Vulcans Never, Ever Smile

One of the first staff meetings I attended concerned a script that had come in from the outside, and was considered insufficiently exciting. The consensus was that it needed a good injection of crew jeopardy so that it wouldn't drag. That could be difficult because it had to make sense in the context of the existing story, and, to keep from sending the episode over budget, it had to be cheap to film even though special effects are generally costly. I had what I thought was an idea that fit those constraints and, even more exciting (for me), an idea rooted in real astrophysics. I took about half a minute to pitch it, and for the first time everyone's attention was focused on me, the new guy. When it was over I turned to my boss, a producer who was a gruff middle-aged former NYPD homicide detective. He stared at me for a moment, his face totally unreadable. Then he said, with great force, "Shut up, you f––king egghead!"

That producer and I eventually became close enough that when he later sensed he was going to be axed, he gave me advice on what to do in the unlikely event that I survived. (No. 1: never mention the "old days." No. 2: when you do see the inevitable pink slip coming, turn down the heat on your swimming pool.) One thing I learned from him is that I had had it backward. The fun in "Star Trek" didn't come from copying science, but from having science copy it. My job wasn't to put real science into "Star Trek," but to imagine new ideas that hadn't yet been thought of.

If that sounds farfetched, then consider this article that appeared in a recent issue of the academic journal Science: "Quantum Teleportation Between Distant Matter Qubits." OK, the teleportation distance was only a meter, it concerned only a single atom and it was only 90 percent successful. Yes, you're still better off walking. And yet, it is the same concept from the show, an example of science and technology following art. And it is only one of many. Rob Haitani, product design architect for PalmOne Inc., says that his first sketches for the user interface of the popular handheld personal computers were influenced by the design of the Enterprise bridge panels. During his Apple design days, Wozniak would leave work and go to his apartment to watch "Star Trek" reruns, then head back, inspired to toil late into the night. And Stephen Hawking, who has a photo of his appearance on an episode of "Star Trek" hanging on the wall in his office, told me that in his opinion a matter/antimatter engine—another "Star Trek" staple—might be the eventual key to interstellar travel. (How did a brainiac like Hawking end up on a silly sci-fi drama? He was on a visit to Paramount to promote a film based on "A Brief History of Time" when he mentioned he had always wanted to visit the Enterprise and asked if he could be taken from his wheelchair and placed in the captain's chair. The writers went a step further and added a scene with him in it.)

Having spawned or inspired these ideas is not what made "Star Trek" a success, but it does give a clue to what the franchise has done right. In the years after World War II, American industry produced a stream of revolutionary innovations, such as the transistor and laser, prompting many to ask the same question about the success of American industry that I am asking about "Star Trek." Many, such as Geoffrey West, president of the famed Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, believe the spurt of invention happened because places like Bell Labs fostered "a culture of free thinking without which it's hard to imagine how these ideas could have come about." The vision of teleportation, warp drive, tricorders, holodecks, a huge assortment of strange aliens and cultures, and cocoa beans aged 400 years for use in Thalian chocolate mousse are all products of my favorite part of working on "Star Trek," the franchise's own atmosphere of free thinking. What sets "Star Trek" apart is the imagination put into every detail, from the set and prop design, to the issues raised in the episodes, to the backstory of the various cultures depicted. Only on "Star Trek" could you have been encouraged one week to examine whether an android could be a sentient being and fantasize on another about intelligent aliens that, like bees or ants, seem to act with a collective consciousness. And only on "Star Trek" could my writing partner and I have been free to explore the details of the mating rituals of aliens, as in the following exchange in which the Klingon warrior Worf talks about love to the human teenager Wesley Crusher:

WORF: Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects. And claw at you.

WESLEY: What does the man do?

WORF: He reads love poetry. He ducks a lot.

Some people invent a machine. Others create a machine for invention. To me, the success of the "Star Trek" franchise is based not on an irresistible world or set of characters, but upon its "corporate culture," a culture of imagination. Bell Labs was not the only precedent. Think of Walt Disney, who didn't just pioneer a few cartoon characters, but built an empire based on an environment that valued and nourished creativity—it is no accident that the company has an arm called Imagineering. Or think of Google, a company created on the very idea of searching. Google seems to invent the future, and ways to see into it, every day, taking us under the oceans, above the Earth and, of course, into the worldwide web of knowledge. Similarly, Gene Roddenberry's real creation is a franchise culture dedicated, like his fictional characters, to "boldly go where no man has gone before." That makes "Star Trek" more enduring than any set of characters or episodes Gene himself created, and bigger than any one of its products or the people who pass through it.