Josh the Aspie’s Blog

For those not in the know, Stargate SG-1 is one of the most successful and long running science fiction shows of all time, rivaling in popularity such Sci-Fi staples as Star Trek and Star Wars. It is based on the movie “Stargate.” Unfortunately, the series is in it’s final days, and seems to have definitely jumped the shark. One of the reasons for this is the increasingly improbable explanations for interacting with the rest of the world.

In the movie and shows, it is possible to travel to other planets and in some cases, other galaxies. This is done by traveling through a network of devices which break people down into their component parts, then transmit them through an artificially generated stable wormhole to the next device, where they are re-assembled.

These devices are called “Stargates.” Space travel by ship is slower but also possible, and is usually required to make large scale assaults on other worlds, or move objects too large to fit through a stargate - such as another stargate.

The US Military, under the auspices of the US Airforce, sends elite “SG” teams of military personnel, scientists, and linguists through the stargates on missions of exploration. The premiere team of these elite squads is SG-1, thus the name of the series.

In the current season of Stargate SG-1 the main adversary are the Auri, and their followers. The lead scientist on the Stargate Team, Lieutenant Colonel Samantha Carter, recently learned how to activate a device which removes those in a particular area from normal space-time. Because of this people can walk through the space they other would have occupied, even through them. When using the technology, no one can see you, but you can see them. Overly bright light can even hurt your eyes.

The way she explains it to others is that it takes you “out of phase” with the world by shifting you into an “alternate dimension.” I can easily see this as her “dumbing down” what she is saying for the intelligent but not scientifically learned military personnel she deals with.

For the longest time her direct supervisor, Jack O’Neal, told her to re-explain things multiple times, each time trying to dumb it down just a little bit more. It became a running gag, perhaps to the point that she may be in the habit even when dealing with other scientists.

There are still problems even if we assume that the non-standard or “alternate” dimensions exist and can be interacted with in all areas of our universe. First of all, if these dimensions can be interacted with, you would not shift someone into them, but rather through them, as we already exist in the non-standard dimension. Shifting someone through the alternate dimension would be similar to, say, shifting my hand 3 feet to the right.

Secondly, the way the special device works in the show, you can see what is going on around you, and bright enough light is even able to hurt your eyes. Why, then, do energy weapons based on light, or heat, pass harmlessly through a person, as was seen in the last episode?

Perhaps the special device she found and activated also creates a hologram (and sound) of what would be going on around you if you were “in phase.”

And that brings is to the term “phase” which is one of the most often mis-used words in Sci-Fi. It hails back to a sci-fi psudo-theory in which all standard matter has the same frequency of vibration in some medium, but this vibration is ‘in phase’. In other words, all matter reaches each peak of the vibration at the same time.

According to this theory, strange things happen if you change this vibration, or change what time the matter hits the peak of the motion at a different time, which is known as changing the phase. One of these weird things is that matter can pass through other matter due to the “holes in space” represented by “the space between atoms.”

First of all, different particles have different frequencies and lengths of vibration. Secondly, there aren’t “holes in matter.” Mater is made up of the interaction of electromagnetic forces between molecules. Molecules themselves are formed from electron bonding, where the electron cloud is shared between the nuclei of different atoms.

At best, if literally translated, this techno-babble would mean that all matter vibrates at the same frequency on one of the “alternate dimensions” we rarely view. But if we “change the phase” along this alternate dimension, we would still intersect with normal space two times per period.

Then there is the issue of gravity. Since you, and objects in the physical world cannot interact, One of the following should be true.

1. Gravity has an effect on the phased matter, which begins to Fall to the center of the planet.
2. If gravity of normal masses has no effect on you, then the only objects that have draw to each other and affect each other’s position are in the area that is taken out of phase, like a house or village. In that case, as you move about the house, it would actually push the house in the opposite direction from the one you were heading. You would also be in a near-weightless environment, and when you tried to walk you’d actually push yourself up towards the ceiling.

If any of my explanations sound like techno-babble to you, feel free to ask about the terms, and I’ll try to explain.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 11:01 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Terms, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.