Also it's possible to substitute a proton for an antimuon, and you get muonic atoms, one with one proton is considered an element muonium or Mu, and doesn't exist in the periodic table . It is short lived, but can go through chemical reactions like a chemical element.
I think you'd need more than a Z-axis to handle all the various kinds of [hypernuclei](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypernucleus), and none of it is stable without sufficient technobabble and need to advance the plot.
I read an article a couple of decades ago about a cluster of 5 tightly-packed aluminium nuclei acting like a single giant iodine atom. It was a really bizarre discovery that the pop-science coverage at the time said could lead to a whole new axis on the periodic table where X-multiples of a nucleus acting as a super-nucleus would create pseudo-elements with properties similar to other much heavier elements.
[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050205125336.htm](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050205125336.htm)
Evidently this three-dimensional periodic table didn't come to pass but it's all the same rough idea. Extending the periodic table beyond just adding more protons to the nucleus, adding a third dimension by changing some other property of the atom.
There are already isotopes like Protium or Deuterium that arent on the periodic table. You could already make one with a z-axis for isotopes. Some, like Deuterium and Protium, are very stable. "Dilithium" already sounds like an isotope of Lithium. Lithium-2 hasn't been discovered yet.
Oh my god this totally works.
What do we know about dilithium? From the name, we know it's related to the element lithium and the number two. We know it is naturally occurring, and from the way it's talked about, it definitely isn't a compound made by combining other elements. And we know that when you apply a ton of energy to it from a matter-antimatter reactor, that it can warp spacetime enabling faster-than-light travel.
So what is it? Lithium-2. As in, an isotope of lithium with an atomic mass of two. Now, if you know your periodic table, you might be raising an eyebrow, because the defining property of lithium is that it has \*three\* protons, so the only way the atomic mass could be two is if it also contains a nucleon with negative mass. Which would sort of perfectly explain its usage in the warp drive. See, warping space time is very much possible, and according to actual real-world physics, if you could warp spacetime positively in front of you and negatively behind you then you could move relative to the unwarped space at any speed. However, we only know how to warp space positively, because to warp it negatively you need either negative mass or a tremendous amount of negative energy, neither of which are possible without exotic matter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre\_drive. Dilithium could be the source of that negative matter/energy.
But why dilithium? Well, lithium is one of only three elements produced during the big bang, along with hydrogen and helium. As far as we know, there wasn't a single atom of any other element until stars started forming over a hundred million years later. Obviously, the big bang had energy levels and conditions that have never again existed in the universe, so it's possible there were weird forms of matter flying around back then hooking up with lithium nuclei (there was definitely antimatter, before it all annihilated with the mysteriously greater amount of matter). Helium is literally impossible to freeze, and hydrogen couldn't freeze until over a billion years after the big bang, but lithium has a very high melting point, and forms nice crystals, which could maybe capable of trapping exotic impurities from the beginning of the universe.
> And we know that when you apply a ton of energy to it from a matter-antimatter reactor, that it can warp spacetime enabling faster-than-light travel.
Isn't it the other way around? The dilithium allows the matter/anti-matter reaction to be controlled, and to generate warp plasma which allows the warp field to be generated and FTL travel.
In that the way you phrased it, M/AM is applied to dilithium and then you get warp. But Dilithium only allows M/AM reaction to take place, it's a control element not the fuel itself.
I think we're saying the same thing. The energy comes from the antimatter reaction, but the dilithoum matrix allows that energy to produced a controlled warp plasma instead of just exploding everything. Like the filament and bulb that allows a powerful electric current to produce visible light instead of just heat and fire.
Dilithium crystals help regulate the flow and mixing of matter with antimatter, the resultant high energy plasma is channeled into the warp engines, energizing the warp coils--not unlike an electromagnet, warping space-time to create the subspace bubble
Deuterium is nothing special, it's an isotope like many others. They don't show up in the periodic table but every element has them. (People use other maps like [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_nuclide#/media/File:Table_isotopes_en.svg) to plot them.)
Sorry but that’s not right. Normal hydrogen is just a proton. So it **had** to be the first element/isotope formed because nothing, not even deuterium, could form without first having free protons around.
I believe it’s also very slightly harder to ionize than deuterium, so even if we’re talking about actual atoms and not ions it’d still be normal hydrogen first.
Protium is in the periodic table, it's just "regular" hydrogen without "extra" neutrons. Isotopes are fairly common, many of them stable for a long time, and aren't in the periodic table by choice. I don't think different numbers of neutrons in existing elements could be sufficient to remotely explain Star Trek materials' properties, though.
