I'm proud to say my first exposure as a child to science fiction--or to science in general--came from Star Trek, starting with the Wrath of Khan. The key for me were the images, the starscapes, the scenes of the Enterprise drifting through the Mutara Nebula. None of it made a damned bit of sense scientifically, but that didn't matter. The stories interested me, and the images were strong enough in my mind to encourage me to learn more. Star Trek inspired me to seek out true astronomy, then physics, then all the sciences until I ultimately settled on geology as a career. I consider myself fairly knowledgable now in science, especially for and American, and I credit Star Trek for starting me on this course.

So I say accuracy doesn't matter. Tell a good story, start kids or anyone else on a course, and they'll go the rest of the way.

Just don't ask them to figure out how not to post a comment to a web site twice.

My first encounter (at the age of six) with SciFI was also TOS but what really thrilled me was the anime version of "Captain Future". Here in Germany it is still considered as a cult anime, mostly because of the genuine soundtrack. For a few years in the early 90s I was a member of a Star Trek fan club, mainly to get informations.

Today I am engineer, which makes it a little hard for me to like the latest Star Trek movie. Remember Scotty being trapped in a big pipe? Luckily for him there was a flap allowing Kirk to rescue him, resulting the room being flooded with water. I can't imagine a sane engineer designing something dangerous like that. Besides this, the whole movie is the most unlogic I've ever seen.

I don't have any problems with things like "red matter", but SciFi stories must get things right, we already have today. For example in Red Thunder (by John Varley), a teenager SciFi book set in the near future, one of the protagonists is using a film camera! Teenager aren't using film cameras today, so my guess is they won't use them in the future either.

I think the main there are so unscientific plots in SciFi movies is the fact, that it's much easier to come up with an unscientific plot then a scientific one. How to create a black whole? Use red matter! What do we need for a time machine? A flux compensator of course!

As I said before, I don't have any problems with that (maybe we have red matter and the flux compensator in the near future, who knows?) but then the consequences should be considered. Creating a black whole very close to ones planet (in the Star Trek movie) is the dumbest thing to do. First, your sun is gone, which is a big problem for every living creature, second most likely the black whole will "eat" your whole planetary system.

I also don't believe that a better scientific education in school would lead to "better" SciFi movies, but a profound understanding of technology and science, like Mr Scalzi I am in favor for more science education in our ever more complex getting world. A computer can get viruses, sun blocker are full of nano technology and the steak you are eating probably comes from a cloned cow.

A reminder to everyone that there's sometimes a lag between when you submit a comment and when it appears in the comment queue. Don't panic if it doesn't show up immediately.

Just here to de-cloudify your day, Scalzi.

I can suspend my disbelief for most bad science in movies. Bad history is much, much harder for me to swallow, for some reason.

Speaking of highly entertaining bad science, I have to go through your archives to see whether you have discussed The Box yet.

My first exposure to Trek was at 7 years old, seeing "The Arena" on a crappy little black and white tv, and I was hooked for life.

Even at the time, part of what hooked me -- apart from a charismatic action hero fighting a humanoid T-Rex -- was the science. In a sequence foreshadowing MacGyver, the action hero looks around at the materials at hand and MAKES GUNPOWDER.

Red Matter was silly, but then, there is no scientific basis for Warp Drive, that I know of.

@Novembrance: me too (bad history). I think the reason I hate this is because the real history is usually much more interesting. Gladiator was a stunning example, and it was one of the main reasons I hated the movie so much.

I guess they wanted some sort of everyman so that the audience could relate, but that's just patronising.

Nah, people don't want science in their movies. That's what the Discovery and History channel are for. Star Trek science never bothered me but what bothers me is severe lack of discpline seen in Trek's chain of command. As a former Navy guy, it makes me cringe when I hear "Aye," and "Yes, sir" interchangeably, and they're not interchangeable. Plus the lack of coming to attention when a senior officer enters the room (The worst was the bridge in TNG). Perhaps they're less formal in the future but I have a hard time believing that, more than the bad science.

