Star Trek: Discovery science advisers explain the science behind The Burn

Several starships explode in flames in The Burn, in Star Trek: Discovery

JANUARY 18, 2021 - Do you know what caused The Burn? Do you want to know?

Season three of Star Trek: Discovery, which just ended, centered around a catastrophic event called The Burn. When the Discovery crew landed in 3188, they found that The Burn had, more than 100 years prior, caused starships all over the galaxy to spontaneously explode, leaving a dilithium shortage and the Federation in tatters.

Over the course of the season, we learned the source of The Burn, but how did the science behind it all work? In a new piece on StarTrek.com, science advisers Dr. Erin Macdonald and Dr. Mohamed Noor explain just that.

The first thing to know is that dilithium isn’t what makes warp drives “go”, it’s merely a stabilizer for the matter-antimatter reaction in a warp core. In the StarTrek.com piece, Drs. Macdonald and Noor explain: “In order to build a warp bubble and ‘go to warp’, the ship needs an extremely high amount of energy to warp spacetime. In today’s physics, when matter and antimatter (like protons and antiprotons, or electrons and positrons) meet, they annihilate themselves and release energy. [...] That’s where dilithium comes in: it regulates these reactions to keep them from going out of control or ‘going critical’.”

The other thing to know about dilithium is that it has a subspace component. Quoting StarTrek.com again: “The crystalline structure of dilithium that is both in normal as well as subspace (and if you’d like, refers to the ‘di’ part of dilithium) makes it a unique regulator for the amount of energy being released.”

To tell you more would be spoilers for those who haven’t seen it, but I will say that the remaining scientific explanation for The Burn is a dizzying combination of physics, genetics and evolutionary biology. If you’re a science nerd (and there’s a good chance you are), the full StarTrek.com piece is worth a read.

And if you’re interested in learning more about Dr. Mohamed Noor’s work on Star Trek, and his latest web series, called BioTrekkie with the Admiral featuring Discovery’s own Jayne Brook, make sure you check out the Daily Star Trek News YouTube channel. Last week, Dr. Noor and I had a chat about what it’s like being a science adviser and how his new series came to be.