Kirk brings the judges to the bridge of the Enterprise. Everyone on the ship leaves expect the judges. Before McCoy uses a sensor to remove the sound of the judge's heartbeats, Kirk tells the judges that the sensors can be increased by 1 to the 10th power. 1^10=1
I'm assuming that the writers thought that "1 to the 10th" sounded better than just saying "1".
Also, I think I remember him saying "1 to the 4th". I'm not sure though.
i beleive they ment 10 to the 10th power. or 1 with 10 zeros,
this was scripted long before they knew the series would be a cult classic and picked apart by every viewer or treckie
Actually, the factor mentioned was 1 to the eighth power. I just mentioned this slip up in the math class I teach. The math on Star Trek classic is notoriously bad. But the math on TNG was graduate level quality.
Just watched the restored/enhanced (ooooo, colorful!) episode. Kirk said one to the forth power. Writer's probably intended ten to the forth power and should perhaps have phrased it as "ten thousand-fold" to avoid the whole problem. As for riverdealers's comment: It”s all good fun to spot this stuff; nothing wrong with TRYING to make TODAY's writers and story line researchers avoid rubbish math and science boo-boos. Just to give one example: based on frequency of "slip-ups” and whoo-hoo that shows up on the "CSI franchises", quality of story-line research is waaaay down from the sixties.
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