Uhura and Chekov went to Starfleet Academy, which is in the Presidio in San Francisco, right? So how come neither of them had even heard of Alameda? I assume you spend at least a few years going through the academy, and in all that time, neither of them wandered around the Bay Area?
Most likely, it hasn’t been known as Alameda since The Eugenics Wars. 
There should have been a lot more shots of Catherine Hicks in her wet sweater in the bay.
Hah! I remember that! Wasn’t there another joke revolving around Scotty’s “There be whales here” line and Kirk making a crack about Scotty’s/James Doohan’s weight?
Is it safe to assume you’re not American? I was a teenager in the '80s and knew darn well who George Burns was. I’m pretty sure most of my peers knew who he was too — he was still making movies in the '80s and appearing in TV specials (usually alongside Bob Hope and that crowd) — and most of us had probably at least heard of Gracie Allen - after all, our parents were old enough to remember their TV show(s).
Spock is unable to precisely calculate the weight of the whales, so he has to guess. Why didn’t he just go to a whale-weigh station?
He couldn’t find the right one. 
Does it bother anyone that transparent Aluminum is a metal … and a plexiglass plant manufactures a clear thermoplastic? Wouldn’t a metal smelter or Aluminum factory of some sort have better tools and know-how to create a large hunk of metal than a plastic manufacturer? I don’t think a plexiglass maker could even attempt Aluminum production on any scale. Am I missing something?
Scotty was trading the formula/process for transparent aluminum for the needed amount of Plexiglas as they had no money.
And in the novelization, Scotty recognizes Nichols as the inventor.
Yes. They didn’t get Transparent Aluminum from Plexicorps. They traded the formula for TA to that guy who wasn’t Newman but should have been (in my mind he was played by Wayne Knight) for plexiglass sufficient to turn the cargo bay of the Bird of Prey into a whale-worthy tank.
I;m sorry - I thought that water and water displacement theory was fairly well known, even in the 20th century - shouldn’t he have been able to calculate the volume of the cargo bay and extrapolated how much it would have weighed based on that alone?
It’s a great line in the movie - but as far as I always understood it - water is displaced by an equal mass - therefore it should have wieghed the same amout as if it were ‘salt water’ only.
Maybe I’m not following you, but I think that would only be true if a whale were the same density as seawater, which obviously is not the case. If you plopped a whale into an exactly-full tank of water, and caught and measured the seawater that overflowed, you’d know the volume of the whale, but not its weight.
Archimedes’ principle
Archimedes’ principle is named after Archimedes of Syracuse, who first discovered this law in 212 B.C.[2] For more objects, floating and sunken, and in gases as well as liquids (i.e. a fluid), Archimedes’ principle may be stated thus in terms of forces:
[QUOTE=Archimedes of Syracuse]
Any object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object.
[/QUOTE]
with the clarifications that for a sunken object the volume of displaced fluid is the volume of the object, and for a floating object on a liquid, the weight of the displaced liquid is the weight of the object.
From WikiPedia-
I would say that the Whales would be defined as “floating”
(and having thought tht thru - I realize he could not have easily figured out how much was about to be displaced since they were beamed up “as a unit”.)
Archimedes’ principle is true for an inanimate object, such as a golden crown or a boat. I don’t think it’s true for a living, swimming, creature. Whales are, I’m pretty sure, somewhat heavier than the water they displace but keep from sinking by moving their bodies.
I think.
With all that fat and the air inside their lungs? Not to mention brain/nerve tissue and other internal organs? I doubt it.
Most likely, they’re pretty close to neutrally buoyant and make up the difference (in whichever direction) via lift generated by their motion. But they wouldn’t be exactly neutrally buoyant, since that’s a target that’s essentially impossible to hit precisely.
That said, though, the assumption of neutral buoyancy would probably be a good enough approximation for any calculations Spock needed to do.
Then he’s back to making the best guess that he can. 
The one thing that bugs me in this movie is that they keep switching between walking up & down a ramp and beaming on and off the spaceship. In the scene just before Gillian hangs onto Kirk as he’s being beamed on board, the rest of the group had just walked up the ramp. They could beam up 2 whales and a lot of sea water, but they couldn’t beam up the whale tank components? I’m willing to suspend disbelief on time travel and the whole beam up/down thing, but I want consistency!
BTW this is one of my favorite ST movies.
Probe. HEY WHALE!
Whale: Fuck, not this moron again.
Probe. HEY WHALE!
Whale: Whaat?
Probe. HEY WHALE!
Whale: What do you want?! My ears, goddammit!
Probe: HAVE YOU HEARD THE GOOD WORD OF THE SPACE WHALE JESUS?
Whale: Fuck off!
Probe: OK, I’LL COME BACK IN A MILLENNIUM. MAY I LEAVE A PAMPHLET?
How do you weigh a cargo bay?