Physicist Proves Picard Maneuver Creates 3 Ship Images, Not 2

Q: If a spaceship suddenly stops at warp speed, why does the universe trick our eyes into seeing three identical vessels?

It would appear as three vessels because the observer is not seeing the ship “as it is now,” but as light from different moments in the ship’s motion arrives at the same time. The key effect is light-travel delay, a standard feature of relativity. When an object moves extremely fast, especially faster than the signal speed that carries its image, there can be more than one past moment, or “retarded time,” that matches the same instant for the observer. In plain terms, light emitted from different positions along the ship’s path can reach the enemy ship together, making one ship look like several. In the Star Trek scenario analyzed by Brazilian physicist Níckolas de Aguiar Alves, the Stargazer changes velocity twice: it accelerates into warp and then brakes hard to stop. A constant superluminal pass can already create two apparent images. The extra change in motion adds another valid light-arrival solution, so the observer can see up to three apparent positions of the same ship. That does not mean the universe is literally duplicating the vessel. It means the observer’s view is a pileup of delayed light signals from different stages of the maneuver. The ship is single; the images are multiple because the timing of emitted light is multiple. Alves’s analysis suggests the famous “Picard Maneuver” would therefore work even better than the episode claimed: not two confusing targets, but potentially three.

2 articles · Updated · Yahoo! Voices · Sep 14

Níckolas de Aguiar Alves found Star Trek’s “Picard Maneuver” would work even better than shown, because an attacker would see three images of the Stargazer rather than two.
Two acceleration phases—speeding up to warp and then stopping—produce the extra apparent image under relativity, improving Picard’s odds beyond the episode’s stated 50/50 chance.
Alves reached the result while checking a real particle-physics problem involving a slower light speed, then recognized the same geometry from The Next Generation’s Season 1 episode “The Battle.”
The finding still rests on faster-than-light travel, which physics considers impossible, but Alves said the episode remains an unusually strong illustration of relativistic effects.