'Star Trek' ensures physics top billing

RENOWNED American physicist Lawrence Krauss has devoted his career to quantum mechanics, the fate of the universe and hidden spacetime dimensions. But what do the punters want to know about? Star Trek.

Not that Professor Krauss, who is here for Australian Science Week and the Melbourne Writers Festival, minds in the least: he's cashed in on it. His 1995 book The Physics of Star Trek was a bestseller and his public lecture on the topic sells out.

Star Trek showcases the sexy side of science, he says - aliens and teleportation. ''Warp drive [faster-than-light travel] is the big one, and the transporter, but people are also asking questions about the holodeck and cloaking,'' he said. ''These things get in the newspapers, too. I explain to people that if you're a scientist and you're trying to get attention, just come up with a Star Trek name for whatever you're working on and the media will pick up on it.''

True, although the ''cloaking'' and ''teleportation'' breakthroughs of real-world science bear no resemblance to Star Trek technology. Take warp drive: ''We're not going to see light speed or close-to-light-speed travel, not only in our lifetime, but ever,'' he says. ''It's a matter of using the Trek phenomenon as a hook to talk about the real universe. People are either intimidated or bored by the real universe but fascinated by science fiction.''

That's a shame, says Professor Krauss, who is based at Arizona State University's BEYOND centre for fundamental science, headed by former Australian scientist Paul Davies. The real universe, he says, is far more interesting, not to mention stranger, than the one from Star Trek. Did you know, for example, that our universe may well be one of many? That 75 per cent of the universe is made of an explained force called dark energy? And that this force - 13.7 billion years after the big bang - is driving the universe apart at an ever-increasing rate?

''Dark energy is the biggest mystery in space,'' he says. ''[It] has changed our vision of the future remarkably.''

And a bizarre future it promises to be. Eventually, dark energy will drive all other galaxies out of sight. ''Astronomers in the far future will come up with completely the wrong idea of what the universe is.''

http://www.theage.com.au/national/star-trek-ensures-physics-top-billing-20090822-euhm.html