10 Historical Figures That Appeared In Star Trek

This list was never intended as a ranking, but this the most legendary of legendary of appearances was always going to take the top spot. When Data united three of the greatest scientific minds to have ever graced the Earth on the holodeck in The Next Generation episode Descent, we all lost our poker face.

The story behind the cameo is as good as the scene itself. At a screening of the documentary based on A Brief History of Time in 1991, it was Leonard Nimoy who introduced Professor Hawking to the stage. Nimoy learned that Hawking was a big fan of Star Trek, and a tour of The Next Generation set was arranged. During the visit, Hawking saw the warp core and remarked, "I’m working on that," and got to sit in the captain’s chair. Producers also learned that Hawking was keen to appear on the show and so offered him the opportunity to do just that.

The scene is a perfect tribute to Hawking in its physics and its fun. Everyone dunks on Newton, of course, whose equations were unable to accurately predict certain 'anomalies' observed in the orbit of Mercury (the precession of the perihelion bit) and were only explained by those of Einstein's general relativity. We then get a reference to Einstein's notorious 'god does not play dice' approach to quantum mechanics (even if that sentiment does need qualifying). The idea for the scene was devised by co-writer Naren Shankar who had a PhD in applied physics, hence the level of accuracy.

On the DVD special features of TNG season six, Brent Spiner, who also cites the poker scene as "maybe my favourite moment of the entire experience of doing Star Trek," recounts his second encounter with the physics genius about a year later. Hawking simply asked, with trademark humour, "where’s my money?"

Hawking's association with Star Trek did not end there. He went on to write the foreword to Lawrence Krauss’ 1995 book The Physics of Star Trek and, along with his cameos on TV shows such as The Simpsons and Futurama, he also referenced his Star Trek role during one of his many appearances on The Big Bang Theory.

Fun fact: In the alternate future timeline of All Good Things… Data holds the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, a position once held by Professor Hawking (and Isaac Newton). According to The Star Trek Encyclopedia, Data’s library in that episode also contained a copy of Hawking's best-seller A Brief History of Time.

This wasn’t the only time that Einstein and Newton made an appearance in Star Trek either. The former also features in the TNG episode The Nth Degree in which he is bested by Barclay. The latter is finger snapped into the future by Q as a witness to Q(uinn)'s impact on history in the Voyager episode Death Wish. Peter Dennis, who portrayed Newton in that Voyager episode, would later go on to play Admiral Hendricks, the officer who gave the crew of Voyager their first official mission in seven years.