Part of that conflict is an over-rationalizing. Now, playing with the actual science is part of the game in "Hard" SF, but the attempt to rationalize is out of place (and poorly executed as well) in other dramas. TOS; "There's an energy barrier at the edge of the universe." The ship hits it, takes damage, and Gary Mitchell gains pychic powers. Exposition out of the way and on with the story, which was about Mitchell and Denner's struggle to retain their humanity against the godlike power that had been thrust upon them. TNG; "We've struck a string fragment that depolarized the ion emmiters. The warp core is too unstable to allow us to escape the worm hole, but we might be able to creep out on impulse if we use the deflector array to saturate subspace with polaron particles...." Aka, total bafflegab, a substitute of meaningless buzzwords for meaningful story, and no more "scientific" then the TOS version, despite the occaisional scientific term (used incorrectly more often then not). The drama is lost in the shuffle and ignored in the self-congradulatory glow of "being about real science." Same oddness in the comic books, of all places; of fans trying to nail down exactly how Superman flies, a trend that has given us "organic" web shooters as they are somehow "more realistic," a trend that substitutes one buzz-word ("gamma radiation") for something more current but no more meaningful ("nanotechnology"). These sorts of changes have the shallow sensibility of Verne's giant cannon over Well's Cavorite; we've heard of cannon, on the surface it sounds more plausible. If you actually look at it, though, the cannon would crush the crew and fly apart -- we're talking a velocity quite a bit higher than cannon are capable of.