Star Trek: 10 Secrets About The USS Discovery-A You Need To Know
3. It Really Doesn't Matter. Unless it's Programmable
By far the biggest, most jaw dropping upgrade to the Discovery and to the Star Trek universe isn't the 32nd Century uniforms or Sonequa Martin-Green's sensational dreadlocks but the introduction of programmable matter. Does it matter? Absolutely.
Aside from being the material to keep Discovery's Wi-Fi warp engines aligned, the super-stuff was installed as part of the starship's refit across all of its control surfaces. While the 24th Century had the wonderfully adaptive LCARS, programmable matter takes the concept to the next level. Adjusting to its user, it provides an interface which is unique to its user in both appearance and style making it even more user friendly than the Library Computer Access and Retrieval System.
It also had its counterpart in the form of programmable antimatter which was used in the shield generators of the USS Discovery when it reached the hyperfield in the search for the Ten-C.
It has its origins in the real world back as far as the early 1990s where it was first termed by Boston University professor Tomasso Toffoli and physicist Norman H Margolus. This referred to fine-grained compute nodes that would interact with their neighbours. This definition would be changed within a decade to describe matter that could be programmed to change its physical properties. While Star Trek has on many occasions created and predicted future technological trends, it has taken the concept of programmable matter and extrapolated where it could end up.