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Now that you have a basic grasp of modern-day cutting edge physics, so what? I mean, who cares about gravitons and anti-whatsits?
Apparently you do, or you wouldn't be reading this lecture. Now to put all that techno-babble into practice. Let's discuss some of the more interesting Star Trek technologies, and see how they make use of these fancy words.
Warp drive is the most interesting of all of Star Trek's technological wonders, and it is the most controversial. The basic principle behind it is quite simple. Remember the anti-matter we talked about in our last class? All Starfleet ships with a warp core carry with them fuel in the form of deuterium and anti-deuterium. "Deuterium" is an isotope of hydrogen, containing one proton and one electron, but also one neutron. Anti-deuterium, therefore, contains one anti-proton, one positron, and one anti-neutron. The anti-deuterium, usually just called anti-matter, is stored in magnetic containers, which use magnetic fields to keep the atoms moving in a circle without ever touching the walls of the container. These storage chambers are connected to one end of the Matter/Anti-Matter Reaction Assembly, or MARA. That's the blue tube with the flashing lights that you see in the middle of engineering on the Enterprise-D. At the other end of the MARA -- usually the top or front, depending on the orientation -- is the deuterium tank, which stores the deuterium in a really big metal tank, similar to the trucks you see on the highway only much bigger and stronger. Matter and anti-matter are both pumped into the MARA at both ends at exactly the same rate, and the stream is controlled by magnetic fields to guide the particles into the Reaction Chamber, that big round thing in main engineering. Inside the Reaction Chamber sits the dilithium crystal, a fictional invention of the producers. Dilithium is special because it's crystal structure is just the right size and shape to channel the flying particles of matter and anti-matter to hit each other head on. It is also the only material known to Federation science that does not interact with anti-matter. How? Good question. We don't have a good answer. When the matter and anti-matter hit each other, they cease to exist, and produce pure energy in the form of plasma. This plasma is then channeled out into the pink tubes you see behind the warp core to the Electro-Plasma System (EPS) and to the warp nacelles. It's here that the explanations differ.
In order to make life easier for future writers, and because they don't quite know how it works either, the producers of Star Trek have deliberately left the description of how this immense power can possibly make a ship go faster than the speed of light quite vague. According to the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, published by the producers, it has something to do with a "subspace field" or "warp field" that managed to side-step the restrictions imposed by Einstein's Special Relativity. How? Pick an answer, none of them really work.
One theory put forth by Professor Lawrence M. Krauss in his book The Physics of Star Trek is that a warp field somehow manages to create a huge gravity well in front of the ship and a gravity vacuum behind the ship. The ship and the space around it are then pulled forward. But as the ship moves forward, so does the gravity well, so the space around the ship and therefore the ship moves along with it, like hanging a carrot in front of a donkey. Since the ship is at rest relative to the space around it, there is no time dilation problem. And this method works perfectly and logically, according to modern physics and even Einsteinian Relativity. But only if you can produce enough energy to create such a gravity well, which would require several thousand times the energy produced in the entirety of human history, and several thousand times the energy of a matter/anti-matter reaction. Somewhere on the order of a black hole.
Another theory put forth by STF's very own Colin Wyers is that subspace is not another dimension but a thin film of zero-dimensional particles that is uniform throughout the universe, and exist for less than a billionth of a second, known as the Zero Point Field. According to him, a warp field causes the ZPF particles in front of the ship to be moved to the back, creating a vacuum in the ZPF in front of the ship, and the ship is sucked in to fill the vacuum. The problem here? Several Star Trek episodes have established that subspace is not a field of particles but another domain, one in which other species can even exist. There's also the problem of moving a particle that exists for only a billionth of a second.
STF's Randy McCullick has suggested yet another brand of warp drive, in which subspace is somewhat akin to the hyperspace used by most other shows, such as Star Wars and Babylon 5. He argues that a warp field is a "pocket" of this subspace/hyperspace which allows the ship to break all kinds of fun rules. This theory is the closest to what we have seen on the show, yet is the farthest from what the official publications tell us happens. As a side note, both McCullick's Wave Motion Engine and the failed Transwarp drive worked on the principle of putting the ship into subspace instead of subspace around the ship. The advantage was that if you traveled at a given speed in subspace it would take you 3 weeks ship time to get from point A to point B but that was only 4 days normal time. Of course, that meant the crew was significantly older than they should be.
Which is correct? None of them. There is right now no convincing argument for any of the proposed methods. So until Stephen Hawking manages to figure out just how it all works, the safest thing we fans can do is nod our head and say "Yep, it works" and leave well enough alone.
The second major technology of Star Trek that gets people excited is transporters and their related technologies. In a nutshell, a personnel transporters work by first creating a virtual energy "tube" called an Anular Confinement Beam between the point of origin and the destination. Then, the transporter examines you, determines exactly how you are made up at that precise moment, and chops you down to the quark level. A fancy device called a Heisenburg compensator is used to keep track of the wave/particle duality that makes dealing with quarks so confusing. The individual quarks, along with instructions on how to put them back together again, are sent through the tube and the reassembled at the other end, and voila! Cargo transporters, on the other hand, only break matter down to the molecular level, so they are not able to handle biological material. Replicators do essentially the same thing, except they are stored at the molecular level and and can be held indefinitely. In fact, molecules are stored in the computer somewhere and then assembled one by one on demand to the recipe you call for, such as tomato soup, for which there are over thirty different recipes. Transporters are actually even less grounded in modern physics that warp drive. In fact, they are the least explained and least likely to ever occur. Within the last year, scientists have been able to essentially transport individual quarks, and even at atom at one point, but the same scientists still say that Star Trek-style transporters are not forthcoming, and probably won't be. But, this is Star Trek, and the magic wand has been woven. So, just as for warp, the safest thing to do is push the button and watch your away team disappear in some really nice special effects.
Remember those gravitons we talked about? Well guess what, they're useful too. Through still more unexplained means, starships are able to produce, or maybe collect we are never quite sure, free gravitons. Those gravitons are then held in a field surrounding the ship by more magic. When a phaser beam or torpedo hits the graviton field it is deflected by the gravimetric distortions. From one point of view, the object is suddenly moved elsewhere, usually around the shields and dissipating into space. Since all matter is really just energy, and all energy waves are really just a pattern of motion in particles (one of the universes many ways of giving college students a headache), this works for both phasers and disrupters as well as torpedoes, missiles, and the random asteroid or shuttle craft piloted by Starfleet officers masquerading as Maquis. Or not.
Confused yet? If not, then I guess I'm not doing my job. Digest this lesson for a while, and then go on to the next lesson. Maybe I can confuse you there.