Star Trek

Thought the remake was done quite well. There may have been a couple things in the storyline that could have been a little better, but in general I thought they did a really good job not messing things up and retelling the story. I liked the movie a lot for the most part. The only thing I REALLY had a problem with is the way they depicted the light beams moving in a circle around people when they were tranporting. Does anyone else agree that light travels in a straight line and can't move in a circle the way they showed it, which in turn made the effect look fake? It is my personal belief that they should not have messed with the way it was done originally. It was originally done in a way that looked very realistic and fit the rules of light travel the way I understand them. They messed it up by making it look like somrthing that, in real life, would not be possible!

ok. Let's talk "impossible".

Take a person's body, break it up into a data stream, deposit it however many kilometres away from its original point, and expect that person to be (a) not only still alive, but (b) entirely unaffected by the experience.

What makes the light dance around is a thousand tiny fireflies all whizzing in a circle because they are attracted to the smell of Spock.

Please define "realistic" considering that transporters aren't real; that the "original" effect was created with glitter in water being stirred; and, what the "rules of light travel" are for breaking matter down into atomic elements and reassembling these elements into a real person? Thanks. 

I don't really like it either, but only because I think it looks bad. There's no real "science" to the transporters, anyway.

I really like the effect my self. Energy swirls swarming over the surface or an object or body recording and mapping the placement of every atom converting that into energy and beaming that energy to a distant location and reasembling it exsactly as it was with out killing the living being.

So what we are seeing is the energy moving over the surface. The light we see from that energy is still moving in a straight line to our eyes.

It was a great effect.

Course it's the single most impossiable thing about Star Trek and not real at all. Never was, never will be.

Don't know if any of you know this or not, but...Gene Roddenberry, who created the original Star Trek made it a point to go out of his way to use as much "reality" or at least actual theory in the series and moviesas he could. Wherever possible he did use things that actually did exist or that at least existed in theory. Scientists actually did even PROVE that Anti-matter does exist. In 1995, they created anti-matter in a laboratry and kept it in existence for .053 seconds! In 1966, when Roddenberry created the series, anti-matter was a theory that someone else came up with. 

Now as to " what the "rules of light travel" are for breaking matter down into atomic elements and reassembling these elements into a real person?"

Don't know if you ever heard of it or not...but in REAL life there is this branch of science that is called PHYSICS. It is very real. Go ahead...check it out. It's not something that I made up or anyhting like that!

Well, Here is one of the dictionary definitions:

physics  plural of phys·ics (Noun)Noun The branch of science concerned with the nature and properties of matter and energy.

Well it is a proven fact in Physics that matter and energy are interchangeable. Matter can be changed into energy and energy can be changed into matter. I'm no scientist so I'm not , in any way, going to try to make it look like I know the actual process, but I do know that it is true and you are welcome to check the facts.

Now......there are NO "rules of light travel" are for breaking matter down into atomic elements and reassembling these elements into a real person?"

Or for anything else specific, for that matter, but there MOST DEFINITELY  are rules concerning how a beam of light is capable of traveling! If you have any brains at all you do know that light travels from stars to the earth. Light is not a living thing and has no say in how it travels. It is only capable of traveling in a straight line, unless it is reflected off of something else. Light will continue to travel in that same direction until it either is reflected off of something else or until it is absorbed by somethig. A beam of light will never travel in a curving  direction. It is not capable of moving that way! Also, in case you didn't realize it before.....LIGHT IS A FORM OF ENERGY!!! So to all you people that THINK that a transporter is not even a possibility, you are DEFINITELY wrong! I don't know that it would ever work with living tissue, But the idea that we could transport items made of solid matter...DEFINITELY A VERY REAL POSSIBILITY IN THE FUTURE!

Certainly there are rules in physics, but as far as a fictional adventure series goes (Star Trek is, in essence, a space opera) the "reality" of light effects in the transporter are really quite secondary to the matter of "that which looks cool". Let's face it, beaming itself may have been couched in fancy scientific terms, but really came about as a way of saving money on special effects.