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Hey, Jeroaver, is Regina Barbara here.

Those of you who have been listening to this show for a while might already know, I'm a huge

Trekkie.

One of my all-time favorite episodes of Star Trek Next Generation that I want to talk about

is called Darmok.

Captain's Log, Star Day 45047.2. In the Star Trek Next Generation that I want to talk about is called Darmaq. Captain's Logs start a 45047.2.

In the Star Trek universe, most everyone in space can talk to each other with this futuristic

technology called the Universal Translator.

But in this episode, that translator, it fails.

So Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise is stuck on a planet with an alien captain, Captain

Captain Dathan.

And they are technically speaking what viewers would understand as English to each other.

But the grammar and the sentences don't quite make sense.

That's Chonda Prescott Weinstein, another huge trekkie and a theoretical physicist.

It turns out that this alien species communicates through the figurative.

So they communicate through stories and metaphor rather than directly just stating facts.

And the walls fell. Zena and Anzo. Zena and Baccar. And the Universal Translator doesn't know how to deal with translating the figurative.

And we're talking about this Star Trek episode because to me and Chonda, a lot of theoretical physics and how we share physics uses the language of metaphor.

Every time I try and explain a concept to you, I need to use a metaphor because I need to use something that's familiar to you to invite you into something that's not familiar to you.

This is something Chanda's been thinking about a lot recently because she just published a new book called The Edge of Space Time.

It starts with metaphors to explain challenging concepts, whether that's as big as cosmic inflation or as small as quantum mechanics, the realm of subatomic particles, which are even tinier than atoms.

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