10 Times Star Trek Changed The World
5. Me Transmitte Sursum, Caledoni!
Nothing says you’ve impacted the cultural climate of the epoch more than your own misquotation translated into Latin on South Park (inscribed above the planetarium). More seriously though, the never-once-said-exactly phrase 'Beam me up, Scotty!' has become so (in)famous that it now carries various meanings in the English language and has, naturally, been meme’d to within an inch of its life.
The expression had become so popular by the 1990s that James Doohan used it as part of the title for his autobiography. And, then, there’s that Nicki Minaj mixtape. Of its common meanings, according to dictionary.com, are "a humorous request to escape a certain situation," "a [standalone] allusion to [Star Trek]," or an indication of "retrofutur[ism]". It has also been used by some as slang for certain illicit substances.
Beyond the phrase itself, Star Trek has instilled in the general population the idea of 'teleportation'. Who hasn’t dreamt of being beamed across the world in a matter of seconds (existential deliberations aside)?
It’s doubtful that we’ll be popping to work via the transporter pad anytime soon, if ever, but teleportation is the object of serious scientific study. In the early 1990s, researchers claimed that the transfer of the information of a quantum state (of an electron, a photon, or an atom, for example) over distance, or 'quantum teleportation' was theoretically possible. This was then confirmed experimentally in 1998 (and several times since) when scientists successfully 'teleported' a polarisation state from one photon to another.