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Eugene’s limit Janet Kuypers 1/23/15 Just read an article from the daily Times of India newspaper that relayed the theory that an interstellar-style wormhole may exist in the Milky Way. That there’s this “teleporting” tunnel we could magically step through that just pops us out, somewhere else in the Universe. But really, a wormhole’s just a theory with a catchy little name that has no basis in reality. And no one’s ever found a stable wormhole — even Data and La Forge left the Barzan wormhole after discovering how unstable it really was. So I guess Star Trek has to settle for going beyond the speed of light with their precious warp drive... And you know, scientists have only now been able to finally figure out how to slow down the speed of light — (warning, science content: researchers say that applying a “mask” to an optical beam, which would give it spatial structure, can reduce it’s speed an infinitesimally small amount from that beautiful constant. 299 million, 792 thousand, 458 metres per second...) And if all we’ve been able to do is try to slow down the speed of light, how will we ever get to Eugene’s limit of warp ten? You know, it’s really cute, how we come up with names for scientific discoveries, “The Big Bang” wasn’t a bang when there wasn’t any atmosphere to allow sound to travel; “dark matter” isn’t dark at all, it’s just a name one scientist said that for some reason stuck; “Eugene’s limit” is an homage in the Next Generation to Gene Roddenberry who thought that warp drive shouldn’t go past ten... Yeah, thanks to Gene Roddenberry, by the 24th century, infinite velocity was the unattainable warp factor ten. But wait a minute, let me get back to the science here, because when it comes of those science geeks who come up with these theories like the Big Bang or dark matter, they try to bring Star Trek into the real world... They’re trying dilithium now to try to increase speed for distance travel for a future journey to Mars. And I don’t know how many years scientists have been trying to transport even an atom to anywhere else in the world... But you know, with these scientist’s minds out there… well, the writer Gene Roddenberry may have come up with a warp drive limit, but when scientists are taking their cues from the Star Trek world, the sky may not be the limit any longer.

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