Spoilers for TNG S04E14 Clues
!The Enterprise encounters a planet inhabited by an isolationist species who uses a fake wormhole to knock people out so they can somehow mask their presence. OK, I'm with it so far.
This trap fails on Data who revives the crew and the aliens say they need to destroy the Enterprise to stop people finding out about them. Picard points out that if the Enterprise is destroyed Starfleet will come looking for them. Again, so far so good.
The aliens agree to let the crew live if they can wipe everyone's memory and order Data to never say what happened. This memory wipe takes 24 hours so they modify the computer records to make everyone think a day hasn't passed and they were actually out for 30 seconds. Then they do it again when the crew realises after finding some unforseen clues, so now at least 48 hours has passed. This is where it lost me.
I can understand them not realising straight away if they're in deep space and not communicating with Starfleet, but surely they're going to figure out their chronometer is 2 days off eventually and go back to try and figure out what went on?!<
I have a vague memory of Data stating in that episode that he was re-syncing ships clocks because "the anomaly" had a temporal something-or-other. The ship experienced 30 seconds, but they were jumped ahead.
Since time is affected by gravity and the differences are magnified by distance (according to relativity), ships clocks must constantly be re-syncing if their standard time is set in sector 001.
Yeah, that was it. The crew didn't react because a time jump from transiting a wormhole is a totally normal thing for them.
I'm not positive, but I think part of the reason for keeping crew unconscious for so long was to make time to fly the ship far enough from the forbidden planet that it would be a pain to go back for another look. There's an exchange that goes something like this,
Picard: A random wormhole isn't that interesting. But we saw a glimpse of maybe a planet? Should we, uh, spend a whole two days to go look again and come back?
Data: That was a sensor glitch! Don't worry about!
Picard: Yeah that's way too much hassle. Let's go ahead and roll the credits.
Pretty much. They send a probe to the planet to avoid the risk of hitting the wormhole again which Data rigs the output of to say it isn't inhabitable after all and the original readings saying it was were probably a glitch.
For the record, we've understood how gravity (and velocity) affect clocks since the 70's. We couldn't have developed GPS without that understanding (which relies on satellites of known position sending out synchronized pulses of messages that are basically just timestamps. The timestamps are used by the GPS receiver to know how far away said satellites are and triangulates based off that.)
They weren't unconscious the whole time, they were unconscious for 30secs after a day of figuring out what to do.
They were retroactively unconscious lol
It was crushers plants that gave them a clue, it grew despite the discrepancy in time?