Dilithium crystals enable the Starship Enterprise to enter warp speed and travel across the universe.
Without them, matter and anti-matter in the warp core would create an annihilation reaction. Or would it?
Dilithium is a real thing, but what does it really do? Photo: Paramount Pictures
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Dr Krista Steenbergen Photo: Supplied
Dr Krista Steenbergen, MacDiarmid Institute Associate Investigator and Physics lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington said if you squeeze lithium down it becomes a dilithium solid.
And she said anti-matter is a very real thing too
"We can play around with it, particularly in particle accelerators," she said, "It is a thing that if you collide matter with anti-matter, a big one would be an electron and a positron, you get an annihilation and a large amount of energy."
