don’t understand nature at all.”

Perez has worked on experiments to capture and stabilise antimatter for decades in staid and serious physics labs, but the question of whether it could fall upward, or whether it could be fuel for spaceships, made him laugh.

In short, he said about antigravity falling up, “nobody believes this”.

After almost two decades of work, the scientists leading the experiment tipped a few dozen antimatter “atoms” into a hi-tech vertical tube to test the question.

The result?  It fell, downward towards the centre of the earth, just like a ball.

Jeffrey Hangst is a physicist and spokesperson for the ALPHA experiment.  Announcing the result , he held two apples, one red for matter, the other black for antimatter, as a visual aid (the black apple was not made of antimatter; if it were, the explosion in his hand would have destroyed part of Switzerland and France).

“So far as we can tell, they fall in the same way as regular matter,” he said happily.

Physics has been saved from crisis — for now. Physicists can get back to the drawing boards, to plumb the mysteries of the universe and keep asking why it didn’t make any antimatter.

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Entry updated 16 January 2023. Tagged: Theme.

The concept in Physics that forms of matter may exist composed of antiparticles, opposite in all quantum properties to the particles which compose ordinary matter, has a special appeal to sf writers. The idea itself was first formulated by the physicist Paul Dirac (1902-1984) in 1930; the confirmation of the existence of such particles soon followed, with the discovery of the positron (antielectron) in 1932. However, although antiparticles have for many years been routinely created in the laboratory, this has never been done in sufficient quantity to form what we would think of as antimatter. The Tevatron at Fermilab, generating some 70,000,000,000 antiprotons every hour, would require a billion or so years to accumulate a single gram of anti-hydrogen. Aside from isolated particles (low-energy antiprotons have been detected in high-altitude balloon experiments), there may be little or no natural antimatter anywhere in the universe. Antimatter cannot easily exist in our world, since it would combine explosively with conventional matter, mutually annihilating 100% of both forms of matter to create energy – a point basic to the plot of Paul Davies 's Fireball ( 1987 ).

Antimatter would make a fine power source if only we knew how to manufacture and store it in quantity: no problem it seems for Scotty, the engineer in Star Trek ( 1966-1969 ), since the starship Enterprise is fuelled by it. Star Trek 's handwaving explanation is that the imaginary Element or mineral dilithium (see Unobtainium ) can safely contain antimatter and matter/antimatter reactions. Although various real-world engineering solutions have been proposed for antimatter storage, usually involving magnetic traps or bottles, its manufacture by creating and assembling antiparticles would be unbelievably laborious and energy-intensive. The traditional sf approach is to assume that natural antimatter can be found and exploited somewhere out in space.

A pioneering view of antimatter's potential usefulness as a Power Source – the most efficient possible form of Nuclear Energy – appears in Jack Williamson 's Seetee stories, opening with "Collision Orbit" (July 1942 Astounding ) as by Will Stewart. This and its follow-ups became Seetee Ship (July and November 1942, January-February 1943 Astounding as by Will Stewart; 1951 ) and the sequel Seetee Shock (February-April 1949 Astounding as by Will Stewart; 1950 ). "Seetee" is a phonetic rendering of "CT", short for ContraTerrene matter, a term for antimatter proposed by US physicist Vladimir Rojansky (1900-1981) in 1935 and broadcast to sf readers in the essay "Inside Out Matter" (December 1941 Astounding ) by Robert S Richardson (see Philip Latham ). In the Seetee books, antimatter fragments abound in the Asteroid belt – a possibility suggested by Rojansky in 1940 and passed to Williamson by John W Campbell Jr – and the ultimate solution to storage and manipulation problems is to posit Antigravity fields.

Antimatter Aliens from an antimatter world also feature in the back-story of Williamson 's Seetee Ship , as constructors of the title's ancient Spaceship ; further "natural" antimatter creatures are found in Colin Kapp 's "The Pen and the Dark" (in New Writings in SF 8 , anth 1966 , ed John Carnell ).

Larry Niven 's sf puzzle story "Flatlander" (March 1967 If ) centres on an intruding antimatter planet from outside our galaxy, scoured to billiard-ball smoothness by destructive interaction with normal-matter interstellar dust: Niven subsequently noted that a Stasis Field – already a given of his Known Space sequence – would permit a landing on this inimical world. In Firstborn ( 2007 ), Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter posit the "mining" of naturally created antiparticles from the high-energy magnetic flux tube which is known to exist between Jupiter to its moon Io, carrying an electric current of some five million amperes.

The vast expense and timescale of manufacturing antimatter by known means is quietly glossed over in Donald Kingsbury 's The Moon Goddess and the Son (December 1979 Analog ; exp 1986 ), in which a deus ex machina ABM system fuelled by anti-hydrogen is deployed from low Earth orbit to avert World War Three ; but is accepted as necessary for the ultra-lightweight interstellar probe in Greg Bear 's Queen of Angels ( 1990 ). In the Culture sequence by Iain M Banks , energy is effectively free and it is thus plausible that antimatter should be created for the Weapons of large-scale destruction used in Consider Phlebas ( 1987 ). One military or terrorist attraction of antimatter is that the enormous energy release upon annihilation allows extremely compact armaments – as highlighted in Alastair Reynolds 's Revelation Space ( 2000 ), where a Suicide bomb of two-kiloton explosive yield is concealed within a prosthetic eyeball. Both uses of antimatter are combined in the space-to-space missiles of The Praxis ( 2002 ) by Walter Jon Williams , whose payload of anti-hydrogen doubles as propellant and warhead.

The Physics analogy that antimatter is (in certain senses) a mirror image of normal matter suggests that it could be created by crafty rotation of objects through higher Dimensions , as discussed by Martin Gardner in his nonfiction The Ambidextrous Universe ( 1964 ; exp 1979 ; rev 1982 ). A lively novel making good use of this idea is The Ring of Ritornel ( 1968 ) by Charles L Harness , in which sending normal matter around a "Mobius-Klein circuit" inverts it into antimatter. It is noted in Roger Zelazny 's Doorways in the Sand ( 1976 ) that the book's topological inverter ("Rhennius machine") would be dangerously capable of generating antimatter if not prevented by safety features from functioning at the subatomic-particle level. Such inversion of matter is the mainspring of an Alien booby-trap in Greg Bear 's Anvil of Stars ( 1992 ): manned probes are converted to antimatter and will detonate disastrously should they dock again with their mother ship. This suggests a source for the matched matter and antimatter projectiles used to destroy Earth in Bear's related novel The Forge of God ( 1987 ). Antimatter spaceship-fuel is created by a form of Matter Transmission in Blindsight ( 2006 ) by Peter Watts , the premise being that only information is actually transmitted for reconstruction by the receiver: send the physical specifications of antimatter, and antimatter is received.

Some authors have deployed Imaginary Science versions of antimatter. E E Smith 's "negasphere" weapon in Gray Lensman (October 1939-January 1940 Astounding ; 1951 ) supposedly has negative mass, and its annihilation with normal matter generates only invisible (though lethal) radiation without the expected cataclysmic release of heat and light. A realistically violent "contraterrene" bomb in Colin Kapp 's Transfinite Man (November 1963-January 1964 New Worlds as "The Dark Mind"; 1964 ; vt The Dark Mind 1965 ) arrives deep-frozen and is unrealistically inert until it defrosts. Likewise, in the Alternate Cosmos of Stephen Baxter 's Anti-Ice ( 1993 ), the eponymous antimatter-like substance remains inactive while sufficiently chilled. Perhaps the oddest sf (mis)use of antimatter appears in Cordwainer Smith 's "Under Old Earth" (February 1966 Galaxy ), where "congohelium" – supposedly a magnetically stabilized matter/antimatter grid – is employed to make Music .

Antimatter galaxies, or even an entire antimatter universe created in the Big Bang at the same time as our matter universe, have been postulated by physicists, with the enthusiastic support of the sf community. A E van Vogt was one of the first to use this idea, which has since become a Cliché of pulp sf. James Blish 's A Clash of Cymbals ( 1959 ) climaxes with ultimate Holocaust as an anti-universe impinges upon our own. The concept is dealt with more sophisticatedly in Ian Watson 's The Jonah Kit ( 1975 ). [DRL/PN]

see also: Positronic Robots ; Scientific Errors ; Space Warp ; Tachyons .