John, I think better science education can make scifi better. Take a look at Star Wars and George's "parsecs" flub. Obviously he knew it was a spacy kind of term, but he clearly didn't know what it actually meant. Every time I hear that line I get thrown out of the story. George's incorrect usage of parsecs doesn't destroy the movie, but it is a glaring flaw. Well, glaring to me, anyway.

I have a degree in history, and I'm actuallly much more forgiving of historical flubs than I am science flubs. I bitched A LOT about the bad science in Star Trek (but I still saw it twice in the theater, including once in IMAX), but I barely even guffawed at the bad history in Rome, Gladiator, and Braveheart. Oh don't get me wrong. I was miffed that they left the bridge out of the Battle of Stirling Bridge, and that Wallace knocked up the queen. And plate mail didn't exist when Arthur supposedly lived (and knights don't hang out at dinner in their armor), but I still love Excalibur.

Bad history doesn't render the story impossible, whereas bad science often can. "That's not how it happened" is much more forgiving than "That never could have happened."

I'm pretty aware of science. I like it, I've worked in neurobiology labs, and grew up with science nerds. I've always loved that level of "WTF?" science in movies. Red Matter? Crazy, but I love it! It's neat and nonsense and cool. It's that kind of science that's pure fantasy and yet... we want it to be real. I want to be able to route every solution through the main deflector array or throw a warp core at it.

That's not to say that there isn't plenty of stuff in movies which makes me want to tear my long, manly hair out, but I try to take it in stride. I try to go with the flow. I think that's how we enjoy movies and TV even when they're silly.

In my opinion science fiction has never actually been about the science. I think that true SciFi is actually about humanity and how we are impacted by our own growing intelligence. The science is just a catalyst that allows us to explore the what ifs about our future.

Now granted, Red Matter is a huge stretch, but then so is time travel into the past, Dilithium crystals, transporters and hand phasers that can disintegrate a person without leaving and dust of burn marks or collateral damage of any kind.

My favorite TV show over the last decade or so has been Stargate. They invented Naquadah and the idea that this small thin ring of "Alien" metal can create a wormhole to another part of the galaxy or even across multiple galaxies. Is that really all that different than a glob of "alien" goo that can open a singularity? (Well yes maybe a little, BUT It's not about the gate. It's about how we as humans react to the existence and use of the gate.

Would science education improve Science Fiction? Maybe, but doubtful. Will Science Fiction improve science? Yes. It already has. Star Trek inspired an entire generation of geeks to try to build the Enterprise. Thank Start Trek the next time you use your cell phone.

Ditto the hatred of Gladiator. I give Braveheart a little more leeway since so little was ever recorded of William Wallace's life. But Gladiator didn't even bother to stick with the historical record. I might have even given it a pass if they had said explicitly it was an alternate history. Too many people came away from that movie thinking it was true...

{getting off my soapbox now}

As for the "red matter" in Star Trek, I think it had less to do with lazy screenwriting or scientific ignorance than it did JJ Abrams' need for self-referential ego stroking.

@dcarrington There is a scientific basic for warp drive, in theory it is possible but not quite like they use it in Star Trek (In volves creating a negative matter field that actually drags time and space to the ship, thus to go from Earth to Alpha Centauri, the ship would generate the field and pull along space). Gives a me a headache.

I wish science would figure out a better way to stop me from posting horrible spelling and grammar mistakes. The current solutions are not working well at all.

If you think real world geeks don't look at that, say I want to live there, and then work to make it happen, you've not been paying attention to all the technical progress of the last few decades.

There's one glaring counterexample to that theory; 40 years back Star Trek showed us computers you could talk to. But what did we get? Telephones you have to type on.

@Keri, they did sort of correct the parsec flub in the extended universe fiction. In the first Jedi Academy book by Kevin Anderson they talk about how the Falcon's hyperspace velocity allowed it to run closer to the Kessel black hole cluster. That's why they talk about the run in parsecs. I didn't say it was a good correction, but it is a correction.

You just have to accept that in Star Trek science isn't science. It's a plot device.

Ah Sarcastro -- how well you live up to your moniker.

That 'telephone' you have to type into has more processing power than the computers guiding the lunar modules during the Apollo missions. The home computer you're no doubt using to post your comments is more powerful than the mainframes at mission control during those same lunar excursions.

