On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, David Silberstein wrote: > On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, Philip Hart wrote: > >I'm a particle physicist so supposedly know about this - my thesis [...] > >- but AFAIK there is no reason to rule out other groups of particles > >at higher energies. > > [Feeling somewhat embarrassed - "Hey, grandma! This, you see, [...] Don't be - see below. > Well, you're probably better qualified to speculate, but I note you > append "at higher energies" -- if the Enterprise *was* experiencing > sufficiently higher energies, wouldn't the ship have been vaporized? This is not my problem to explain - it sure looks like they're at rest in a one-g field all the time... > For that matter, wouldn't those high-energy particles quickly decay > into known, lower-energy particles? Depends - new particles might be very light but unable to decay because of symmetry laws - say electron-positron collisions can produce teckla-antiteckla particles - the (anti)teckla particle might be immortal because of conservation of tecklaness... Anyway, your basic point is right - it's hard to come up with new particles that interact with normal matter, or even abnormal matter. That's one reason why particle physics is so difficult. But reading brains and FTL are probably harder. > I can only recall 2 episodes where it wasn't working quite > transparantly - one was the moderatly famous "Darmok", and the other > was an episode of DS9 where they met a new species (from the Gamma > quadrant?), where it was taking longer than usual to kick in. I thought they keep meeting things that require telepaths to communicate with, or which telepaths can't talk to so everybody nearly dies. > And while it was emotionally powerful, "Darmok" made no sense > linguistically. That's the one with the guy who says, Foo and Bar at the gate of Blah? I remember thinking, wow, great episode, and how can I like something so dumb?