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- Dozens of inventions, from mobile phones to ion engines,
that first appeared in the Star Trek television series are explained in
a new exhibition that opens today at the Science Museum in London.
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- Visitors to Star Trek: Federation Science, which runs
until next April, will have the opportunity to try out voice-recognition
technology, thermal- imaging devices and a medical scanner measuring blood
oxygen levels - all of which were used by characters such as Captain James
T. Kirk and Captain Jean-Luc Picard long before they became reality.
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- The displays, which also feature explanations of the
scientific principles behind some of the more ambitious "treknology"
that has not yet been realised, were opened yesterday by Marina Sirtis,
the British actress who plays Counsellor Deanna Troi in Star Trek: The
Next Generation.
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- There is a virtual-reality simulation of one Star Trek
perennial that scientists consider to be rather less feasible: the transporter,
a teleportation device that gave rise to the original show's most famous
line: "Beam me up." Ms Sirtis said that she was proud to have
appeared in a show that was always intended by its creator, Gene Roddenberry,
to be based on solid scientific principles that represented a reasonable
vision of the future.
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- "Star Trek has always been regarded as a science
fiction show, but even as we were shooting it we always knew there was
science fact there as well," she said. "The writers spoke to
scientists and they made sure that what was there was scientifically feasible."
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- As a result, many of the devices used by successive crews
of the Starship Enterprise, since the first episode in 1966, have proved
remarkably similar to actual technology since developed by scientists.
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- The cellular networks used by mobile phones operate on
the same principle as the communicators used by Captain Kirk, and floppy
disks, touch-sensitive computer controls, automatic sliding doors and language-translation
software were all featured on the Enterprise long before they became parts
of modern life. More surprising was the revelation by Nasa scientists last
month that the unmanned spacecraft Deep Space 1, which is on a mission
to explore the outer solar system, had run for more than 200 days on power
supplied by an ion engine - another Star Trek device, using a stream of
electrically charged gas to produce thrust.
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- In the Federation Science exhibition, visitors can use
some of the smaller-scale applications of Star Trek technology for themselves.
In the first display, a mock-up of the Enterprise bridge, you can train
a computer to recognise your voice, then call up information about Star
Trek characters with vocal commands.
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- A heat-sensitive camera records visitors' profiles as
thermal images, in similar fashion to the visor worn by Chief Engineer
Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and a recreation of
the ship's sickbay offers a demonstration of today's best equivalent of
the "tricorder" medical scanners. Another medical device in
the series, the syringe that uses compressed air in place of a hypodermic
needle, is also now available.
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- The exhibition goes on to explain the differences between
matter and antimatter, and how the combination of the two might one day
be able to power a spacecraft in similar fashion to the Enterprise. At
present that is far beyond what scientists can achieve: antimatter is impossible
to store, because as soon as it meets a matter molecule, the two are annihilated.
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- Other aspects of Star Trek, too, are likely to remain
science fiction. Although scientists have managed to "beam" single
particles of matter from one place to another, the idea that this technology
might also teleport human beings is dismissed by experts. There is no danger,
either, of scientists inventing the warp drive which allows the Enterprise
to travel faster than the speed of light.
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- "Nice idea, but not likely," the exhibition's
guidebook admits. "According to Einstein, no object can move faster
than light."
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