Physicist does the math on Star Trek’s “Picard maneuver”

“And after I drew one or two diagrams, I started noticing, ‘Hey, I think I’ve thought about something like this before,’” said de Aguiar Alves.

Three images, not two

The idea behind the Picard maneuver comes from the way a faster-than-light spaceship would outrun its own light. If the spaceship were going at a constant, faster-than-light speed, then another ship at rest would see two images, corresponding to two different times when light from the ship could reach them.

But in the story, Picard’s ship isn’t going at a constant speed. He speeds up to warp speed, then stops close to the enemy ship. The Stargazer accelerates twice… and that changes the timing. After diagramming things out, de Aguiar Alves found that the enemy ship would see three images of the Stargazer, not two.

While the details were wrong, de Aguiar Alves was impressed that the episode reproduced the...

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