• "Antimatter's Science Fiction Debut" by William S Higgins

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Down goes antimatter! Gravity's effect on matter's elusive twin is revealed

Landmark CERN experiment answers longstanding question of whether antimatter and matter are gravitationally attracted or repelled

If you dropped some antimatter, would it fall down or up? Scientists now know the definitive answer: down. That is, if you can somehow prevent it from exploding into pure energy long enough to see where it goes.

A scientific paper describing the landmark experiment behind that conclusion is published today in the journal  Nature and comes from the international Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) collaboration at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. The ALPHA collaboration's unique, painstaking experiment has answered the longstanding fundamental question about whether antimatter is gravitationally attracted or repelled by regular matter by observing the downward path taken by individual atoms of antihydrogen. Their work also provides a key piece in one of the most immense unsolved puzzles in science — why is there so little antimatter in the observable universe?

CERN's ALPHA collaboration is supported by more than a dozen countries and private institutions, including the U.S. through the joint U.S. National Science Foundation/Department of Energy Partnership in Basic Plasma Science and Engineering program.

"Einstein's theory of general relativity says antimatter should behave exactly the same as matter," says University of California, Berkeley, plasma physicist and ALPHA collaboration member Jonathan Wurtele. "Many indirect measurements indicate that gravity interacts with antimatter as expected, but until the result today, nobody had actually performed a direct observation that could rule out, for example, antihydrogen moving upwards as opposed to downwards in a gravitational field."

Matter's elusive, volatile twin

Beyond the imagined antimatter-fueled warp drives and photon torpedoes of "Star Trek," antimatter is completely real yet mysteriously scarce. Our bodies, the Earth and most everything else scientists know about in the universe are overwhelmingly made of what scientists call baryonic matter. That's the stuff made mostly of regular protons and neutrons, like oxygen, carbon, iron and other familiar elements on the periodic table.

Antimatter, on the other hand, is regular matter's twin — except that it has some opposite properties depending on the particular type of particle. For example, antiprotons have a negative charge while protons have a positive charge. Similarly, antielectrons (also known as positrons) are positive.

Antimatter also has another property that makes it uniquely challenging to work with:

"As soon as antimatter touches matter, it blows up," says ALPHA collaboration member and UC Berkeley plasma physicist Joel Fajans. The combined mass of the matter and antimatter is transformed entirely into energy in a reaction so energetic that "explosion" doesn't do it justice.

Scientists call it an "annihilation."

"For a given mass, such annihilations are the densest form of energy release that we know of," says Fajans.

But not to worry. The amount of antimatter used in the ALPHA experiment is so small that the energy created by antimatter/matter annihilations is imperceptible to humans. Instead, highly sensitive detectors must be used. "Still, we have to manipulate the antimatter very carefully or we will lose it," says Fajans.

Dropping an antimatter banger

Nearly two decades in the making, the sprawling ALPHA experiment resides in a building labeled "Antimatter Factory" outside Geneva, where antihydrogen is created from scratch by combining antiprotons and positrons in a labyrinthine process. The antiprotons are created and provided to the ALPHA experiment by the CERN particle accelerator complex. The positrons are acquired from an artificial radioactive isotope of sodium which emits them. Both antiparticles are cooled to near room temperature and form plasmas, the fourth state of matter (solid, liquid and gas are the other three).

The antiproton and positron plasmas are then routed into a vertical chamber called ALPHA-g, where the gravity experiment will eventually be performed.

"The vast majority of the experimental time is spent doing plasma manipulations to get these antiparticle plasmas into the shape and temperature that we need them to be," says Fajans. "We have to cool them to about 10 degrees Kelvin — that's 10 degrees above absolute zero — and we must form them into needle-like shapes.”

"Plasmas are normally the hottest form of matter," explains Wurtele. "But we need to cool them to temperatures where almost everything would typically be solid or liquid."

Once the proper conditions are attained, the plasmas are mixed together with exacting precision inside the ALPHA-g chamber to create the precious antihydrogen atoms.

"Broadly speaking, we're making antimatter, and we're doing a Leaning Tower of Pisa kind of experiment," says Wurtele, referring to ALPHA-g's somewhat simpler intellectual ancestor, Galileo's legendary (and perhaps apocryphal) 16th century experiment demonstrating identical gravitational acceleration of two simultaneously dropped objects of similar volume but different mass.

"We're letting the antimatter go, and we're seeing if it goes up or down."

The antihydrogen is contained within ALPHA-g's cylindrical vacuum chamber using a variable magnetic trap, which prevents the antimatter from touching the walls of the chamber and annihilating. The scientists reduce the strength of the trap's top and bottom magnetic fields until the antihydrogen atoms can escape, and the relatively weak influence of gravity becomes apparent. As each antihydrogen atom escapes the magnetic trap, it touches the chamber walls either above or below the trap and annihilates, which the scientists can detect and count.

The researchers repeated the experiment more than a dozen times, each time varying the magnetic field strength of the top and bottom of the trap to rule out possible errors. They observed that when the weakened magnetic fields were precisely balanced at the top and bottom, about 80% of the antihydrogen atoms annihilated beneath the trap — a result consistent with how a cloud of regular hydrogen would behave under the same conditions.

Thus, gravity was causing the antihydrogen to fall down.

"Previously, there have been many indirect observations that strongly suggest that antimatter gravitates normally," says Fajans. "But none of those observations were as incontrovertible as following the trajectories of antimatter under the influence of gravity; they all relied on much more subtle phenomena."

The matter/antimatter mystery

As you've probably noticed, there are not antimatter people walking around and annihilating in colossal explosions. In fact, despite some very modest sources of antimatter — like naturally occurring positrons emitted from potassium, including inside bananas — we don't see much antimatter anywhere in the universe. That is counter to the laws of physics, which predict that antimatter should exist in roughly equal measure with regular matter.

"For the most part, we live in a universe of matter. And one big question is 'why?'," says Tim Tharp, an ALPHA collaboration member and plasma physicist at Marquette University. "There isn't a lot of antimatter around, and we don’t really understand why the universe developed this preference."

Scientists call this conundrum the baryogenesis problem. One potential explanation for the scarcity of antimatter is that it was gravitationally repelled by regular matter during the Big Bang, causing it to shoot off to some distant part of the universe that we can't see. That theory no longer seems plausible.

"We've ruled out antimatter being repelled by the gravitational force as opposed to attracted, but that doesn't mean there isn't a difference in the gravitational force on antimatter that has not yet been measured," Wurtele says. The force of gravity on antimatter may be weaker or stronger than regular matter, which requires a more precise measurement to determine.

"The success of the ALPHA collaboration is a testament to the importance of teamwork across continents and scientific communities," says Vyacheslav "Slava" Lukin, a program director in NSF's Division of Physics. "Understanding the nature of antimatter can help us not only understand how our universe came to be but can enable new innovations never before thought possible — like positron emission tomography scans, which have saved many lives by applying our knowledge of antimatter to detect cancerous tumors in the body."

The ALPHA collaboration researchers will continue to probe the nature of antihydrogen in search of some contrarian aspect. In addition to refining their measurement of the effect of gravity, they are also studying how antihydrogen interacts with electromagnetic radiation through spectroscopy.

"If antihydrogen were somehow different from hydrogen, that would be a revolutionary thing because the physical laws, both in quantum mechanics and gravity, say the behavior should be the same," says Wurtele.

"However, one doesn't know until one does the experiment."

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Discovery Season 5 Episode 5 Easter Eggs Reveal the Fate of a Classic Star Trek Ship

From the Mirror Universe and the ISS Enterprise to a big reveal about the Breen, Discovery season 5 just referenced a a huge swath of the Star Trek timeline.

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This Star Trek: Discovery article contains spoilers.

