Kirk Mcdonald: Fill & Download for Free

What’s inside an electron?Light. That’s why in gamma-gamma pair production performed by people like Kirk McDonald of SLAC, we make matter out of light:Image by Gil Eisner from the November 1997 issue of Photonics SpectraIt’s also why we can diffract electrons, and why when we perform electron-positron annihilation, what we get is light. Take a look at what is an electron? by Frank Wilczek. He said “the proper quantum mechanical description of electrons involves wave functions, whose oscillation patterns are standing waves”. Also see the Wikipedia atomic orbitals article, where you can read that electrons “do not orbit the nucleus in the manner of a planet orbiting the sun, but instead exist as standing waves”. Then see my “physics detective” article on the electron for details and references.Gif courtesy of Adrian Rossiter, S-orbital © copyright Encyclopaedia Britannica

The out-of-universe answer is that Generations had not been written by the time that Scotty was freed from his transporter stasis in “Relics”, and that the fate of James Kirk was still up for discussion. For all we knew, he could have been alive and living out his normal life in the 24th century, just like Spock and McCoy.The in-universe explanation, keeping in mind that Scotty had witnessed the apparent death of Kirk in trying to save the Enterprise-B from the Nexus, is explicable. I, again, turn to the script. RIKER  I'm Commander William Riker from  the starship Enterprise.   Scott's weary face lights up at this and he breaks into  a wide smile.   SCOTT  The Enterprise... I shoulda known.  And I'll bet it was Jim Kirk  himself who hauled the old girl  out of mothballs to come looking  for me. At the time that Scotty speculated that Kirk had rescued him, he had been removed only minutes before from an unprecedented transporter stasis seventy-five years in length. Woozy from this experience, mourning the death of the Ensign Franklin who had accompanied him, Scotty might well have imagined—hoped?—that Kirk might have saved him. If Scotty could find a way to survive against the odds, then why not Kirk? Call it wishful thinking, perhaps.(You know, Scotty was not even that wrong. At that point in time, Kirk was in the Nexus, only a couple of years removed from his death in the Veridian system. Had things gone only slightly different, the two might well have been reunited in the 24th century.)

Kirk’s not checking up on the group of highly-capable superhumans with a dark role in Earth’s past who, after he defeated them, had grudges against him personally and Starfleet generally was a major failure. If he had no responsibility for this but Starfleet did and forgot, then Starfleet erred. Someone should have monitored the colony.Kirk cannot be blamed for the explosion of Ceti Alpha VI. We have no reason to believe that he was actually trying to arrange for the death of Khan and his fellows, settling them on a planet in a solar system set to be conveniently ravaged when a neighbour world exploded. This is just not consistent with what we know of the personality of Kirk, never mind his crew. What happened to this neighbour planet—its apparent spontaneous self-destruction—seems to have had few precedents.Even so, even without events unprecedented in Kirk’s lifetime transforming the existence of an isolated settlement of exiles from something survivable to something not, Kirk—or Starfleet—should have checked up on Ceti Alpha V. Khan and the other Augments were incredibly capable and aggressive people who not only plunged Earth into global war in the late 20th century, but who were able in a few days to nearly take over the Federation flagship after they had been rescued from a centuries-long cryonic suspension. The survivors of the Botany Bay needed to be monitored, if not for their own good then for the wider good of the Federation.Khan’s strategy to redress his legitimate grievances with Kirk, and with Starfleet, following the abandonment of the survivors on what turned out to be a dying world, now, was entirely inappropriate. Never mind the ethics of hijacking a starship and doing who knows what with its crew and attacking another and trying to take over terrifying weapons of mass destruction—Khan quite conceivably could have kicked off a terrific scandal, revealing to the entire universe how some castaways were stranded by a Federation ship on a dying world. A Khan not committed to avenging himself immediately on Kirk, instead applying something of the skill that nearly let him conquer Earth centuries before, might well have triumphed.