In the science fiction world, “technobabble” refers to the use of technical or scientific jargon strung together so that to listeners unfamiliar with the language, it sounds like made-up nonsense. When relating to Star Trek, a derivative and more derogatory concept shows up: “treknobabble,” which, in the words of Wikipedia, “is used humorously by fans of the various Star Trek television series, and disparagingly by its critics, to describe the infamous amount of pseudoscientific gibberish inserted seemingly at random into many episodes of these television series.”
Well, on Slashdot tonight this article contains the most ridiculous real-world treknobabble I’ve ever seen:
A one-dimensional [Bose-Einstein condensation] in an optical lattice is rapidly rotated, causing a quantized vortex to form. The bosonic part of the superstring consists of this vortex line. Inside the vortex, they would trap an ultracold cloud of fermionic atoms. Hopefully this will allow observation of the supersymmetry between bosons and fermions, thus providing the first experimental evidence to support superstring theory.
That makes no sense to me whatsoever, and yet it’s the funniest thing I’ve read all day.
The Evils of Treknobabble Gone Awry
Gradually, it became no longer a character’s personal sacrifice or talent or ingenuity that helped save the crew from certain doom . . . on the contrary, it was just a simple matter of "Bouncing the graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish…"