As both a prequel and sequel to various versions of the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek: Discovery often includes unexpected easter eggs and references to the entire saga. The latest episode, “Mirrors,” is no exception, as it brings back a famous Star Trek ship, as well as answers questions about a mysterious alien species, which has been around since the 1990s.

From references to the goatee version of Spock, to some deep-cuts from Deep Space Nine , and even a tribble joke, Discovery ’s easter eggs in season 5, episode 5 aren’t messing around. Here are the best references and how these shout-outs solve a few mysteries, while suggesting a possible future development for the next Star Trek show.

“Classic Work on Kellerun”

Early in the episode, Rayner and Burnham talk about which stories are considered classics on the planet Kellerun. Rayner is a member of the Kellerun species, which were established in the DS9 episode “Armageddon Game.” We actually know very little about the Kellerun species, so Discovery is inventing new canon here, rather than referencing anything from previous Trek shows.

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Wormhole and the Burn

The wormhole that Book and Burnham have to enter is unstable, which describes most wormholes featured in Star Trek . But, in this case, it’s suggested that the matter/anti-matter reactions in this wormhole were caused by the Burn.

The Burn was that galaxy-changing event in the backstory of Discovery season 3, when, in 3069, every warp core in the galaxy detonated. Warp cores use matter/antimatter reactions to do their thing.

ISS Enterprise 

Inside the wormhole, Book and Burnham encounter the ISS Enterprise , and Book says right away “ISS, that’s Mirror Universe.” When he says this we hear the Mirror Universe music from Discovery season 1.

The existence of the ISS Enterprise in this episode is a massive easter egg, which contains various other smaller easter eggs. These include the following:

• The ISS Enterprise was last seen, in-canon, in the TOS episode “Mirror, Mirror.” So, chronologically, in both our world, and the Trek timeline, this is its second appearance. 
• The bridge and sickbay of the ISS Enterprise are just the sets from the Strange New Worlds version of the Enterprise . Discovery season 5 filmed in between SNW seasons.
• Several versions of the Terran Empire logo are seen throughout the ship. These match with the Terran Empire logo from Discovery season 1 and season 3, and differ from the logo from The Original Series . 
• Does the redesign make sense in terms of the timeline? Well, Akiva Goldsman has suggested that on some level, the visual canon of Strange New Worlds relative to The Original Series isn’t the true canon. In 2023, he said that the aesthetic choices of the more modern Strange New Worlds don’t change the story as seen on TOS , but it doesn’t mean modern Star Trek will ever reveal a rubber-suited Gorn. “You will never see the Gorn like that…This is the Gorn as we perceive them,” Goldsman said. So, analogously, Discovery didn’t need to make the TOS Mirror Enterprise like the retro 1960s version. Plus, who knows what the Terran Empire did in between “Mirror, Mirror” and the moment this crew escaped? 

Mirror Spock 

Burnham mentions that the science station on the Enterprise was “my brother’s station.” This, of course, refers to Spock, who, in this universe, did, briefly, work at this exact station. Burnham says, “I’m sure he was just as ruthless as the rest though,” which, as we know, is not true. Mirror Spock spared Prime Kirk in “Mirror, Mirror,” and then became the leader of the entire empire.

In fact, when Book reads the story of this version of the Enterprise , he says, “The Terran High Chancellor was killed for trying to make reforms.” In the Deep Space Nine episode “Crossover,” we learned that the leader of the Terran Empire was Spock. And that Spock trying to reform the Terran Empire led to Earth being taken over in the 24th Century by the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance. 

So, the episode references Spock, twice, without actually naming him, and the second time, neither Book nor Burnham even knows that Mirror Spock was a low-key hero.

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Saru and the Mirror Universe From Discovery Season 3

Book mentions that the crew of the ISS Enterprise escaped with the help of a “Kelpien slave turned rebel leader.” This seems to reference the events of “Terra Firma Part 2,” from Discovery season 3. In that episode, Georgiou went back into the Mirror Universe and created a kind of pocket timeline in which she died at a different time, and Saru was freed to become a rebel leader. At the time, it wasn’t clear if this changed the timeline of the Mirror Universe — or the timeline of Discovery season 1 — but the mention of a Mirror Saru who is a rebel suggests that some version of that timeline might have occurred after all.

The Breen Revealed!

First mentioned in The Next Generation , the Breen eventually appeared in person in the 1995 Deep Space Nine episode “Indiscretion.” But, from that point, until now, they’ve only appeared inside their suits, and under those helmets. There’s been a ton of speculation for decades about what the Breen look like under their helmets, and now, we’ve finally seen the answer. 

In “Mirrors” — during the flashbacks that explains Moll and L’ak’s relationship — we finally see that the Breen have not one face, but two . Apparently, one face exists under their helmet, while another, more stable face can emerge when they have their helmets off. This seems to suggest that the Breen hiding their faces has more to do with a cultural tradition than any environmental requirement. Moll has been running around without a helmet this entire season, and apparently, that’s what a Breen can look like, too.

Smuggling Tribbles

In one of the flashbacks, Moll jokes about making sure she “didn’t smuggle any tribbles on board.” This seems to suggest that yes, even in the 32nd Century , tribbles are still possibly hazardous, because they breed so quickly, and overrun spaceships and space stations. Famously, the tribbles first appeared in the TOS classic, “The Trouble With Tribbles.” Though, in Picard season 3, we did see a genetically engineered “attack tribble” with vicious teeth, stored away in a Section 31 black ops lab. It’s possible this “attack tribble” was created during the Dominion War, which means, it might have been designed to fight the Breen, who were Dominion allies back then.

As Book is navigating the ISS Enterprise out of the wormhole, he says, “Should we hit it?” Book has no idea that “hit it” was Pike’s catchphrase to send a ship into warp. Burnham smiles sheepishly and responds, “Feels weird. Let’s just fly.” She feels weird because she doesn’t want to steal Pike’s catchphrase, and so she uses her own catchphrase, “let’s fly,” instead.

The ISS Enterprise in the Prime Universe 

The episode ends with the ISS Enterprise being fully intact in the Prime Universe. We’re told that Detmer and Owo are flying the ship back to Federation HQ on their own. Scotty was able to fly the classic Enterprise with just himself and Sulu in The Search for Spock , so we have to assume that Detmer and Owo have done something similar. We don’t know if a new, 32nd Century Enterprise exists in this era of Star Trek , but as of now, Discovery just brought a classic version of the ship into the future. 

Because the upcoming Starfleet Academy series is set in the 32nd Century, it feels possible that Discovery just created a way for the students of future Starfleet to hang out on the bridge of the classic Enterprise — again!

Ryan Britt is a longtime contributor to Den of Geek! He is also the author of three non-fiction books: the Star Trek pop history book PHASERS…

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Published Apr 26, 2024

RECAP | Star Trek: Discovery 505 - 'Mirrors'

No matter how bad things get, the one thing you always have is a choice.

SPOILER WARNING: This article contains story details and plot points for Star Trek: Discovery.

StarTrek.com

Previously, in " Face the Strange ," Moll and L'ak unleash a time bug aboard the U.S.S. Discovery, designed to paralyze them and keep them stuck as they're randomly cycled through time. Once they're ahead of Discovery and on to the next clue, they can escape the bounty on their heads and finally be free.

In one time loop, Zora informs Burnham and Rayner one of the outcomes they feared had come to pass — the Breen gained control of the Progenitors' tech and destroyed everything, leading the Kellerun to believe the Breen must be the ex-courier's highest bidder. Thankfully for the crew, they're back in the mix and only lost six hours. Plus, they discovered a warp signature matching Moll and L'ak.

In Episode 5 of Star Trek: Discovery , " Mirrors ," Captain Burnham and Book journey into extra-dimensional space in search of the next clue to the location of the Progenitors' power. Meanwhile, Rayner navigates his first mission in command of the U.S.S. Discovery , and Culber opens up to Tilly.

