In 2008, theoretical physicist, Dr. Michio Kaku published a book entitled, “Physics of the Impossible.” This non-fiction book is described as “A Scientific Exploration Into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel” in which Dr. Kaku has, in a sense, taken all the cool, science fiction technologies that movie producers have used over the years, and sorted them into three classes of “impossibility.” Class 1 would be technologies that are impossible today, but do not violate the known laws of physics. Class 2 is technologies that are impossible today, and walk a fine line with the laws of physics, right between what’s improbable and impossible. Finally, Class 3 is technology that completely violates the known laws of physics, and thus, cannot exist.

This is relevant because two of arguably the coolest pieces of technology used in the Star Trek films are based on concepts that Dr. Kaku has classified in his book. Teleportation and Time Travel are concepts that might once have been thought to be complete science fiction nonsense, but are actually not out of the realm of possibility.

To start, I’ll discuss the idea of “warp drives.” As it stands, warp drive would actually be a class 3 impossibility because the current laws of physics state that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Warp drive is needed because the interstellar and intergalactic federations exist such vast distances from each other. There would have to be a way for characters to transport quickly from one place in the universe to another, otherwise the majority of the movie would be spent with the characters waiting while traveling through empty space. If this were the case, then characters in other parts of the galaxy would live their entire lives, and eventually die, just waiting for other characters to arrive, who by the way, would also be dead by the time they got there. Now, if you’re a viewer who can suspend your own disbelief that objects can’t travel faster than light, there is still one fundamental problem to deal with. Assuming you could travel faster than light to arrive at your destination in a timely fashion, even thought you get there faster, the person or group of people who were waiting for you will not have been traveling at warp speeding, meaning they lived all the minutes and hours you had the convenience of skipping over. The creators of Star Trek decided to ignore this physical concept and portray warp drive the way they did because without it, there would have been no franchise (and if there was it would probably would have sucked).

While there are numerous problems with “warp drives”, time travel is not out of the question. The idea of time travel has to do with Albert Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity. Under this theory, there are two postulates. The Relativity Postulate, stating that the laws of physics are the same in every inertial reference frame. As a consequence of this, there is no preferred reference frame and no concept of absolute time. The second postulate is the Speed of Light Postulate, which states that the speed of light in a vacuum in any reference frame is always the same and as a consequence of this, there exists what’s known as time dilation. This is what makes time travel possible. In a sense, we are always time traveling, just based on the activities we do on a daily basis. For example, if you drive on the highway for 10 hours at a constant speed on 80 miles per hour, you arrive at a point in time that is fractionally ahead of others at your destination. The same applies to people who fly on airplanes or spaceships. However, the difference in time is so unbelievably small that it’s negligible. Not to mention that everyone is always traveling somewhere, so eventually it all evens out. To travel noticeably into the future, one would have to achieve unimaginable velocities; speeds far greater than any man made object has ever traveled. In doing this, said “time travelers” would experience less time compared to people not traveling at that velocity, and thus arrive at a point in time where others have lived longer than you; in other words, arrive “in the future.”

Secondly, I would like to discuss teleportation. In Star Trek, the transporter is used to beam characters from the ship, down to planets, and back. The transporter is necessary because it allows characters to move quickly where otherwise they would have to use a smaller space ship, or some sort of a re-entry capsule. I don’t believe teleportation is as much of a necessity as warp drive in the movie because we still see the characters getting around using small space ships and pods; but nonetheless, it looks cool.

According to Dr. Kaku, teleportation is a Class 1 impossibility. But how could this be class 1 when time travel is class 2? Especially given that I just stated that everyone is technically time traveling every day. The fact is, everyday, we teleport information. Think of a fax machine. When sending a fax, the machine takes information in one location, and sends it somewhere else, and an exact copy of that information can be reproduced in a location other than the original. Seems easy enough, so why not start shoving people into fax machines? If we set aside the obvious limitations of that problem, the real issue is that fax machines are not designed to transfer matter or energy. In order to send a person, or an object, you would technically be sending a 3D fax, where the atoms of one item would be completely disassembled in one location, and transferred to another location where they would be reassembled in the same exact manner as the original. In a sense, it’s not so much a physics problem as much as it is an engineering challenge to design a machine that allows for that to happen.