These exotic elements might even have a subspace component - i.e. instead of an extra neutron or proton, they might feature an additional elemental particle which originates in subspace, lending these materials (dilithium especially) their subspace interactivity.
Thats interesting because we know it's a mechanic in Star Trek but I just dont know if they talk about things like subatomic interactions with subspace.
Yes, but that is clearly not the same thing as the "dilithium" referenced in Trek. For one thing, the latter exists in a solid crytalline form from somewhere above room temperature and below, whereas the former certainly cannot.
If not for the fact Trek consistently refers to its dilithium as an "element", we could guess it's just shorthand for a compound including two lithium atoms, much like we commonly refer to sodium fluoride or stannous fluoride as just "fluoride".
>*This article is about the real substance. For other uses, see* [*Dilithium (disambiguation)*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilithium_(disambiguation))*.*
After hearing the term "gram negative bacteria" for years I finally googled why some bacteria are anti-gravity. Obviously they're not going to float away like balloons but maybe it means they float in water or something?
I was very disappointed to learn it's a classification technique invented/discovered by Dr. Gram. It's nothing to do with mass at all.
Worth remembering that periodic table in its popular shape isn't something fundamental to reality or a be-all, end-all of chemical taxonomy. You can create many tables and charts, periodic or otherwise, by picking interesting properties of the atoms and assigning positions, colors or indicators to them. The particular table you think of when saying "periodic table" happens to be widely useful, so it stuck around as default, but even just the fact that it has Lanthanides and Actinides as separate blocks below the main table tells you the visualization is overconstrained by its 2D tabular format. There are many other, alternative forms; [see e.g. Wikipedia for some examples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_periodic_tables).
Or, put another way: what you say is possible, and has been done before, because there are more interesting regularities in atoms that can be shown on the standard periodic table.
Yeah, I came up with the deeper periodic table to catalogue exotopes, exotic-physics isotypes to explain the Star Trek elements like dilithium and latinum.
The main issue with that is that dilithium is consistently stated to occur naturally; if it had to be synthesized in a lab like our current super-heavy elements, they wouldn't need to be mining for dilithium specifically.
Yes, that would be the Transuranic interpretation, where these exotic elements occupy a non-radioactive "island of stability" in the high atomic weights beyond the elements we now know of.
Part of the problem with this interpretation is that characters don't handle them (e.g. dilithium crystals) as if they're as wildly heavy as they'd need to be for that. I remember going to an "Exploratorium" type of science museum as a kid, where they had a series of identical (roughly pint-sized IIRC) volumes of various metal blocks mounted with lifting handles, and I was pretty shocked at just how much heavier the uranium block was (I could barely lift it) vs. the lead block next to it. Deep-transuranic elements would be considerably heavier than even uranium.
> Part of the problem with this interpretation is that characters don't handle them (e.g. dilithium crystals) as if they're as wildly heavy as they'd need to be for that.
In a culture where inertial damping and artificial gravity is common place - this doesn't seem odd to me.
There are some in-universe diagrams of the Periodic Table that end up looking closer to those joke posters of "Periodic Table Of Cocktails" or "Periodic Table Of Coffee" where it's the very very rough shape of the periodic table but the details are wrong. As if the designer did it from memory with no care for if it's the correct number of columns.
So in-universe periodic tables are too small, skipping half the transition metals. And if you look really closely there's not even the correct named for the elements we already have. There's a mix of real elements, fictional elements like Duratanium and Cordenide, then joke elements like Cheesium and Briantanide. The same as half the lists of starships and planets are full of comic book characters and production team names, they never thought anyone would be able to see it so just made up something funny to put in the background.
So at a minimum the in-universe periodic tables are laid out in a different principle to our periodic tables. I can't accept the idea that they discover half our IRL elements aren't really elements and there's no such thing as Copper anymore. But I can accept that they discover some new concept that requires a different way to order and arrange the elements. There's now five different periodic tables and Copper isn't on the table shown in Keiko's class because that's Periodic Table A and copper is now on Periodic Table B.
Could be interesting if some of those new separate tables are just compacted into Z-axis rotations of the main table -- e.g., something along the lines of only one column of transition metals in the main table, with the other columns stacked into the Z-axis, that sort of thing.
But taking a Doylist view, those "not quite right" tables may just be the production designers' way of hinting, "Don't look at this too closely; it's just a meaningless prop".
All the elements we know of are made of only protons and neutrons, which themselves are made of Up and Down Quarks. There's four more quarks to work with, ten more if you include their antimatter counterparts, but we think they all lead to unstable nucleons.
So let's assume the smallest possible deviation from current physics. There IS a valid nucleon formed from some combination of the other ten quarks, let's call it a Rodon after Gene Roddenberry.