• Cleveland "Book" Booker
• Michael Burnham
• Paul Stamets
• Sylvia Tilly
• William Christopher
• Dr. Hugh Culber
• Moll (Malinne Ravel)
• Breen Primarch

• U.S.S. Discovery -A
• Discovery shuttle
• I.S.S. Enterprise
• Breen warship

In his quarters aboard the U.S.S. Discovery -A, Cleveland "Book" Booker contemplates advice given to him by his mentor and namesake, "No matter how bad things get, the one thing you always have is a choice." Book gazes at a holo of Moll — real name Malinne Ravel, the daughter of his predecessor — certain that she is capable of turning things around just as he had. Aware that Cleveland Booker IV saved his life, Book believes he owes it to him to do the same for his daughter.

With Discovery at Moll and La'k’s last known coordinates, Book makes his way to the Bridge, where Captain Michael Burnham gives the stage to Commander Paul Stamets and Lieutenant Sylvia Tilly. Though it appeared as if the couriers' ship left a warp trail which disappeared into empty space, adjusting the viewscreen to compensate for the Lorentzian coefficient in high-energy spectra reveals the presence of a fluctuating wormhole. Stamets states that it leads to a pocket of interdimensional space and is collapsing and expanding due to matter-antimatter chain reactions, likely caused by the Burn.

Captain Burnham surmises that the next clue resides within the wormhole, and Tilly notes that Moll and L'ak are probably in there, as well. Lieutenant Gallo, Commander Rayner, and Lieutenant Christopher brief the captain — sensors can’t penetrate the aperture, the opening isn’t large enough to fit Discovery’s saucer, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to maintain comms contact. Burnham nods, ordering Lieutenant Linus to prepare a shuttle with boosted comms and fortified shields before requesting that Lt. Commander Gen Rhys place a security team on standby.

"Mirrors"

The captain's declaration that she will accompany Book on the away team draws Rayner's interest, and the two senior officers convene in the Ready Room. The Kellerun first officer expresses his view that he should be the one risking his life to lead the mission. She assures Rayner that she needs him on the ship and refuses to bring additional security with her, citing that the implied threat of armed guards would undermine Book's personal connection to Moll. Recalling the devastating future they had witnessed during the time bug ordeal, Rayner observes that it was only one possible outcome.

Captain Burnham senses there is more to Rayner’s unease and quotes the Ballad of Krul , " Serve it without a grum of osikod ." Though impressed by his captain's reference to Kellerun culture, Rayner still holds back. Burnham theorizes that his concern is related to taking the conn while she's away, and he begrudgingly admits it has been some time since he took the chair from another captain. The first officer makes eye contact, confessing that he doesn’t want his tenuous rapport with the crew to jeopardize the mission. Burnham reassures Rayner that she believes in him, leaving the demoted captain to swallow his protest.

Book joins Burnham to embark on their journey and pilots their shuttle away from Discovery . Relaxation floods the former courier's expression as he notes the craft is "purring like Grudge when she’s killed something." Hoping to emphasize his connection to Moll's father in the event they locate her, Book playfully shifts the conversation to the captain's temporal escapades when the time bug overtook the ship. Burnham makes a "my lips are sealed" gesture, only willing to disclose that she encountered some surprises.

The shuttle approaches the aperture, and Book plans to charge the impulse capacitance cells and release them into the drive coils to give the vessel a boost. Book offers a saying from his own culture, Never return from a hunt without enough bait for the Carrion Reaver . Burnham laughs off the "catchy" phrase, and the shuttle launches toward the wormhole's pulsating light. Turbulence causes the ship to tremble, and a bright flash overwhelms the two occupants.

Commander Rayner observes from the Bridge and is initially greeted by static. Burnham's voice cuts through the interference, informing the first officer that they made it through. Rayner’s relief is short-lived, as Discovery loses the shuttle's comm signal. He orders Stamets to the Science Lab in a bid to boost comms and conveys confidence as he takes the ship to Yellow Alert.

Meanwhile, in the wormhole, exotic matter has rendered the shuttle's sensors and holopadds inoperative. Book and Burnham narrowly dodge debris — "debris is not a good sign" — and spot the smoldering wreckage of Moll and L'ak's ship, or at least half of it. The nebulous environment clouds their vision, and Book wonders if the couriers survived. Burnham stands as she spots another vessel through the murkiness, its I.S.S. markings indicating it originated in the Mirror Universe. Shock envelops the captain's face as she reads its full designation — I.S.S. Enterprise* — and postulates that how the vessel arrived in interdimensional space must be "one heck of a story."

Book sees the Constitution -class starship's battered hull as evidence that it became trapped during a battle, and Burnham declares that it must have been ages ago — crossing from the Mirror Universe has been impossible for centuries. A shipwreck in a hidden wormhole sounds like a secure place to hide the next clue, though the captain is only acquainted with her brother Spock's U.S.S. Enterprise . They glimpse the other half of Moll and L'ak's broken vessel and assume that, if the couriers are alive, they must be on the Terran ship.

Back on Discovery , Tilly tracks an EPS conduit to a panel in Sickbay — after having followed it across three decks, including through the quarters of a new ensign who keeps a Cardassian vole as a pet. Sensing that Dr. Hugh Culber feels troubled, Tilly lets him know that she's always available to talk — at least until Stamets chimes in over the comm system to check on the status of her work. Culber maintains that he is fine and promises to find Tilly later, though his demeanor leaves her unconvinced.

In the Science Lab, Stamets notices that Ensign Adira Tal is undergoing some uncertainty of their own while working on their graviton pulse idea. The ensign rechecks their calculations for a third time, prompting the astromycologist to tell them that the time bug was not their fault. Rayner strolls in with confidence and requests an update on attempts to boost the comm signal. Stamets begins to explain, but the commander interrupts and states that he does not need to know how the cake is boiled. Adira is taken aback by the Kellerun culinary insight — Rayner assures them not to knock it until they try it — but Stamets presses forward with a proposal to hold the interdimensional aperture open. Unfortunately, there's a 43.7% chance that a graviton pulse would cause the aperture to close with the captain and Book still inside. Visibly frustrated, the first officer urges them to get the comm signal back.

Phasers drawn, Captain Burnham and Book enter the I.S.S. Enterprise 's bridge, which is adorned with Terran insignia and dimly illuminated by flickering lights and control panels. Intent on using the ship's sensors to track quantum signatures from the Prime Universe in order to locate Moll, L'ak, and the clue, Burnham pauses when she realizes that Book is standing at the science station — her brother's station, at least on the U.S.S. Enterprise . Though she had never met Spock's Mirror counterpart, she assumes he was just as ruthless as the Terrans.

Using a hack Book had previously applied on an Andorian transport ship, the captain successfully accesses the Enterprise 's sensors, and — after the former courier elicits words of praise from her — they detect that the intermix chamber has been ejected from the warp drive, all shuttles and escape pods are gone, the captain's log was erased, and the crew had apparently abandoned ship. Evacuation is a last resort in Terran culture, but the starship's damage was not terminal. The situation leaves them puzzled, but they turn their attention to the three Prime quantum signatures located in Sickbay — Moll, L'ak, and the clue.

En route to their quarry, Burnham and Book spy bedding, blankets, clothes, and other objects one wouldn't expect to find on a warship strewn about in the transporter room. Book gets a glimpse of the I.S.S. Enterprise 's dedication plaque, which itself bears an unorthodox phrase for Terrans, " Light of hope shines through even the darkest of nights. " The inscription describes the starship’s story, and Book relays that the new Terran High Chancellor had been killed while trying to make reforms. The crew mutinied, escaped, and attempted to shuttle refugees from the Mirror Universe into the Prime Universe, and a Kelpien slave-turned-rebel leader helped them. As she listens to the tale, Burnham picks up a locket and places a piece of her uniform inside of it. The mention of the Kelpien — likely Mirror Saru — catches her attention, and she supposes the crew fled when the ship got stuck within the aperture.

The pair continue on and move through the Terran ship's sparking corridors, only to be confronted by a batch of Moll and L'ak holo-doubles whose phasers are pointed toward Sickbay's entrance. Unable to determine which Moll and L'ak figures are real or target the room's holo emitter from their location, Book and Burnham rush their opponents and dodge a storm of phaser fire. They take out several holographic doubles before striking Sickbay's emitter, and the two couriers' true forms are revealed. Everyone heads for cover, but Burnham's diplomatic appeals don’t sway Moll or L'ak.

