Do you ever have to compromise on scientific accuracy?
Sometimes you have to make trade-offs to tell a good story. For example, there’s an episode of Strange New Worlds where the ship gets too close to a black hole. It’s a region in space with gravity so strong, even light can’t escape it. Someone asks Spock—the Enterprise’s science officer—what’s happening, and he says they’re “getting sucked into a black hole.” Technically, that’s wrong!
It’s a common misconception that black holes, like vacuum cleaners, suck in objects. It’s more accurate to say that something falls into a black hole’s gravitational well because it is so massive, it bends the space around it. I usually try to correct this language in scripts. But in this instance, I knew the writers wanted to create a sense of urgency.