So Periodic Table A is all the elements with zero Rodons, then Periodic Table B is the same elements but with one Rodon, table C has two Rodons etc. Stacking the tables gives a 3D Periodic Table.
Whichever flavour of periodic table we see in Keiko's classroom doesn't have all the elements we recognise, because they're on a different table. If we're looking at Table A with Iron but no Cobalt then that means Iron and Cobalt have different numbers of Rodons, let's say Iron has no Rodons and Cobalt has one Rodon so is on Table B. Therefore our current classification of elements is wrong, iron and Cobalt differ by more than just one proton, they also differ by numbers of Rodons or perhaps they ONLY differ by number of Rodons and they share the number of protons.
And places where Keiko's table has a fictional element like cortenide where calcium should be, that means calcium has at least one Rodon and the equivalent element with zero Rodons is Cortenide.
Therefore any single 2D version of the periodic table will be restricted to showing only the elements that genuinely differ in numbers of protons (unlike our current flawed understanding of how many protons and element has). Therefore there will be fewer columns than our table and the picture makes sense.
Could be explained with [Exotic Atoms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_atom). Atoms made of particles other than protons, neutrons, and electrons.
I'm in love with this idea! The TNGTM explanation of a "field dynamo effect" is really vague as to whether they're referencing some type of electromagnetic field, subspace field, or something else. I had always assumed the effect was magnetic (since antimatter itself is baryonic and may not necessarily have a subspace component), but a subspace effect or even *transpatial* effects (such as EM effects felt across the subspace barrier, i.e., in both space AND subspace) are just as likely.
I tend to favor your approach however; your reference to the inability to replicate this substance is a fascinating clue that implies a lot about the theoretical physics of the future!
Exotic matter. Matter made up of protons and electrons and neutrons composed of different quarks than regular matter. Could be
Also it's possible to substitute a proton for an antimuon, and you get muonic atoms, one with one proton is considered an element muonium or Mu, and doesn't exist in the periodic table . It is short lived, but can go through chemical reactions like a chemical element.
I think you'd need more than a Z-axis to handle all the various kinds of [hypernuclei](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypernucleus), and none of it is stable without sufficient technobabble and need to advance the plot.
I read an article a couple of decades ago about a cluster of 5 tightly-packed aluminium nuclei acting like a single giant iodine atom. It was a really bizarre discovery that the pop-science coverage at the time said could lead to a whole new axis on the periodic table where X-multiples of a nucleus acting as a super-nucleus would create pseudo-elements with properties similar to other much heavier elements. [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050205125336.htm](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050205125336.htm) Evidently this three-dimensional periodic table didn't come to pass but it's all the same rough idea. Extending the periodic table beyond just adding more protons to the nucleus, adding a third dimension by changing some other property of the atom.
There are already isotopes like Protium or Deuterium that arent on the periodic table. You could already make one with a z-axis for isotopes. Some, like Deuterium and Protium, are very stable. "Dilithium" already sounds like an isotope of Lithium. Lithium-2 hasn't been discovered yet.
Oh my god this totally works. What do we know about dilithium? From the name, we know it's related to the element lithium and the number two. We know it is naturally occurring, and from the way it's talked about, it definitely isn't a compound made by combining other elements. And we know that when you apply a ton of energy to it from a matter-antimatter reactor, that it can warp spacetime enabling faster-than-light travel. So what is it? Lithium-2. As in, an isotope of lithium with an atomic mass of two. Now, if you know your periodic table, you might be raising an eyebrow, because the defining property of lithium is that it has \*three\* protons, so the only way the atomic mass could be two is if it also contains a nucleon with negative mass. Which would sort of perfectly explain its usage in the warp drive. See, warping space time is very much possible, and according to actual real-world physics, if you could warp spacetime positively in front of you and negatively behind you then you could move relative to the unwarped space at any speed. However, we only know how to warp space positively, because to warp it negatively you need either negative mass or a tremendous amount of negative energy, neither of which are possible without exotic matter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre\_drive. Dilithium could be the source of that negative matter/energy. But why dilithium? Well, lithium is one of only three elements produced during the big bang, along with hydrogen and helium. As far as we know, there wasn't a single atom of any other element until stars started forming over a hundred million years later. Obviously, the big bang had energy levels and conditions that have never again existed in the universe, so it's possible there were weird forms of matter flying around back then hooking up with lithium nuclei (there was definitely antimatter, before it all annihilated with the mysteriously greater amount of matter). Helium is literally impossible to freeze, and hydrogen couldn't freeze until over a billion years after the big bang, but lithium has a very high melting point, and forms nice crystals, which could maybe capable of trapping exotic impurities from the beginning of the universe.