Book steps out from his concealed position. The captain follows with her phaser up, but Book tries to relate to Moll via their shared connection with her father. Moll grimaces with pain and anger as she states that Cleveland Booker IV was garbage, and L'ak holds up their bargaining chip — a device containing the next clue. Moll pitches a compromise; if she and L'ak are given a ride out of interdimensional space, they’ll let Starfleet replicate the clue. Burnham counters, bluntly replying that the couriers don’t have the clue. Referring to the decoy stanzas on Lyrek, the captain displays the locket she had procured and notes it has a Prime quantum signature.

The standoff remains steadfast, and Book draws Moll's ire when he guesses the couriers would not risk each other's lives over latinum. The exchange intensifies, and Moll contests that not even the Federation could lift an Erigah . Burnham recognizes the term, stunned to learn that the mysterious L'ak is actually Breen. An Erigah is a Breen blood bounty, and Moll and L'ak clearly hope to exchange whatever is at the end of the clue trail for their freedom. Book questions Moll about what they did to receive such a sentence, and the courier reflects…

…back to one of her regular visits to a busy Breen space station some years ago, where two helmeted Breen investigated one of her deliveries. Moll is unafraid when a third Breen approaches, introducing herself by quipping that she enjoys latinum and long walks on the beach. The Breen responds through his helmet's metallic speech processor, but rather than using the Breen sounds deemed unintelligible by most species, he speaks to Moll in her own language and accuses her of cutting her dilithium shipments with impurities. The human denies the accusation levied by "Green Eye," and the two square off in hand-to-hand combat.

Moll's lighthearted conversation persists even as they fight, and she points out that the Breen's belt insignia indicates he is royalty. Rumors have swirled that the Primarch's nephew — an independent thinker named L'ak — has been demoted to shuttlebay duty. Moll suggests that she can help L'ak get payback and admits she does cut the dilithium, leading the Breen to place her in handcuffs. Moll never relents, pitching that having a partner on the inside would make her operation go smoother. She senses L'ak is intrigued and faces him — she knows what it's like to be on the outside and alone — before slipping out of the cuffs. L'ak ponders why Moll would make a deal with someone she didn't know anything about, and Moll resolves to change that unfamiliarity.

Back in the present, Moll refuses to disclose what she and L'ak did to receive their bounty. Captain Burnham cautions them to not let love lead them down the wrong road, but Moll and L'ak opt to open fire once again. An errant phaser blast strikes a control panel, raising a containment field that traps Burnham and L'ak in Sickbay while preventing Book and Moll from re-entering the room. Book intends to resolve the dilemma with the Bridge's security controls and requests Moll's assistance. She agrees to the temporary truce, but threatens to dust Book if he makes one wrong move. They depart, but L'ak and Burnham stay put and keep their weapons drawn.

In another memory from their time on the Breen space station, L'ak receives payment from Moll and declares that her dilithium is clean. She quietly asks if he’d like to inspect her ship again to make sure she didn’t smuggle any tribbles on board, but L'ak's needs to shine his boots in anticipation of his uncle's upcoming inspection. The Breen clarifies that this isn't a euphemism, as the Primarch really likes their boots to be shiny. Moll thinks his uncle sounds like an asshole and brings up the promise that "Green Eye" had made during her last visit. L'ak delays, but Moll is adamant that he show her what he looks like. Though she has seen his face, she wishes to view his other face. L'ak seems self-conscious, and Moll maintains that both faces are a part of him. L'ak concedes, holding his breath and retracting his helmet to reveal his translucent green features. Moll greets him with warmth…

...however, aboard the Enterprise , Moll's demeanor is icy. She walks defiantly through the ship's corridors and rejects Book's appeals about her father. Aware that Cleveland Booker IV left Moll and her mother, Book shares that his mentor made the difficult choice to stay away from them in order to keep them safe. Moll emits a strained laugh, believing that Book must have his own "daddy issues" to have believed her father's story. Even though her father had promised to get his family off of Callor V and take them to a safe-haven colony in the Gamma Quadrant, he eventually just stopped coming home. Her mother was forced to get a job in the rubindium mines, ultimately falling victim to the harsh conditions when Moll was 14. Left alone, Moll tearfully emphasizes that L'ak is now the only person who matters to her.

Down in Sickbay, L'ak and Burnham retain their suspicious stares. Seated, yet still aiming their phasers at each other, they discuss the "power beyond all comprehension" that the Romulan scientist's diary and the subsequent clues would guide them toward. The captain warns L'ak what could happen if they Breen acquired that technology, and her observation that the Federation is all about second chances seems to resonate with him. Though Burnham promises she'd advocate for Moll and L'ak to serve their time together, L'ak is emphatic — he'd rather die than be separated from Moll.

On the Enterprise 's Bridge, the security system's firewall prevents Moll and Book from accessing the containment field. Moll pounds the console in frustration, but Book takes the opportunity to compare Moll and L'ak’s bond with the one he had shared with Burnham. With the exception of Grudge, who bites him when he doesn't feed her, Michael was the first friend Book made after Cleveland Booker IV died. He apologizes for what Moll endured because of her father and explains his troubled relationship with his own father, though Moll's thoughts continue to drift to L'ak…

…and to their time on the Breen space station. Concealed by a force field among the cargo containers, Moll and L'ak kiss. The human pauses, hesitant to mention that she received a new contract in Emerald Chain territory. L'ak calls Osyraa a butcher, but Moll responds that the Breen Imperium's faction wars don't make this region much safer. Her pursuit of higher paydays is a byproduct of her desire to discover the peace and freedom of the Gamma Quadrant paradise that her father had described. L'ak confesses that he only stays in Breen space because he has nowhere else to go, prompting Moll to propose he leave with her. The sound of footsteps interrupts the tender moment, and the Breen Primarch marches in with two Breen soldiers by his side. He disables the privacy field, his visored face locking eyes with the human.

With the memory of that confrontation fresh in her mind, Moll comes to attention on the Enterprise 's Bridge and knocks open a panel underneath the con. She creates a power surge to burn through the security system and short out the containment field, but her actions cause violent explosions to rock the ship. The Sickbay force field drops, though Burnham’s attempt to block L'ak's exit results in another round of fisticuffs that shatters glass and takes its toll. Book reports that impulse engines are overloaded and nav systems are fried — they have no control over the ship. Discovery 's shuttle becomes dislodged, tumbling away from the Terran ship and leaving the Enterprise eight minutes from impacting the aperture.

Book tries to develop a plan, but Moll aims her phaser at him. Nevertheless, Book is still determined to not let anything happen to Burnham or Moll. As a Kwejian, he lost his planet — everything that he cared about is gone. Though Cleveland was a "shit dad" to Moll, he was a great mentor to Book. In a heartbreaking tone, Book informs Moll that she is the only family he has left. He carefully picks up his phaser but chooses to hand it to her. She reacts with suspicion and directs both weapons toward him. Moll wrestles with indecision but opts not to kill him, a choice which elicits a sigh of relief from Book.

Burnham and L'ak's physical confrontation rages in Sickbay, but the Breen's reliance on a bladed weapon proves to be a tactical error. The Starfleet officer subdues him and retrieves the clue — the locket was a decoy. However, L'ak was inadvertently stabbed with his own blade during the attack. Moll runs in at this unfortunate moment, filled with concern for her partner and rejecting Burnham's plea to get L'ak to Discovery for treatment. Now a mere five minutes from colliding with the aperture, Book and Burnham speed off to the Bridge, leaving Moll to assist L'ak in Sickbay…

…and remember the moment when the Breen Primarch caught them together. As a guard holds L'ak, a second Breen strikes Moll. The Primarch prevents his nephew from intervening, then airs his grievance — L'ak carries the genetic code of the Yod-Thot, they who rule . While the Primarch campaigns for the throne of the Imperium, L'ak has been consorting with "lesser beings." His uncle describes L'ak's use of his more humanoid face as an insult to his heritage. The Primarch retracts his own helmet, gesturing to his translucent visage and proclaiming, " This is Breen." L'ak argues that their ability to change is a sign that both faces are a part of them, but his uncle claims they have evolved past a need for that form — holding it makes L'ak unfocused, inflexible, and weak.