We have made progress, and quite a number of innovations were prompted by what people saw on Star Trek forty years ago...

Bad science is tolerable; inconsistency is intolerable. Nothing's inherently wrong with the idea of red matter, but there's no logical reason why, if the goal is to destroy a planet, you need to put the black hole creating Macguffin in the middle of the planet.

Similarly in the Matrix sequels: Fine, I'll grant you the bad science that lets machines use humans as batteries to create the plot. But I've written programs for current robots that had more strategic competence than the Matrix machines, and who designs mechs that put the human's body outside the giant metal contraption? Science fiction authors can use bad science, but there's a point when it turns into bad writing.

The real problem with red matter is not that it's scientifically incorrect - everything in Trek is scientifically incorrect anyway.
No, the real problem is that the name sounds as if it was invented by a neanderthal. It's like calling a tricorder "box with lots of buttons", or renaming the photon torpedo "shiny explody thing". It just isn't cool.

What's funny is that I cut my computing teeth on IBM S/360s, the very machines NASA used at ground control for the moon shots. My current phone is much, much more powerful.

There's one glaring counterexample to that theory; 40 years back Star Trek showed us computers you could talk to. But what did we get? Telephones you have to type on.

HA! :-) Hey now, looky here. I don't see why I should have to suffer because some dudes from the fake future hate privacy. Give me my mini keyboard, thanks!

(And yes, Red Matter was far less about bad science, far more about obnoxious, self-referential ego-boostage. That and #$**)(*$)# Slusho. Jeeze.)

I think that science in the movies can serve two main purposes:

First, it provide limits. I tend to believe that respecting limits makes for good art, because it forces you to be more creative to stay within the limits.

Second, science is part of the set. Respecting science means that you pay attention to the details. That, again, makes for better film-making.

"Red matter" is becoming a punchline because it violates both those principles. Not that I'm surprised. I've been around Hollywood long enough to know that the approved directorial method is to modify the scenery to fit the plot, not the other way around. It's not surprising that they'd rather modify the science than let it get in the way of their "vision."

And we haven't even mentioned the life sciences. My favorite anecdote was seeing Jurassic Park 2 with a bunch of biologists. Let's see, we start on a tropical beach, allegedly in Costa Rica, with dinosaur. Cute. Then we get off the beach and find themselves in Redwood National Park. Turn the corner and, whoa, they're in New Zealand. A few minutes later, they're in Hawaii. And we're all giggling.

At this point, everyone says, "yes, but only a biologist would notice that, and there are so few of you" to which I ask something acid about why they vacation somewhere other than their back yards, if the scenery doesn't matter, and so on. But the real problem is that Hollywood generally doesn't care about the details. They figure you are going to the movie with your brain turned off, because you want to have seen this movie to fit in with your social group, or you want to have fun, or you want to score with your date, or whatever. Seems to work more or less, although their profit margins are generally shrinking.

Of course, one of the better movies for paying attention to details was The Lord of the Rings which raked in huge amounts of money. I'd suggest that maybe it was so popular because it was obvious that the moviemakers actually cared about getting it right, for once?

It is possible to write scientifically literate SF, but you have to give up some of the standard tropes. So what I do is keep the science correct on the sides, then having jump drives, stasis fields, artificial gravity get to come along for the ride as "science as done in the future". (grin)

But most SF movies don't try nearly as hard. Look at the applause and cheers which greeted the poor crewman sucked into space -- and it all went silent. Took Star Trek forty years to get that detail right.

And I do use Hollywood SF movies in my science literacy assignment, to see what the students can come up with in terms of getting things right and wrong. But John, I would argue that for a lot of majors at even prestigious universities, there's not a lot of requirement that one gets a very good basic science education.

See, it's supposed to be a liberal arts and sciences degree -- not a liberal arts degree. The sciences frequently take a short shrift in terms of quantity and quality. That said, I've seen a lot of science and engineering majors who've not had a good science literacy background.

