NEW PHYSICS COURSE: STUDENTS LEARN AT WARP SPEED

In a scene from the movie "Star Trek V," Captain Kirk slips while rock climbing on El Capitan in Yosemite. Mr. Spock, who had been conversing with the captain while hovering in midair with the aid of rocket boots, zooms down to stop Kirk's fall just as the captain's head is inches from the ground.

Dr. Giulio Venezian flipped on the lights and asked, "Who gets killed first, Spock or Kirk?"

The students laughed. "All of their internal organs are mush," said one.

That's The Physics of Star Trek, a course being taught for the first time this semester at Southeast Missouri State University. These students know that the physical laws of the universe don't always work the way Star Trek's writers want them to, though they're often very creative about inventing exceptions.

Venezian usually teaches general physics and mechanics, but this course satisfies the university's requirement for a course in critical and creative thinking.

The Physics of Star Trek is an opportunity for him to teach physics through example, in this case, Star Trek episodes and movies almost all the students have watched many times.

If you think this is a course for throwing out the textbooks, you're wrong. A number of books have been published that address Star Trek physics. "Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual" is 184 pages of schematic drawings of the USS Enterprise and detailed explanations of such well-known Star Trek terms as warp speed, tractor beam, antimatter generation and photon torpedoes.

This also isn't a class for goofing off. Venezian is teaching the class "modern physics in a nutshell," beginning with the Greeks, on to the 14th and 15th centuries and how Newton came to his ideas about how bodies move.

"Before Newton, people believed motion on Earth was different from motion in the heavens," he says. If it's not, that should be a line in a Star Trek episode.

But the star of the Star Trek galaxy probably would have to be James Clerk Maxwell, the British physicist who discovered electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light and concluded that light was an electromagnetic wave.

When Star Trek vessels travel at warp speed they are riding an electromagnetic wave like a surfboard.

But is the physics of Star Trek really possible? In many cases no. "Some of those things you have to accept as literary license," Venezian says. But he also points out that the first cellular phones appeared on the first Star Trek series.

Venezian was a fan of the original Star Trek series in the '60s, but most of his students grew up watching "Star Trek: The Next Generation." They kid him about the older series, in which Captain Kirk is quicker with his fists than with his wits.

The current series, "Deep Space Nine," seems more concerned with psychology than physics, Venezian says.

Only a few of the students in the class are physics majors. One is majoring in German and physics, another psychology, another accounting, another biology, and another in industrial technology.

Teaching physics to students who have had very little math is difficult because math is the language of physics, the professor said.

"I'm forced to try to explain physics in layman's language."

Many of the 20 students enrolled in the class have seen the episodes and movies numerous times, but only a few are bonafide Trekkers. Still, everyone joins debates over whether a tractor beam should have been able to nudge a star fragment (the mass would make the ship move instead) or whether a repulser beam should have been able to move the USS Enterprise away from an onrushing meteorite (in theory, yes).

"They had the physics correct in this one but not in the other one," Venezian said.

He is impressed with his students' knowledge of the principles of general physics.

"These are difficult topics," he said. "They have more of a grasp of them than I had at their age even though I was studying physics."

After the class, a young man wearing a "We are not alone" baseball cap engaged the professor in a discussion of relativity. People today are much more familiar with the ideas behind physics than when he was going to school, Venezian said.

"Relativity wasn't part of everyday conversation back then."