Thinking About Star Trek, Stock, And Science

I just posted about Star Trek and a stock called Candela to my blog for small business owners, BusinessOwnerInvestment.blogspot.com, and that gave me the idea to blog here about Star Trek and science. (If you write often, you'll find that you keep getting ideas that lead to other ideas. Writing expands your creativity, if you let it.)

Plausibility is one reason that science fiction fans find it enjoyable. Maybe we're not there yet, but some of the ideas look like we could actually achieve them. Consider mobile phones. I understand that the original creators of what we usually call cell phones were inspired by the communicators in the original Star Trek series [the one with Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy].

NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, even has Star Trek type science on their site:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/ideachev.html#alcub

One of the scientifically controversial ideas that is central to Star Trek is the faster than light space travel that they refer to as Warp speed. One man who argues that speeds faster than the speed of light may be possible is Miguel Alcubierre, who proposed the Alcubierre drive, mentioned at the NASA site. Alcubierre was born in Mexico City and achieved his Ph.D at the University of Wales, Cardiff in 1994. Read more at the Answers.com link below or Google Miguel Alcubierre. He worked for the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics for a time, too. That's the other link below.

http://www.answers.com/topic/miguel-alcubierre


http://www.aei.mpg.de/english/contemporaryIssues/home/index.html

Click on the title of today's post to read another Star Trek article in National Geographic News.

In more recent Star Trek news [this is entertainment news, not scientific], find out what they're beaming, er, cooking up.


http://www.hollywood.com/news/Star_Trek_Captains_to_Team_Up/3472202

One of my favorite "captains" of Star Trek is Patrick Stewart who was a Shakespearean actor before he joined Star Trek: The Next Generation in the role of Captain Picard. Here are a few links about Stewart and some science thrown in:

http://www.hollywood.com/celebrity/Patrick_Stewart/1113871

http://preview.tinyurl.com/2vpkjn

Don't forget the Science Channel!
http://science.discovery.com/