Dr. Phil

I wouldn't assume any filmmaker knows jack squat about science just because they graduated from college, unless their degree was in a scientific discipline. This history major (with a minor in music) took classes in biology, geography, algebra, and earth sciences (a mashup of geology and physics, with a touch of chemistry thrown in) during college, and married a zoology major while there. But that doesn't mean I would have learned enough to know why red matter might be a problem in a scifi movie.

Regarding parsecs in Star Wars, Lucas explained in the commentary that Han Solo used a unit of distance instead of time because hyperspace is hyperspace, but the Falcon is so fast because it can plot more efficient courses than other ships. It's like the car that can drive from Point A to Point B in 200 miles, while another car follows a more indirect route to get to the same place. The problem is that Lucas wasn't very clear what he meant when the movie first came out, inviting one more nonsensical element to join the non-canonical absurdity that is the expanded universe in an attempt to explain it first.

Bad science I can generally live with (unless it's spectacularly glaring), bad ancient history I can put up with (although casting Sean Connery as King Arthur did make me twitch), but bad history where the participants (or their relatives) are still alive pisses me off no end. U-571, for example...

Regarding parsecs in Star Wars, Lucas explained in the commentary that Han Solo used a unit of distance instead of time because hyperspace is hyperspace...

George is full of crap. He used the word incorrectly and tried to retcon it so he didn't look like an idiot without a dictionary.

I had no problem with “red matter”, which I took to mean a condensate of isolated quarks, all of the same “color”. Certainly it would require untold energy to confine these, fighting as they would, like indeterminate cats in a sack, against Pauli Exclusion.

Originally posted in Mr Scalzi's Whatever:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/05/11/quick-review-star-trek/#comments

There's also "bad science" that is essential if you want to tell a story. To pick on Star Trek again, the Universal Translator -- which allows aliens to instantly speak perfectly idiomatic English (or whatever language you happen to have the DVD/BluRay player set to), even if you're in a first contact situation and they've not said a guttural squeak -- isn't just bad science. It's magical bull***t.

But stunned mutual incomprehension really puts a limit on the stories you can tell. :)

But stunned mutual incomprehension really puts a limit on the stories you can tell.

True dat, yet one of Trek's greatest episodes is TNG's "Darmok" which is wholly predicated upon mutual incomprehension. Hard to do every week though.

I kind of like the pilot episode of Farscape where Chrichton is jabbed with translator microbes and the alien gibberish becomes progressively more intelligible as the microbes 'take'.

...one of the better movies for paying attention to details was The Lord of the Rings...

Which is why you can see the reflection on the sky from Sauron's tower practically anywhere in Middle Earth, yet it takes an enormous amount of time to get there. Like most any story, locations, distances and travel times seem to change to meet the needs of the plot.

And really, you can pick any movie apart for this sort of thing if you want. I don't know why red matter is considered any worse than anything else. If you want a science-based Star Trek, you'll have no warp or impulse propulsion, no artificial gravity, no subspace communication, no jumping instantaneously to speeds that are significant percentages of the speed of light, no turning on a dime at full impulse without splattering your crew against the bulkheads, no transporters, no aliens that look almost exactly like humans with face tumors or strange ears, no alien interbreeding (and thus, no Spock), no aliens speaking English, and on and on. In essence, if you want Star Trek based on science, you won't have Star Trek. You might have something just as good or better, but that depends more on the story than the science.

I prefer the Babelfish myself...

You have ever listened to a serious gardener bitching about what was blooming or in leaf, or even just growing supposedly where in a movie? You could probably use all the foam as fertilizer.

To be honest, I even enjoy bitching about that kind of stuff, but I don't let it detract from a good story. I grew up on all those optimistic post-war movies, what with Crusader knights bring democracy and freedom to medieval Samarkand and the like. Let's face it, for entertainment value, the Aarne-Thompson code is much more important than the periodic table or whatever science you care to throw at the story.

I submit that the identification of scientific inaccuracies, and the subsequent handwaving geeks do in order to explain away said inaccuracies, gets people thinking about science on a much deeper level than seeing a movie that gets the science correct ever could.

The basic answer is this:

People aren't sensitive in movies to everything they happen to know.
They're sensitive specifically to the things they're sensitive to. Those'll be their pride-points.