The Primarch reseals his helmet and hands L'ak a weapon. His nephew must kill Moll to gain redemption. Resigned to her death, Moll tells "Green Eye" that their relationship was fun while it lasted, but L'ak elects to shoot the Breen guards instead of her. His uncle allows L'ak to place the phaser at his chest. Swayed by the fact that the Primarch raised him, L'ak only wounds his uncle. Alarms blare through the cargo area, and L'ak urges Moll to flee so that he will know she's safe. The blood bounty that L'ak just earned does not dissuade Moll from wanting him to join her. Holding onto his face, she says they can be happy together. L'ak voices his love for Moll…

…which snaps her back to the present, where L'ak reiterates his love for Moll in the Enterprise 's chaotic Sickbay. However, she is unwilling to give up and vows to get them out of this predicament. Meanwhile, Burnham and Book burst onto the Bridge and intend to activate a tractor beam. Book brightens the Terran light panels — "can’t save the day if we can’t see" — and winks at the captain as he takes the helm.

On Discovery 's Bridge, Commander Rayner asks Christopher for an update on comms. Naya interjects, reporting that something is happening at the aperture. A tractor beam can be seen emanating from within the wormhole, and it is oscillating with a repeating pattern: 3-4-1-4. Rayner grins in understanding and calls Stamets, Adira, and Tilly to the Bridge. The first officer doesn’t just need them to hold the aperture open, he also wants them to make it bigger — large enough for a starship. Discovery isn't going in, but their captain is coming out.

Stamets and the senior staff are perplexed by Rayner's announcement, and the Kellerun's reference to the Ballad of Krul doesn't give them any additional insight. Returning to the task at hand, Tilly affirms that such a procedure would require more energy than the entire ship can safely produce. Rayner pushes them for ideas, promising a cask of Kellerun citrus mash for whoever lands this solution. The Bridge is abuzz with chatter — inverting the deflector array would take too long, discharging the spore reserve would leave them unable to make an emergency jump, and pulling power from gravitational systems would cause everyone to float around… but replacing the photon torpedo payloads with antimatter would add fuel to the reactions already present in the aperture! Adira confirms that hitting it precisely with a sequential hexagonal pattern should keep it open for approximately sixty seconds. Rayner questions why it must be hexagonal, but Stamets points to him in a mischievous manner and notes, "It doesn’t matter. It’ll work." Satisfied, the commander awards the citrus mash to the entire Bridge crew and trusts that they'll make their only chance to succeed count.

As Captain Burnham sits in the I.S.S. Enterprise 's center seat, the ship's computer pronounces that only 60 seconds remain until impact with the aperture. Driven by the perilous countdown, she confesses to Book that he was one of the surprises she encountered while ensnared in the time bug's grip. She reflects on how nice it felt and how happy they seemed. Book offers an appreciative nod, but the pull of the aperture shakes the Enterprise .

On Discovery , Rayner orders a volley of torpedoes to be launched at the wormhole, and their detonations cause the opening to expand and generate even more light. The Enterprise 's tractor beam rattles the ship as it makes contact with Discovery . Book awaits Burnham's order to act and asks if he should "hit it." Captain Christopher Pike's signature phrase draws a quizzical and bemused look from Burnham, who replies, "Feels weird. Let’s just fly." The Terran ship's saucer section begins to emerge from the aperture, and its secondary hull clears it just before it collapses and releases a radiant surge of energy.

A relief-filled Captain Burnham communicates her thanks to Rayner over the comm channel, but she and Book then notify Discovery about a Terran warp pod being fired by the Enterprise . Scans detect two lifesigns and sickbay equipment aboard — Moll and L'ak. The pod launches and jumps to warp before it can be captured, though Rayner hopes to follow their warp signature and put out an alert throughout the fleet.

As the I.S.S. Enterprise and U.S.S. Discovery station themselves opposite one another in deep space, Rayner accompanies Burnham on a stroll through Discovery 's halls and compliments her on her "3-4-1-4" signal. The captain's message had referred to Section 4, Verse 7 of the Ballad of Krul , in which Krul calls to his war brothers for rescue with a repeating drumbeat of three taps, followed by four, one, and four. Although impressed, Rayner has doubts about how the mission played out. Burnham encourages him to take the win and relays that she is ordering Commanders Owosekun and Detmer to head a team and fly the Enterprise back to Federation HQ storage.

Discovery 's crew takes some much-needed downtime in Red's, where Culber follows through on his promise to confide in Tilly. The doctor leans beside her at the bar, and Tilly remarks that the day has left her feeling as if she has been through a gormagander's digestive tract. Highlighting the unique experiences he's had — dying, being resurrected, and staying present in his own body while Jinaal Bix inhabited it during the zhian'tara — Culber can only classify these events as "weird." Coupled with their current quest to find the technology that created life, Culber has found these questions to be both impossible to grasp and exhilarating. Since Stamets hates the unknown, Culber isn't sure how to talk to his partner about these emotions. Tilly advises him that the intellectual and the spiritual are not that far apart in the sense that they each bring understanding and can take you to new places. Initially taken aback by Tilly's use of the word spiritual, the doctor lets his friend's words sink in.

Captain Burnham welcomes Book into her Ready Room as she finishes reading a file on the Progenitors. There's no news about Moll and L'ak's whereabouts, but every ship in the sector is on high alert. She extracts a vial of liquid from the device containing the clue and shares that Stamets is preparing to do a full chemical analysis on it. Burnham secures the third object alongside the other two clues, which Book observes always seem to be presented hand-in-hand with a lesson. The ordeal with the itronok on Trill demonstrated that they valued lifeforms different from their own and the necropolis planet evoked the importance of cultural context, so why did a scientist leave the third clue on a Terran warship? 

The query draws a smile from Burnham, who discloses that the scientist had been a Terran named Dr. Cho — the junior science officer aboard the I.S.S. Enterprise . The captain had Zora search for the names from the vessel's manifest, and most of them had turned up in various Federation databases. The crew did make it to the Prime Universe and started new lives, and Cho herself became a branch admiral in Starfleet. The Terrans had hope, found freedom, and overcame the odds. Burnham supposes that those qualities were the reasons Cho returned to the aperture and concealed the clue on the Enterprise . Perhaps the lesson is that they can shape their future in the same way the Terran refugees had.

Book catches sight of the Enterprise getting underway outside of the Ready Room's viewport, prompting the captain to turn and gaze at the vessel. She brings up the time bug secret she had shared with Book when death appeared imminent, but he grins and acknowledges that they had been happy. Stamets' voice rings out over the comm system to let the captain know he is ready for the vial. Burnham grabs the container and makes her way to the door, but Book wonders what happens when they finally put these clues together. Captain Burnham concedes that she doesn't know, but she can't wait to find out.

* " Mirror, Mirror " — The I.S.S. Enterprise was last seen in this Original Series classic when a transporter malfunction sends the U.S.S. Enterprise crew into a mirror universe.

• Written by Johanna Lee & Carlos Cisco
• Directed by Jen McGowan

"Mirrors" features a dedication:

In loving memory of our friend, Allan "Red" Marceta

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Jay Stobie (he/him) is a freelance writer, author, and consultant who has contributed articles to StarTrek.com, Star Trek Explorer, and Star Trek Magazine, as well as to Star Wars Insider and StarWars.com. Learn more about Jay by visiting JayStobie.com or finding him on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms at @StobiesGalaxy.

Star Trek: Discovery Seasons 1-4 are streaming exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S., the UK, Canada, Switzerland, South Korea, Latin America, Germany, France, Italy, Australia and Austria. Seasons 2 and 3 also are available on the Pluto TV “Star Trek” channel in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. The series streams on Super Drama in Japan, TVNZ in New Zealand, and SkyShowtime in Spain, Portugal, Poland, The Nordics, The Netherlands, and Central and Eastern Europe and also airs on Cosmote TV in Greece. The series is distributed by Paramount Global Content Distribution.

