Star Trek is a good show. But some of its technology just don’t make any sense whatsoever when you really start to think about them. Of course they’re from the future and regularly go faster than the speed of light, so they’re not new to breaking laws of physics with their left hand and breaking common sense with the other.

One of the problem areas are hand phasers, which are very seemingly contradictory to not only the laws of physics, but the show in itself.

After thoroughly processing numerous kiloquads of information peddled to us by a stray Ferengi vessal, we’ve found that:

1. Phaser disintegration takes a visibly slow amount of time.
2. The target disappears in a flash of light with no debris, no gas clouds, and no effect on the surroundings or surrounding people.
3. Phasers on the maximum setting disintegrate a human body regardless of mass with no excess energy noticeably spilling into the environment.
4. Phasers can heat rocks at one setting, and shatter rocks at another setting.
5. Different lifeforms and materials are affected by phasers differently.
6. Captain Kirk can fire a phaser shot that picks up an enemy and hurls them through the air upon impact and experience no recoil from the gun.

Visibly Slow Disintegration

In the show it is seen that anytime someone is vapourized with a phaser, the effects of the last linger seconds after there is no energy being pumped into the opponent. The beam may only strike for a tiny fraction, but the energy slowly propagates through the body for as long as two seconds before the person disappears.

This is just an introductory “odd thing to note”, since there is no way a human body could “hold” the energy to allow it to propagate, since the energy needed to vapourize the person into whatever thing you see above (or whisk them to another dimension far out of transporter range) is immense.

Anyways…

No Gas Clouds

Matter does not simply disappear. There is actually a nice fundamental law called the Law of Conservation of Mass, which states that elegantly “matter cannot be created nor destroyed”. So if the person is being vapourized, that person is obviously being turned into some sort of vapour. But what?

Now seems like a good time to ask the Star Trek Technical Manual for a more accurate answer beyond speculation, except it tells me that the matter is being “transitioned out of the continuum”. This is used to describe the destination of the missing matter, except it has little meaning since it doesn’t say where the matter is other than being in a different place. There is also little scientific reason to base a Starfleet technology that allows transition of matter to different universes, or it would probably be used in far more locations than Mirror Universe episodes involving freaky bearded people.

Lastly, even if it was possible, the Law of Conservation of Mass says that an equal amount of mass-energy would have to come back from the other universe, which would have to be something.

So the first answer is impossible, so we have to do better. What exactly are we looking for? Many people cite that the target is being converted into energy, and that’s what it seems to look like when the person becomes a shrinking red ray. However, this avenue has been explored before to disastrous effects. Remember the mass-energy equivalence equation E=mc² — even a small mass yields a very large amount of energy. In the case of the average 80kg humanoid, E=(80)(299,792,458)² which means you’d observe a 1700 megaton blast. Very noticeable and very damaging. Still a huge death boom is much better than not possible at all.

Another possibility is closer to that of Star Trek’s transporters — the atoms are disrupted and dissembled into subatomic particles. The problem is that the subatomic particles would form a very huge cloud of ionized hydrogen plasma, which is thousands of degrees Celsius hot and suitably undense enough to fill a whole starship. There is also dangerous radiation involved, making this idea — while less death-causing than the one above — still a bad idea and far from what we see on the show.

Here’s one that’s slightly better. If we took the concept of “vapourization” literally and said the body was being turned into real vapour, we’d have less dire consequences. The normal human body which has been phasered to death contains around 75% water, which makes the resulting phaser vapour mostly water vapour. Water vapour, also known as steam, is seen every day and is — while not as hot and deadly as a subatomic cloud of doom — suitably hot to the touch to cause burns, and smoky enough to be visible.

At this point, I think it’s time to give up and move on.

Phasers “Vapourize” Independantly of Mass, and With No Excess Energy

This involves comparison of two different episodes. In Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “The Vengeance Factor”, Commander Riker increases his phaser to “maximum setting”, which usually means there is no higher setting the phaser could be on. He then uses the phaser to disintegrate a small female humanoid, probably no larger than 50kg. The person disintegrates completely and spreads no excess energy to the surroundings.

Now jump to Star Trek: Enterprise’s “In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II”. Evil Mirror Universe Captain Archer uses his phaser on “maximum setting” to completely vaporize an admiral. This admiral who is far heavier than the small girl that Riker vaporized is also completely killed just enough to leave no excess energy.

This difference in phenomena can only be explained if the energy for the vaporization/disintegration comes from the victim’s mass instead of from the phaser itself — allowing the reaction to occur until it runs out of mass and then stop recurring afterward. Otherwise there should be spill-over when shooting small targets and a deficit with larger targets.

Heating Rocks or Destroying Rocks

Another “interesting thing of note” is that phasers are simple heating devices at low power levels, which is very different from their behavouir at higher levels. The phasers at higher levels aren’t heating their targets, so it’s not a simple case of dialing or ramping upward, but rather a complete about-face in the deployment of energy.

Not only that, but we’ve seen phasers at similar settings (sometimes even the exact same setting) shatter a rock quite easily, and then also strike the ground in a combat situation without damaging the ground at all.

Dependence on the Material

In The Original Series “The Devil in the Dark”, we find that silicon-based life is impervious to a phaser instead of getting disintegrated like a self-respecting carbon-based lifeform would be. Phasers — also in their quest to never work on any credible security threat — also seem to not work as well on various armours or strong-willed lifeforms, and preform differently against different hull. This gives us even more evidence that phasers cause a chain reaction in the mass of the target rather than destroy the target itself.

Complete Disregard of Newton’s Third Law

In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Captain Kirk can fire a one-handed phaser shot that carries such momentum that it can lift a Klingon entirely off his feet into the air and send him flying several meters through the air. Newton’s Third Law — for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction — should have creamed Kirk backwards with the same amount of force and recoil. This is why shooting high caliber guns can hurt.

Therefore, it’s apparent that the phaser does not hit with simple impact physics, but rather through some strange other method. Perhaps this amplification of force is a side-effect of the induced chain reaction, or it was an anomaly caused by freakish space-time warping from the Genesis planet.

Conclusion and Disclaimer

Lastly, yes I am well aware that Star Trek is a show, and I enjoy watching it even if it occasionally does drink the sci-fi Kool Aid rather than fall in line with known physics. That’s why they have Warp Drive, which is additionally unexplainable and we’re all cool with that.

I also know that a lot of the effects — such as flying Klingons or lingering beams of light — are just simple theatrics.

However, it is fun to try to examine effects of the show from a real physics standpoint, and see just how much they stand up or not. For example, there still is no real explanation for exactly how the phaser is killing a person, theatrics or not.

The weapons are way too powerful to present them in any realistic kind of way. Given the real power of a hand phaser, we shouldn’t be able to show ANY firefights on camera where the opponents are even in sight of each other, much less around the corner! It’s annoying, but just one of those things that we tend to slide by in order to concentrate on telling a dramatic and interesting story.
– Ronald D. Moore

Be Sociable, Share!

•