People who say to themselves, "I'm a history buff," are annoyed by anachronisms. People who say to themselves, "I'm a science buff," are annoyed by bad science. (And so on)

I don't think teaching basic science better will massively increase the number of people who are actually interested in science (where science education is especially bad, people who are naturally inclined towards it might miss out on their actual interest, etc). And if the number of people who will exoriate a movie for bad science doesn't go up rather significantly, the people making movies won't shift.

You have to bend a few Laws of Nature to get a science-fiction story going - like FTL travel - otherwise we'd never get past "the impact of the automobile on civilization" stories (like "The Magnificent Ambersons").

On the other hand, things don't go "BOOM!" in space!!!"

The problem is that most writers now are MFA or film school grads, and they don't know sh*t about sh*t.

And I say that as an MFA grad.

They know about Freitag's Triangle, and dick about anything else.

So they can't distinguish between science and fantasy bullcrap. To their ears it's all just "blah blah blah plot point blah blah blah."

But you know what would be cool?!? Let's have Spock make out with Uhura!!!

So it'd be great if primary and secondary schools taught better science. But they sure ain't gonna get any science in their writing workshops.

So Trek has got some shady science eh John? If you are such a purist I'm sure you'll be happy to answer some of these questions.

Hows does the Skip Drive obey the laws that a Warp Drive does not?

If there less than a five percent difference between the human genome and the chimpanzee genome how does removing most of the human genome leave you with something that is super-human and not less human(say like a jellyfish)?

Assuming you accept Sir Arthur Clarke's notation of apes and angels how is it that mankind stumbles upon
a large number of species that are at same technological
as we are?

If the aliens in your novels are in fact at a higher or lower technological level why isn't mankind
A. at the brink of extinction
or
B. driving other species into extinction

Why are humans in the far off future
1. Still using railguns (in space no less)
2. Using WWII era combat tactics

"The former went to the University of Texas at Austin, a fine public university, and the latter attended Wesleyan University, consistently ranked as one of the best private colleges in the country. Director J.J. Abrams went to Sarah Lawrence College, also one of the most prestigious private colleges out there. The chance that these three don't have a better-than-average grounding in basic science, both in high school and then in college, seems pretty slim"

Yikes. Great article, but that is one of the most staggeringly naive remarks I've ever read. Having lived the experience at considerable expense, I can assure you the fact that someone went to an extremely prestigious school doesn't mean they know any more about a given subject, particularly if it involves science or mathematics, than your cat does. Be careful out there.

Movies have a tough time depicting things realisitcally (the issue extends way beyond the scientific realm - a lot of movie dialogue is comically unrealistic) because they have time and picture constraints that would make realistic depictions unbelievably boring.

Aries1989:

"If you are such a purist"

There's your first error. I like lightsabers and green-skinned humanoid aliens as much as the next guy, as well as speculative elements with room to imagine how they work, or not.

What I'm not so fond of is when screenwriters can't be bothered to get correct the science we already know, thus leading to things like Spock's monologue, in which a) a supernova threatens the entire galaxy, b) suddenly and unexpectedly destroys a planet not in its own system, c) two starships travel get sucked into a black hole without being destroyed. All of which is complete pants.

Just to agree with several previous comments on the assumption that anyone who went to a well-known university knows their science. I did a double major in Computer Science and Art at a major university and I have to say that Linear Algebra and Compiler Theory classes are quite different from Film Comedy and Drawing II, and I didn't notice a lot of overlap between the two departments. The major difference between the worlds of Hollywood and science is that the Hollywood types were in those art classes and the science types were in those math and science classes. Movie science is bad because the people who make the movies are mathematical and scientific illiterates, unable to understand the incredible drama and wonder of true exploratory science and applied reason. Since they aren't capable of understanding anything complex and worthwhile, they make stuff up.

So - if Star Trek said 'Red Matter; even the Vulcans don't understand how it works... it was given to them by the Consu' - would that be a more appropriate way to explain to the masses?

(p.s. re-read OMW last night, for the 4th or 5th time... still can't put it down)

I think science education has almost nothing to do with the quality of science in science fiction.

