2.11 — “Rivals”

Comments

6 responses to “2.11 — “Rivals””

1. 

   Randi Cohen

   February 16, 2017

   I actually liked the “randomness is broken” and tracking down the synchronized neutrinos. Cute pseudoscience.

   Also I liked: Bashir totally seeing through Quark’s attempts to rig the match, yet his inability to figure out how to get out of the awkward O’Brien rivalry. Keiko standing by her man with scented handkerchief. Quark’s brother: “at least I’ll be cheated by family”. Quarks stroke of genius in arranging the “celebrity match-up”. It shows you that he actually does have business acumen.

   The writers seem to actually like and respect the characters they are writing, and it shows.

   Reply
2. 

   Kevin Black

   February 16, 2017

   That’s a good list of things! Although I didn’t care for the randomness bit. Isn’t quantum uncertainty fundamental to our understanding of physics? If stuff like the location of particles suddenly becomes predictable, doesn’t everything fall apart?

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3. 

   Randi Cohen

   February 16, 2017

   Yes, the uncertainty principle is fundamental. It doesn’t sound like spins were individually predictable though, just correlated with each other, and not necessarily in a way that would be predictable in advance, depending on how the device works. I just thought it was cute that they invented a way to track the device that wasn’t just entirely made up, like “verteron particles”.

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4. 

   Kevin Black

   February 16, 2017

   There is this entry in Memory Alpha (linked above): Author and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss pointed out that neutrinos can only exist in a specific spin state, the left-handed spin state (antineutrinos are in the right-handed spin state), and therefore Dax could never have discovered a “statistically unlikely” left-handed alignment of whirling neutrinos. Science Advisor Andre Bormanis said of this error, “This was a mistake on my part; I thought neutrinos had multiple spin states like other subatomic particles, and didn’t double-check. Well, as Spock noted in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – nobody’s perfect. (Star Trek Science Logs, p.54). In November 2016 a group of European physicists published a paper in which they suggested the inclusion of six additional particles to the current Standard Model used to describe sub-atomic physics. Three of these would be neutrinos with a right-handed spin state. Footnote: arxiv.org – [1608.05414v1] Unifying inflation with the axion, dark matter, baryogenesis and the
   seesaw mechanism

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5. 

   Kevin Black

   February 16, 2017

   Didn’t we have stories about luck not being random before, like in that horrible TNG casino episode? 2.12 “The Royale?”

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6. 

   Randi Cohen

   February 16, 2017

   Ugh… thanks for that memory, Kev! I don’t recall if non-random luck was a part of that or if it was just deterministic generally. Thanks for looking that up about the neutrinos… interesting!

   Reply