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Star Trek Event Coming To ‘World Of Tanks’ Online Game – Watch Mission Preview

| May 1, 2024 | By: TrekMovie.com Staff 19 comments so far

The popular World of Tanks massive multiplayer online game is usually all about tank warfare, but they just announced a game event that will let you compete in Starfleet “rovers.”

Call to the Final Frontier

The “Call to the Final Frontier” event will run in World of Tanks from May 2 to May 13. It is themed around the 2009 Star Trek movie and Kelvin Universe. Here is the mission synopsis:

A mysterious alien Object stole the antimatter straight from the warp core of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Use your vehicle combat skills while competing with other crewmates to recover the antimatter and research the alien Object. Help the iconic flagship resume her five-year mission!

For the special event players put aside their usual tanks to drive rovers to collect antimatter fragments to get Star Trek-themed rewards. Players can compete in daily event missions to earn new styles, decals, inscriptions, and 3 new Commanders with unique voices (Kirk, Spock, and Uhura). There is also a special “Orion Lockbox.”

This video provides your mission briefing…

Trekify your Tank!

One of the 3D styles you can get during the event is called “Emissary,” transforming your regular tank with a Starfleet theme. Here is the teaser from World of Tanks :

“Found this one when we were looking for that T95 we lost during field trials. The ground ’round the thing was…strange, wrinkled. Like it had been fried or something. And what a remarkable piece of equipment, this tank. Looks a bit like one of ours, right? But I heard Doc getting all excited about the ‘improbable alloy’ it’s made of—after he managed to chip a bit off the lower plate. Hope his ravings can stir up some of the top brass to get the tank outta our depot and into some fancy top-secret lab. Because I’m telling you, it looks like it can fly—or even more. You know, the little green men that built it—just for fun, inspired by our exotic designs—they might find its remote control and press some buttons.”

Check it out…

For more info on the Star Trek event or to start playing World of Tanks visit worldoftanks.com .

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scrolled down and legit thought for 1 second that ST4 was being announced with surprise new movie poster

Isn’t that the Enterprise-A from the end of Beyond? That’s an interesting choice to use in the marketing for this.

They use the first Kelvin-prise at the beggining of the video, then they change it at minute 1 with the Kelvin-prise A.

This seems pretty silly. It would be nice to get a single player adventure game, but I’ll keep on dreaming. Star Trek: Resurgence isn’t terrible, but it’s not the open world exploration RPG I’d rather fawn over.

My two complaints for Resurgence are that the “video game-y” parts of like the little mini games or flying the ship are a bit clunky, and that also sometimes, for me personally, it goes just a little too far on the lets put you in stressful situations sort of thing (I know that’s kind of the point of the game, so that probably is just part of it and not much to do about that but it just felt like it was constantly trying to make me feel bad about making choices). But in terms of getting to feel like you are part of an interactive Star Trek story they did a wonderful job with the look and feel and lots of great writing.

If there’s one thing that makes me thinks of Star Trek, it’s heavy artillery.

Agreed, was just about to post this sentiment.

I’m at a loss to explain why this was greenlighted. Star Trek… with military tanks? Someone was asleep at the wheel.

I’d surely hate to think that during the Dominion War that when it came to ground forces that the Klingons did all the heavy lifting.

The same logic that had Starfleet borrowing a Romulan cloaking device for the Defiant instead of developing their own: let others do the distasteful work so we can keep our hands clean.

they’ve also done collabs with TMNT, it’s not meant to be treated as some super serious in universe Trek event

the reaction to this event is so overblown and silly, IP crossover collabs are the current “it” thing for big online games

Star Trek New Worlds

At long last, the next Transformers and Trek crossover I was waiting for.

Age Of Tanks paid a licence fee…

Enjoy the game kids because this is probably the only thing you will get to getting more JJ verse. It certainly won’t be another movie at the rate things are going. 😂

…another mismanagement of the franchise, imo. Imagine if Rockstar put out a Trek game, aka RDR/GTA.

It’ll never cease to amaze how big an influence Mass Effect has had, not just on games, but on sci-fi in general.

You’re right, those tanks totally look like they’re straight out of Mass Effect

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Antimatter Pod posts bi-weekly (or fortnightly, if that’s your preferred lingo), moving to a weekly schedule when new episodes of Star Trek air. Episodes drop on Tuesday evenings (US time)/Wednesday mornings (Australian time).

Our theme music is “Universe Calling” by Lee Rosevere from the album Music For Podcasts , and uses a sample uploaded by Iwiploppenisse  to Freesound. Both use Creative Commons attribution licences. 

Star Trek and related entities are the property of Paramount/Viacom.

We are American (Anika) and Australian (Liz), and we’ve been Trekkies since our respective childhoods. Even when we hate it, we love it.

The Ultimate Guide To Sci-Fi's 8 Coolest Power Sources

E very device in the real world requires a power source. Electricity and gas are some of the most common fuels, and many machines rely on components that convert one form of energy into another. Even science fiction devices require energy sources, especially if they don't want to fall into the "It's magic, I don't have to explain it" trope.

To provide an air of relative realism, many sci-fi properties at least partially explain how their technologies are powered. Since most of these devices defy the laws of physics as we (currently) know them, their power sources are equally far-fetched. Some of these fuels are based somewhat in reality and use energies we wish we could harness, while others create brand new elements out of whole cloth and invent energy conversion methods to go along with them. Depending on the imagination of the creative team, some sci-fi power sources stand out from others.

Here are some of the coolest power sources in all of sci-fi, either due to their iconic nature or sheer creativity.

[Featured image by Babbel1996 via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 2.5 ]

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Dilithium Crystals And Warp Cores From Star Trek

"Star Trek" is the quintessential sci-fi franchise. The first series was ahead of its time, and it  accurately predicted countless hi-tech devices . However, the ability to travel the stars still eludes us, probably because of the "science" behind the associated technology.

Whenever someone talks about the warp core of a Federation starship, "dilithium crystals" are usually part of the conversation. These minerals are a core part of the warp core (pun intended). The uninitiated might assume dilithium is the fuel behind the warp drives, but that is not true.

Contrary to popular belief, Federation starships travel faster than the speed of light thanks to a constant stream of matter/antimatter reactions. As any sci-fi aficionado (or theoretical physicist) will tell you, when matter and antimatter collide, they eliminate each other and produce so much power that, according to the U.S. National Science Foundation , calling the result an "explosion" would be an understatement. So why don't Federation ships explode all the time? Dilithium regulates the reaction and converts it into mechanical energy while within the warp core. Unfortunately, due to this ability, naturally formed dilithium lattices can literally tear planets apart. While we said dilithium is a crystalline reagent, earlier "Star Trek" stories also portrayed it as a complementary fuel source, but that purpose has essentially been retconned.

Dilithium is purely fictional, but if we ever invent a material capable of withstanding pure matter-antimatter annihilation, maybe it will help with faster-than-light travel too.

Proton Packs From Ghostbusters

Usually, the undead are completely detached from science. True zombies are either resurrected or just somebody infected with a particularly nasty strain of rabies or cordyceps. But how does one scientifically explain something as phantasmal as a ghost? The same way they create an equally scientific way of busting ghosts.

Peter Venkman (played by Bill Murray) calls the iconic proton pack from "Ghostbusters" an "unlicensed nuclear accelerator" you can wear on your back. While Venkman often exaggerates, this claim is spot on. The science behind the proton pack is rooted in reality, albeit blown up to fictional proportions. Each proton pack is a nuclear-powered and unlicensed miniature cyclotron, i.e., a particle accelerator that continuously propels positively charged particles (protons) through a vacuum chamber. In the real world, cyclotrons are used for medical diagnoses and high-temperature fusion experiments . In "Ghostbusters," the proton pack cyclotron blasts protons at targets with a "neutrona wand."