Don't get better education; get better writers. It's a matter of simple laziness. I'm an amateur writer with a complete aversion to math and applied science (though I can follow theories just fine) and I know there's no way to create a black hole out of noncomplex, nonmassive matter inside a canister. A CERN-in-a-box (does it make even smaller black holes?) would have been more believable than that.

The bottom line is that it would take another day or two to shoehorn a different plot device or two into the script and maybe another day to make one as sinister and horrifying, visually, as "red goo".

IMO, "Red Matter" is incredibly lazy.

It's as bad as Cameron's mysterious "Unobtainium" in Avatar aka, "Dances with Smurfs"....

Red matter--fine, I can accept that. It's the internal contradiction that bothered the heck of me: if Spock only needed a few drops to do the trick, why was he flying around with what looked to be a couple hundred gallons of the stuff?

You hit the nail on the head in differentiating science from storytelling. Very seldom do I read something and think, "yes, that exactly expresses my viewpoint." Thanks!

Except that I have to agree with bmn regarding science education at universities. As a University of Texas graduate (liberal arts), I can say without a doubt that the required science is minimal and requiring minimal thought and knowledge. My children have experience in both a well-ranked private university and in a large public university; spotty may be the best way to describe their education in science in those venues: there is no good general science education required.

PrisonGuy said: "Star Trek science never bothered me but what bothers me is severe lack of discpline seen in Trek's chain of command. As a former Navy guy, it makes me cringe when I hear "Aye," and "Yes, sir" interchangeably, and they're not interchangeable. Plus the lack of coming to attention when a senior officer enters the room (The worst was the bridge in TNG)."

I sympathize. What we actually saw on TV on STTNG was actually better than what Roddenberry originally wanted to give us, he had grown to detest anything military-slanted by the time he made STTNG and wanted to emphasize that Starfleet was NOT a military, as such.

(His contempt was on display in the STTNG pilot when he has Picard make reference to a 20th century military uniform as 'costumes like that'.)

The original conception for the bridge set for STTNG had a long frickin' BENCH, no consoles or controls at all, some plants around, everything run by voice command, nothing to suggest any sort of hierarchy. Saner heads prevailed, but those three seats side-by-side are on the bridge set, and the apparent importance of a 'counselor' implied by having one of the 3 center seats, is a remnant of that original set.

It's no coincidence that STTNG is often seen as having gotten better in later seasons, after Gene Roddenberry's direct hand was off the controls. Same deal with the movies, Roddenberry had a close hand in making that first Trek movie and much less creative control later, and most viewers see that later movies as better.

(Not necessarily more plausible or scientitic, but certainly more entertaining.)

I could grant the combined army/navy rankings, this is centuries in the future and I could imagine political changes that might produce that. Ditto the 'not standing' part for flag officers, I could imagine practical reasons why that custom might die out or not transfer well to space.

What I absolutely can't grant, and what's a more serious example of the actual underlying problem, is the total disregard for the _concept_ of discipline.

Likewise, in the Trek movie we see Academy graduate Kirk go _directly to command of a capitol warship_ right ouf the frickin' Academy!

Granted after the events of the movie he might be promoted a level, or seen as being on a fast track, but direct to senior command? Absolutely not, it would NEVER happen that way, unless every single line officer and all of Starfleet's experienced personnel were dead. Even if that happened, they'd be more likely to call a retiree back to duty than put a 20-something, wet-behind-the-ears ensign in the captain's seat.

This last goes beyond bad science and bad writing to sheer lunacy.

Edgehopper said: "Bad science is tolerable; inconsistency is intolerable"

Exactly! It's perfectly plausible that we'll find someday that our current ideas of physics are wrong or imcomplete. Fission power and nuclear bombs, for comparison, are completely impossible...by the Daltonian atomic theory. It turned out Dalton's theory was wrong.

But the 'bad science' needs to be at least a little bit consistant, the 'rules of the story' thought out...and the way people _use_ the future tech should make some kind of sense! That means no developing revolutionary new tech for one use and then forgetting it exists, even if it would make a great tool in some later situation.