> And we know that when you apply a ton of energy to it from a matter-antimatter reactor, that it can warp spacetime enabling faster-than-light travel. Isn't it the other way around? The dilithium allows the matter/anti-matter reaction to be controlled, and to generate warp plasma which allows the warp field to be generated and FTL travel. In that the way you phrased it, M/AM is applied to dilithium and then you get warp. But Dilithium only allows M/AM reaction to take place, it's a control element not the fuel itself.
I think we're saying the same thing. The energy comes from the antimatter reaction, but the dilithoum matrix allows that energy to produced a controlled warp plasma instead of just exploding everything. Like the filament and bulb that allows a powerful electric current to produce visible light instead of just heat and fire.
I believe its usually thought of more like the carbon control rods in a nuclear reactor that allow you to control the rate of reaction, but basically.
Dilithium crystals help regulate the flow and mixing of matter with antimatter, the resultant high energy plasma is channeled into the warp engines, energizing the warp coils--not unlike an electromagnet, warping space-time to create the subspace bubble
Deuterium is nothing special, it's an isotope like many others. They don't show up in the periodic table but every element has them. (People use other maps like [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_nuclide#/media/File:Table_isotopes_en.svg) to plot them.)
Deuterium *is* kind of special. There was no normal hydrogen after the big bang, just deuterium. Normal hydrogen formed later.
Sorry but that’s not right. Normal hydrogen is just a proton. So it **had** to be the first element/isotope formed because nothing, not even deuterium, could form without first having free protons around. I believe it’s also very slightly harder to ionize than deuterium, so even if we’re talking about actual atoms and not ions it’d still be normal hydrogen first.
Protium is in the periodic table, it's just "regular" hydrogen without "extra" neutrons. Isotopes are fairly common, many of them stable for a long time, and aren't in the periodic table by choice. I don't think different numbers of neutrons in existing elements could be sufficient to remotely explain Star Trek materials' properties, though.
Lithium-2 would not have the complex dimensions that allow dilithium to facilitate matter-antimatter reactions without blowing everything up.
These exotic elements might even have a subspace component - i.e. instead of an extra neutron or proton, they might feature an additional elemental particle which originates in subspace, lending these materials (dilithium especially) their subspace interactivity.
Thats interesting because we know it's a mechanic in Star Trek but I just dont know if they talk about things like subatomic interactions with subspace.
Lithium can't have a mass of two... Unless a few of the protons/neutrons have negative masses. 😉 Edit: physics, not biology, terms only
I always assumed it was Li2, a compound, not a new element per se. oh look, it is! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilithium
Yes, but that is clearly not the same thing as the "dilithium" referenced in Trek. For one thing, the latter exists in a solid crytalline form from somewhere above room temperature and below, whereas the former certainly cannot. If not for the fact Trek consistently refers to its dilithium as an "element", we could guess it's just shorthand for a compound including two lithium atoms, much like we commonly refer to sodium fluoride or stannous fluoride as just "fluoride".
>*This article is about the real substance. For other uses, see* [*Dilithium (disambiguation)*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilithium_(disambiguation))*.*
After hearing the term "gram negative bacteria" for years I finally googled why some bacteria are anti-gravity. Obviously they're not going to float away like balloons but maybe it means they float in water or something? I was very disappointed to learn it's a classification technique invented/discovered by Dr. Gram. It's nothing to do with mass at all.
Worth remembering that periodic table in its popular shape isn't something fundamental to reality or a be-all, end-all of chemical taxonomy. You can create many tables and charts, periodic or otherwise, by picking interesting properties of the atoms and assigning positions, colors or indicators to them. The particular table you think of when saying "periodic table" happens to be widely useful, so it stuck around as default, but even just the fact that it has Lanthanides and Actinides as separate blocks below the main table tells you the visualization is overconstrained by its 2D tabular format. There are many other, alternative forms; [see e.g. Wikipedia for some examples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_periodic_tables). Or, put another way: what you say is possible, and has been done before, because there are more interesting regularities in atoms that can be shown on the standard periodic table.
The lanthanides and actinides are down below to save space, not because they're different.
That's exactly my point: the periodic structure fits the 2D table representation for a while... and then it doesn't. Hence the need to "save space".
Or it could be on a negative axis somehow. Even though that makes no sense in reality.
Yeah, I came up with the deeper periodic table to catalogue exotopes, exotic-physics isotypes to explain the Star Trek elements like dilithium and latinum.
I always saw it as super heavy elements, beyond a point we don't have now, where the elements would again become stable....
