Physicist: Famed 'Picard Maneuver' on Star Trek Works

A famous Star Trek battle trick turns out to be better physics than the show ever claimed. As Popular Science explains, Brazilian physicist Níckolas de Aguiar Alves has shown that the "Picard Maneuver" would work like a charm. As fans might know, the name stems from a first-season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which a ship commanded by a young Captain Picard comes under fire from an enemy craft. With few options, Picard gambles: He orders his vulnerable ship to charge at warp speed, then abruptly shift out of warp, before firing.

"By going faster than light, Picard anticipated that the other ship would see two images of the Stargazer: where it reached warp speed and where it stopped," explains Ars Technica. The trick fooled the other ship and saved the day. De Aguiar Alves, working on a real particle-physics problem involving slower light speed, realized the scenario was familiar—and calculated that the move would create not two but three visible images, because Picard's ship technically accelerates twice during the gambit. That would boost Picard's odds beyond the 50/50 split described on-screen. While faster-than-light space travel remains off-limits in real physics, de Aguiar Alves calls the maneuver "a great illustration" for students wrestling with relativity.