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Inertial Mass Separate From Gravitational Mass?
CPerdue writes with this excerpt from the MIT arXiv blog:
"The equivalence principle is one of the more fascinating ideas in modern science. It asserts that gravitational mass and inertial mass are identical. Einstein put it like this: the gravitational force we experience on Earth is identical to the force we would experience were we sitting in a spaceship accelerating at 1g. Newton might have said that the m in F=ma is the same as the ms in F=Gm1m2/r^2. ... All that changes today with the extraordinary work of Endre Kajari at the University of Ulm in Germany and a few buddies. They show how it is possible to create situations in the quantum world in which the effects of inertial and gravitational mass must be different. In fact, they show that these differences can be arbitrarily large."
Reverse engineering things like Star Trek to come up with plausible explanations is lots of fun.
My take on near misses with photon torpedoes making "bang" sounds and throwing people around the bridge (besides the needs of dramatic presentation). ... ... ...
Reverse engineering things like Star Trek to come up with plausible explanations is fucking stupid.
They weren't engineered to begin with, and, let's face it, Star Trek is terrible science fiction.
Trying to reconcile StarTrek's bullshit with physics is pointless masturbation. Just accept the fact that it's wrong, that the people who wrote it / approved it don't know/care what they're writing/approving, and that you need explosions and shitty plot twists to keep people's attention.