The voyages of the Starship Enterprise are logged via stardates, and these seemingly insignificant set of numbers are meant to mark the episode's place in the series' timeline.
They sound like serious business, but how much thought and effort is put into continuity in the Star Trek series' in terms of stardates?
Well, as Chris Higgins of mental_floss discovered, the stardate system used in the original Star Trek series was "totally bogus" by design. Here's a snippet from the series bible:
Pick any combination of four numbers plus a percentage point [ed. note: tenths digit], use it as your story's stardate. For example, 1313.5 is twelve o'clock noon of one day and 1314.5 would be noon of the next day. Each percentage point is roughly equivalent to one-tenth of one day. The progression of stardates in your script should remain constant but don't worry about whether or not there is a progression from other scripts. Stardates are a mathematical formula which varies depending on location in the galaxy, velocity of travel, and other factors, can vary widely from episode to episode.
However, the writers and directors of Star Trek: The Next Generation were given an updated system that actually worked, and with the updated system we discover that one season of the show amounts to 1,000 days:
A stardate is a five-digit number followed by a decimal point and one more digit. Example: "41254.7." The first two digits of the stardate are always "41." The 4 stands for 24th century, the 1 indicates first season. The additional three leading digits will progress unevenly during the course of the season from 000 to 999. The digit following the decimal point is generally regarded as a day counter.
Of course they still goofed here and there, but that's a way better system than "pick four random numbers and a percentage point".
Read more about Star Trek's Stardates system at mental_floss
Comments (1)
When scientists put bonobos (one of the words from the spelling bee) or macaques into a room that is alight with a tint, be it green or red, they see habituation occur in the occipital lobes of the apes. Eventually their brains stop reacting to the colored-light, it merely becomes as if it was white light. The brain habituates to the most common features in it's environment. White-light is defined by the contrast with incidental light. So it is with us, that which is most common in our environment and our experience is made transparent, invisible, undetectable. The old saying goes; we are like fish trying to find water. Because we spend our entire lives in water, and because to see water clearly would seriously impede our lives, we never experience the water except as negation.
Nothing is something in your imagination.
In the real world, nothing is nothing.
Well why didn't you say so sooner. You know how much time I've wasted wondering if nothing was really something, when all the while I just needed to hear you say how it is.
Ryan S covered the cognitive bit quite thouroughly so I'll say this about physical vacuum: its "non-emptiness" has been pretty much demonstrated 60 years ago by the Casimir effect, which I think is really cool but I might be a nerd.
If we still have a concept of vacuum in science, it's only as a reference, an ideal case, like the absolute zero (which is basically the same thing, i.e. the lowest possible energy state).
Still, in everyday life saying that your glass is empty is less confusing than stating that it is full of air.