Infinite Regress

I got kind of interested the other day (in a somewhat relative way) about how phasers in Star Trek worked. Or, more precisely, how they were said to work, since they don't really work at all. But in the various shows, they can do just about anything, from stunning obstreperous, foul-mouthed hipsters into blessed silence, to burning holes in things, to blowing stuff up, to making entire human beings vanish utterly (in the fashion, though perhaps not the form, of Milli Vanilli or Gary Hart).

So I look up "phaser" on the Internet. It's a weapon that emits a beam of "nadions".

Okay, what's a "nadion"? Apparently, it's an "artificially-produced particle." And by altering the characteristics of the beam of nadions, one can, say, stun obstreperous hi... Oh, we're back to the same problem, aren't we?

I generally enjoy Star Trek technobabble, which is at least as interesting to me as terminally-hip urban slang. Okay, a lot more interesting than urban slang. You only have to innocently look up something horrid like a "Dirty Sanchez" once before you realize that Treknobabble (as they call it) is way less disturbing than the real world. On my spare time at work I even wrote a Treknobabble generator, which is pretty easy - you just assemble three lists of words and assemble them randomly, as in "optimizing deuteron polarizer" or "structural modulus flux" or "inverse quantum rectification". (In fact, assemble any of these in any way you like, as long as you don't change the word order - anyone up for some structural deuteron rectification?)

But nothing's as much fun as emitting a tachyon pulse, which they do in Star Trek all the time, and which I'm known to do myself.