While a proton pack's energy output has never been measured, the resulting streams are enough to significantly damage anything they hit. Technically ghosts in "Ghostbusters" aren't hurt by protons, just drained of energy since they are made up of negatively charged particles. Opposite charges attract, after all. However, due to the flipside of this universal principle — similar charges repel — if two proton streams hit each other, they could make every atom in your body rip apart at the speed of light.

Thankfully, ghosts don't actually exist, so we don't have to build real-life proton packs. And while one could construct their own portable cyclotron, it probably wouldn't pack the same firepower as the movie version.

Kyber Crystals In Star Wars

More often than not, sci-fi weapons are some kind of destructive laser emitter. Laser rifles and pistols are the most common examples, but laser swords are a popular variant. Usually, laser swords and guns draw from the same batteries, but lightsabers buck this trend.

While most weapons in "Star Wars" run on power packs, lightsabers instead rely on the somewhat rare kyber crystals. These crystals don't provide the raw fuel necessary to power lightsabers, but they are a vital component nonetheless since they act as amplifiers. Energy focused through kyber crystals creates the iconic plasma blade that forms the "light" part of the "lightsaber."

Unlike regular crystals, kyber crystals contain organic components that react to people strong in the Force, which is what draws Jedi to them. However, that connection to the Force is also what lets Sith corrupt kyber crystals through a process known as "bleeding." It's just the act of pumping emotions such as fear, anger, and hatred into the crystal, but it's enough to create the signature crimson hue of Sith weaponry. Regardless of who uses a kyber crystal, though, the material remains impossibly strong, capable of withstanding blasts that would otherwise destroy a lightsaber and its wielder.

As much as we would love to swing around real lightsabers, without the impossibly fictional properties of a kyber crystal, the closest we'll ever get is a toy that shoots a thin stream of fire .

Element Zero In Mass Effect

In some sci-fi settings, different alien cultures have their own power sources. Federation ships in "Star Trek" rely on dilithium, while Romulans use artificial black holes. In "Mass Effect," the fictional Element Zero powers the technology of every species.

Element Zero, or "eezo" for short, is the lifeblood of the "Mass Effect" series, providing the in-universe explanation for almost all of the game's futuristic tech. Eezo is produced when planets are exposed to supernovas, and it generates a field of dark matter when exposed to electrical currents. This dark matter affects the mass of anything within its sphere of influence — positive currents increase mass, whereas negative currents decrease mass — hence the term mass effect.

While eezo isn't necessarily a fuel source, it reduces the energy required for interstellar flight by reducing the mass of spaceships and everything in them. The less something weighs, the less fuel it needs. However, eezo has many more in-universe uses. Because the element only requires a small amount of electricity to generate a mass effect field, everyday items such as guns, building materials, and even toothbrushes use it. Plus, while eezo dust is generally toxic, people who are exposed to the element in utero can develop special nodules in their bodies filled with it that generate dark energy fields, essentially giving them telekinetic abilities.

While Element Zero is purely fictional, dark matter itself is a hypothetically real material that might have helped form the universe as we know it. Just don't expect it to reinvent transportation or toothbrushes if we ever discover it.

WAAAGH! Power In Warhammer 40K

The phrase "mind over matter" generally applies to situations where you make yourself feel better by thinking positively. In sci-fi, "mind over matter" goes beyond this mental placebo effect via psychic powers. Usually, these abilities are reserved for advanced civilizations, not warmongering hordes.

The Orks of "Warhammer 40K" are a big dumb murderball of a race. They can't count higher than three and are only concerned with fighting. While primitive compared to other factions, Orks frequently use guns and buggies, albeit ramshackle ones designed to be the coolest and killiest (their words, not ours). Ork tech is so unstable it tends to blow up in their users' faces. And despite being responsible for its construction, Ork mechanics (called meks) don't actually know how their technology works.

They may look brutish, but all Orks are psychic — most are just too dumb to realize it. When they put their empty heads together, their collective gestalt psychic power changes reality, forcing mek creations to work simply because Orks believe they work. Without this energy, sometimes referred to as "WAAAGH! power" after the Ork battlecry, Ork guns and vehicles are inanimate scrap. This low-level psychic field can subtly alter how Ork tech functions, too. Vehicles painted red drive faster, and yellow missiles and bombs provide larger explosions, all because of their paint jobs.

While the power to make something happen simply because you believe in it sounds childish, Orks demonstrate that in the right (or wrong) hands, it can devastate entire galaxies.

The Eye Of Harmony From Doctor Who

"Doctor Who" has aired off and on since 1963. While the show is seemingly about the adventures of a human-like alien and their time machine, calling the TARDIS just a simple "time machine" would be a disservice to its capabilities and power requirements.

In the show's canon, the TARDIS can do more than time travel; it also houses a potentially infinite number of rooms and can disguise itself to blend in with its surroundings. Well, it could if its "chameleon circuit" wasn't broken. The amount of energy needed to power all these functions would have to be, well, infinite, so how did the Time Lords manufacture enough power generators to fuel a fleet of these vehicles? 

The Eye of Harmony is the central power source for every TARDIS in the universe of "Doctor Who." Instead of using artificial stars or black holes, the Time Lords did one better by depositing a star on the verge of exploding into the center of the space-time continuum. They then suspended the star in a state of permanent decay, making it give off infinite energy as it collapsed into a black hole that would never be. The result: more than enough raw power to fuel every TARDIS and all of Time Lord society. 

However, that's just the current canon. "Doctor Who" has been running for so long that the Eye of Harmony has been reimagined a few times, as both the source of Time Lord regeneration and of time itself. In another decade or two, and someone will probably rewrite how it works yet again.

Mr. Fusion From Back To The Future

The "Back to the Future" DeLorean uses a Flux Capacitor to become a time machine, but it needs to refuel with rare energy sources after each time jump. At least until its inventor harnessed the power of futuristic technology.

At the end of the original "Back to the Future," Doc Brown uses his DeLorean to bring Marty McFly back to the future. Before he does, though, Doc refuels his Flux Capacitor by throwing random trash into something labeled "Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor." This device from the distant future of 2015 is a fusion reactor that can break anything put into it down into energy, and it isn't some luxury item either. Background details in "Back to the Future Part II" imply that Mr. Fusion is a cheaper, consumer-friendly member of a larger line of reactors by "Fusion Industries." 

The Flux Capacitor's power requirements are a major plot element of the original "Back to the Future" film. Each jump requires 1.21 gigawatts, which ain't easy to find — it took conning angry Libyan terrorists out of plutonium and channeling a direct bolt of lightning. In 2015, Mr. Fusion can provide that much by burning banana peels and beer, with enough energy left over to power the DeLorean's hover technology.

It's difficult to tell which aspect of the Mr. Fusion reactor is more impressive: its potential power output or its potential for solving Earth's trash problem. But can it charge a Mattel hoverboard?

Coral From Armored Core 6

We may all want to drive sci-fi mechs, but their very nature defies the laws of physics. Not only are mechs tougher and faster than they have any right to be, but their power requirements should be through the roof. While many sci-fi settings avoid that immersion pitfall by simply ignoring it, this game ties mech power sources into its story with all the grace we've come to expect from FromSoftware.

"Armored Core" players have always had to balance power requirements when customizing their mechs, but the in-universe mechanics of mech generators were never important until the introduction of "Coral." In "Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon," this miracle material is a highly efficient fuel. Not only does Coral provide a ton of energy when burned, but it is also self-replicating. With Coral, many devices, Armored Core units included, can go years without refueling. That property sounds like it should defy all known natural laws, at least until you learn about Coral's true nature.

In truth, Coral isn't just a fuel: It's a colonial microorganism that can reproduce exponentially and semi-indefinitely. Granted, using microbes for gas isn't new — real-world scientists are experimenting with using glowing dirt in biofuels   — but Coral goes above and beyond because it also exhibits some intellect. This property is demonstrated by Coral's ability to serve as a data conduit and, more importantly (warning: spoilers), control machines and spawn humanoid personalities.

Here's hoping future microbe biofuels don't end up being anywhere near as intelligent as Coral.

Read the original article on SlashGear .