For ex, in the new movie, we see Scotty establish that he can 'beam' someone across interstellar distances onto a starship travelling faster than light. Wow! That ought to _completely revolutionize military and travel tech in the Federation._ Will it? Probably not. Odds are they'll forget it happened.

Likewise, Red Matter might be acceptable as an example of Clark's Third Law in action (i.e. advanced tech beyond a certain point is indistinguishable from magic, just as television would be magic to a Neandertal.) But...even if we can't know how it makes a black hole to order, we can say with reasonable confidence that the black hole would not behave, AT ALL, like the thing we see in the movie behaves.

Bad science is a debatable thing, bad writing (which is what has reduced Trek, over the years, to a very bad joke) is intolerable and toxic.

Of all the incarnations of Trek, TOS is actually the least bad about scientific howlers. It made some, and it sure bent the laws of nature, but...the writers were at least somewhat consistant, and gave a little thought to the implications of things, in ways that they never did for any of the movies, or any of the successor series. In certain ways TOS is more realistic than any other Trek incarnation.

Red Matter was quite obviously the result product placement.

There is little doubt in my mind that Target gave money (or some significant incentive) to the production of Star Trek in order to get one of their signature logos featured so prominently.

After all, every Target store I've ever seen has several large red balls outside their door that look exactly like the Red Matter ball hovering in Spock's ship. Who needs science when one has advertising to fall back on?

Wow, hard to believe, at least two people here agree that getting the science we now know wrong is inexcusable in SF (especially since I've said that here before as well as on the Whatever blog, not to mention several other places.)
I also totally agree with HC above except I think he left out the most outrageous idiocy: a senior officer porking an undergrad and one in his direct chain of command at that. Just so everyone could rejoice in Spock finally getting some. Incredible. (I also agree that all the Star Trek incarnations got better quickly once Roddenberry had no direct influence)
I disagree that better science education won't help this problem though. In general, (though there are egregious exceptions, see one very Bad Astronomer), the more one knows about a subject, the higher one's threshold of suspending disbelief rises. This is true for me not only in my area of expertise, physics and astronomy, but also in areas where I'm a knowledgeable amateur, such as history.
John's point about the education of the writers and director of the latest Star Trek is misguided (I've taught at Wesleyan, btw). These folks undoubtedly received a good liberal arts education, but that says very little about their SCIENCE education, or about their critical thinking skills. Your typical non-science major at Wesleyan takes one or two survey science courses, if that. If you have decent study skills and a decent memory, you can very often get at least a B in these courses, even at a good school, without really learning anything about the PROCESS of science (or you can learn a lot in some cases, how much is largely driven by the skill and personality of the individual prof).
While everything in the previous paragraph is true, it's not as important as the fact that in general the writers and producers just don't give a crap. They have no RESPECT for the intellect and intelligence of their prospective viewers, which is why there are so many OTHER plot and logic holes. Of course, box office figures unfortunately give them no reason to change their behavior. (obvious example: one of Abrams earlier travesties, Armageddon, beat the much better written and much more scientifically accurate Deep Impact at the box office by about $200M to $140M (I think both of those numbers are just domestic)).

HC wrote: I sympathize. What we actually saw on TV on STTNG was actually better than what Roddenberry originally wanted to give us, he had grown to detest anything military-slanted by the time he made STTNG and wanted to emphasize that Starfleet was NOT a military, as such.

I reply: I often wonder what "The Great Bird of the Galaxy" would have made of the latter seasons of Deep Space Nine where the Federation not only gets into a prolonged and brutal war with The Dominion, but covert forces within Starfleet itself created -- and released -- a genocidal plague, and our hero is complicit in a murder that brings the Romulans into the war on the Federation's side. Not at all, I suspect, but there's no way of knowing for sure.

John is right, of course. I'd put it this way: the quality of big-budget SF movies won't budge, education or no, as long as the current profit model works. If you have the resources for a massive and sufficiently well-executed promotional blitz, plus wide release in around four thousand theatres, you can get enough curiosity and enough bums in seats in your first two weekends to more than pay for the production and marketing budgets. Even if box office sinks like a stone after that (as it often does owing to negative word of mouth), it won't sink fast enough to keep the production from making money hand over fist. Lather, rinse, repeat for the international market, and you have an investment that repays you four or five times over regardless of the quality of the product.

