Monthly Archives: November 2008

star trek

Your Moment of Trek

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ZOMG, They’re Reviewing the Trailer!!

A desktop of the new Star Trek movie logo and poster. Courtesy Paramount and www.startrekmovie.com
Star Trek lives again! Courtesy Paramount and www.startrekmovie.com

Okay, I’m a Trekkie.  I admit it proudly.

I’ve been one so long that I remember passionate discussions in college about whether Trekkies were better than Trekkers, or whether Trek-ites were the truly serious of the Trek fans… nerds… geeks experts. We  sopped up Star Trek along with our physics and astronomy classes, and I know more than one scientist who got interested in pursuing a career in science as a result of watching Star Trek.

Honestly, yes we did argue about degrees of Trek fandom and who was most serious and who were merely pretenders to the Trekiverse Throne.  And, we had those “get a life” moments when knowing the proper derivation of a Klingon name was more important than, say, differential equations. And, I must confess, I was a member of an impromptu group of skiers who banded together as the Klingon Ski Team when I was in grad school. Our motto was  “Ski with honor, there is NO honor in falling!”   We took our Trek seriously…

Well, I’m glad to see that there are still Trekkies/Trekkers/Trekites out there and that the Trek phenomenon trundles along. We have the TV reruns, the movies, the books, the cartoons, the comix to keep us happy.

But now, in case you’ve been stranded with your Intrepid-class starship inside an inversion nebula and haven’t been on subspace radio due to verteron particle emission interference, here’s some news: there’s a new Trek movie coming out. And, since it’s not coming out til next May, the producers have released a trailer, which you can see at the StarTrekmovie.com (the official movie site) and StarTrek.com.

Okay, that’s all fine and good, but wow, there are reactions all over the place to the trailer!  Just the trailer, mind you.  It has ignited heated discussions on various blogs (and many of them NOT normally Trek-related) and science discussion boards that remind me so much of those early days of Trekhood, when we’d quibble about such things as how hard to pronounce the “g” in “Klingon.” I mean, this trailer has spurred arguments over technical issues, casting, costumes, technology use, canon vs. non-canon fact, and it goes on and on.  It’s all great publicity for the movie, but what really impresses me is the intensity of the discussions (and you can find them all over — just Google “Star Trek movie”).

What does this tell me? There are a lot of Trek folk out there, sure. But, despite early calls for the demise of the Trekiverse by critics and naysayers who pit one Trek series against another, it tells me that folks out there do very much care about Star Trek and the messages it has always told through its stories. I can’t wait to see what they’ve done with Trek this time… nor can bazillions of my Trekking compatriots!

astrovisualization

Designing the Cosmos

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Blending Art and Science

Cosmological visualization... what does it say to you?
Cosmological visualization... what does it say to you? (Courtesy NASA/STScI)

I’ve written before about space art and astronomy visualization, but there’s always a new artist or a new way of looking at the universe popping up.  There are whole clans of people who work on finding ways to take astronomy data and turn it into eye-smacking artwork and images.  In turn, we can all look at their work and understand a little bit better how the cosmos looks and behaves.

Take the cosmological visualization I’ve posted here. It’s actually quite a nice piece of artwork and I’d have no problem with hanging a print of it in my office. But, like all art, you have to ask: “what does it mean?”  To an artist, it may represent a balance of light and dark, a gradation of colors, a counterpoint of smooth and active textures and regions of heaviness and lightness, all blended into one painting.

But, look at it with scientific curiousity and it becomes a visualization of the process of cosmic creation.  It depicts, from right to left, the emergence of large-scale structure in our cosmos in the epochs after the Big Bang, which took place just off the right side of this image (and some 13.7 billion years ago in real time).

After the Big Bang, the universe began a headlong expansion effort that continues today.  Free electrons and protons began forming atomic hydrogen, the first — and most abundant — element in the cosmos. Those atoms could absorb light, which they did, turning the cosmos into a murky place. This period is called,  appropriately enough, the Cosmic Dark Ages. The golden area depicts that murky time. It may look bland, but there was action going on there as atoms of hydrogen crowded together to make the first stars.

About 900 million years later, the universe began lighting up as those first stars and the massive quasars began generating ultraviolet light, which turned hydrogen atoms back to protons and electrons. In the process the universe began to light up again. This was the Epoch of Reionization. At first it occurred in isolated bubbles, but as time went by, they spread out and connected, and eventually the universe was freed of its murky dark ages. Light could travel freely as the galaxies and stars continued forming and expanding.

So, this picture (created by the Goddard Science Visualization Studio) is really an artful depiction of the Cosmic Dawn, using real science data to draw imagery of a time we could never see or experience for ourselves (in real time).  Isn’t it amazing?