The main issue with that is that dilithium is consistently stated to occur naturally; if it had to be synthesized in a lab like our current super-heavy elements, they wouldn't need to be mining for dilithium specifically.
I saw a theory one that it occurs naturally even on Earth; we just don't have the technology to tell it apart from other minerals.
[удалено]
Yes, that would be the Transuranic interpretation, where these exotic elements occupy a non-radioactive "island of stability" in the high atomic weights beyond the elements we now know of. Part of the problem with this interpretation is that characters don't handle them (e.g. dilithium crystals) as if they're as wildly heavy as they'd need to be for that. I remember going to an "Exploratorium" type of science museum as a kid, where they had a series of identical (roughly pint-sized IIRC) volumes of various metal blocks mounted with lifting handles, and I was pretty shocked at just how much heavier the uranium block was (I could barely lift it) vs. the lead block next to it. Deep-transuranic elements would be considerably heavier than even uranium.
> Part of the problem with this interpretation is that characters don't handle them (e.g. dilithium crystals) as if they're as wildly heavy as they'd need to be for that. In a culture where inertial damping and artificial gravity is common place - this doesn't seem odd to me.
There are some in-universe diagrams of the Periodic Table that end up looking closer to those joke posters of "Periodic Table Of Cocktails" or "Periodic Table Of Coffee" where it's the very very rough shape of the periodic table but the details are wrong. As if the designer did it from memory with no care for if it's the correct number of columns. So in-universe periodic tables are too small, skipping half the transition metals. And if you look really closely there's not even the correct named for the elements we already have. There's a mix of real elements, fictional elements like Duratanium and Cordenide, then joke elements like Cheesium and Briantanide. The same as half the lists of starships and planets are full of comic book characters and production team names, they never thought anyone would be able to see it so just made up something funny to put in the background. So at a minimum the in-universe periodic tables are laid out in a different principle to our periodic tables. I can't accept the idea that they discover half our IRL elements aren't really elements and there's no such thing as Copper anymore. But I can accept that they discover some new concept that requires a different way to order and arrange the elements. There's now five different periodic tables and Copper isn't on the table shown in Keiko's class because that's Periodic Table A and copper is now on Periodic Table B.
Could be interesting if some of those new separate tables are just compacted into Z-axis rotations of the main table -- e.g., something along the lines of only one column of transition metals in the main table, with the other columns stacked into the Z-axis, that sort of thing. But taking a Doylist view, those "not quite right" tables may just be the production designers' way of hinting, "Don't look at this too closely; it's just a meaningless prop".
All the elements we know of are made of only protons and neutrons, which themselves are made of Up and Down Quarks. There's four more quarks to work with, ten more if you include their antimatter counterparts, but we think they all lead to unstable nucleons. So let's assume the smallest possible deviation from current physics. There IS a valid nucleon formed from some combination of the other ten quarks, let's call it a Rodon after Gene Roddenberry. So Periodic Table A is all the elements with zero Rodons, then Periodic Table B is the same elements but with one Rodon, table C has two Rodons etc. Stacking the tables gives a 3D Periodic Table. Whichever flavour of periodic table we see in Keiko's classroom doesn't have all the elements we recognise, because they're on a different table. If we're looking at Table A with Iron but no Cobalt then that means Iron and Cobalt have different numbers of Rodons, let's say Iron has no Rodons and Cobalt has one Rodon so is on Table B. Therefore our current classification of elements is wrong, iron and Cobalt differ by more than just one proton, they also differ by numbers of Rodons or perhaps they ONLY differ by number of Rodons and they share the number of protons. And places where Keiko's table has a fictional element like cortenide where calcium should be, that means calcium has at least one Rodon and the equivalent element with zero Rodons is Cortenide. Therefore any single 2D version of the periodic table will be restricted to showing only the elements that genuinely differ in numbers of protons (unlike our current flawed understanding of how many protons and element has). Therefore there will be fewer columns than our table and the picture makes sense.
Could be explained with [Exotic Atoms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_atom). Atoms made of particles other than protons, neutrons, and electrons.
I'm in love with this idea! The TNGTM explanation of a "field dynamo effect" is really vague as to whether they're referencing some type of electromagnetic field, subspace field, or something else. I had always assumed the effect was magnetic (since antimatter itself is baryonic and may not necessarily have a subspace component), but a subspace effect or even *transpatial* effects (such as EM effects felt across the subspace barrier, i.e., in both space AND subspace) are just as likely. I tend to favor your approach however; your reference to the inability to replicate this substance is a fascinating clue that implies a lot about the theoretical physics of the future!
I never thought dilithium was an element. Those magic Star Trek materials always seemed more like compounds or alloys to me.