The story of Star Trek's box office success is largely the story of that profit model: efficient marketing compensating for mediocre filmmaking. So too with the Star Wars prequels, the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels,
the Matrix sequels... any number of films (rightly) denounced as shite despite profitable runs at the box office. Nobody much cared for the Matrix sequels, and I suspect the people who went gaga over the Star Trek reboot -- which consisted of absolutely nothing more than slapping a Michael Bay-style action formula on a recognizable brand (with a few moments of Abrams' signature self-referential wankery thrown in for good measure) -- will feel in retrospect much like Vanilla Ice's "fans" did when they finally really listened to "Ice Ice Baby" and realized how ridiculous it was. But, meh. The studio has their money. And they'll have it again when they roll out the next marketing blitz, provided they get the blitz right.

@BlueFairlane

Actually, as far as interbreeding is concerned, they DID have a "plausible" explanation for that.

If you recall, there was a TNG episode where it was discovered that there was a Progenitor intelligent species that put a message into the DNA of various worlds' then-current species that a) evolved into the current intelligent species and b) thereby made them genetically similar; the episode was (eventually) about decoding and playing back the message (sorry, I can't remember the name - perhaps one of you readers will know).

Actually, this was a splendid conceit, though I don't know how "scientific" it was - it does sound plausible, at least.

@jravin: Humans can't even interbreed with gimps, who share 90% of our genome. That TNG episode was no less nonsensical than anything that preceded it, more's the pity.

Uhhh, "gimps" should be "chimps" in the above. That's a bit of a Freudian slip, there...

Old blog entry by internet time, but I feel compelled to comment regardless.

All of the arguments I see here against 'bad science' or 'bad history' or 'bad geographical segues' is really summed up in the same concept that can /always/ make a movie a difficult watch-- breaking the suspension of disbelief.

This is a basic concept that actors are introduced to very early on-- that if people cannot suspend or otherwise ignore their reasonable knowledge to enjoy the story/human drama, then much of the failure is on your part (for being an unconvincing actor, in this case). Granted, we all know someone who goes to a horror movie and points out all the innaccuracies in anatomy or physics just to keep themselves from screaming like a little girl when someone gets their head sliced clean off with a kitchen knife. It's the same thing, in a different way-- forcing themselves to cling to disbelief to not soil themselves.

In the case of movies, I think there is a lot of pressure and pride on the shoulders of moviemakers to make it seem 'as real as possible'. With our modern special effects, we can do that-- but we've raised the standards so high that there is no burden on moviegoers to suspend their disbelief and just enjoy the f'n movie. They expect to be drawn in, and -anything- that jars them out of their involvement in the story-- an inaccuracy that suddenly crushes their fragile grasp on an imagined reality-- is a travesty, and affront, and 'ruins the entire movie'.

Granted, I've had the same experiences-- the more you know about a subject, the more you notice when a lot of other people are doin' it wrong. From science to cultural and language accuracy, I cringe when I see a glaring error that passes the threshold of belief and throws me out of my comfortable passive intake of the story. But at the same time, I think that the burden is on the audience to determine whether they believe they are watching a documentary or if they are trying to enjoy a story being laid out in front of them through whatever medium.

It's not easy to pull our worn and tattered imaginations out of the box we hide it in when we pretend to be adults, but it makes moviegoing a lot more tolerable.

No excuse for poor acting and directing, though. Psh.

"I think there is a lot of pressure and pride on the shoulders of moviemakers to make it seem 'as real as possible'. "

On the contrary, I think there's relatively little such pressure. The pressure is to deliver a spectacle that will make money; niggling details like an actually coherent plot are disposable. (You can, after all, expect about 50% of the audience to defend the most laughable contrivances with even more laughable bromides like "if you went to [this-movie-that-I-totally-did-not-waste-my-money-on] expecting an Oscar-worthy plot, then [insert equivalent of 'suck-my-totally-not-suckered-penis-you-elitist-bastard']" until the cows come home.) Abrams' Trek is a case in point.