Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Phasers

The exact way phasers work has only been explained on-screen through sparse references to beam intensity, nadion particles, and other confusing technobabble, but the Star Trek: Next Generation Technical Manual from 1991 went into a bit more detail.

According to that reference book, the term phaser was short for 'phased energy rectification', and a phaser beam was generated by a complicated interaction between plasma and superconducting lithium-copper that would cause a so-called 'rapid nadion effect', dissolving the strong nuclear force in the plasma. From there, a stream of energy would then be fired in pulses through a special superconducting crystal in the emitter. The intensity and frequency of these pulses would determine the effect of the blast, from heating to disintegration.

All of this is consistent with what we've seen on screen, apart from the fact that phasers are generally referred to as particle beam weapons, which fire fictional 'rapid nadion particles', rather than a beam of electromagnetic energy.

People have gone into a lot of work trying to describe the way phasers function, but the way they originated was much less scientific.

In The Cage, the first Star Trek pilot starring Captain Pike's crew, Starfleet used laser weapons. These were changed to phasers two days into filming the second pilot, and, in the reference book The Making Of Star Trek (released in 1968), Gene Roddenberry explained that the reason was that he knew people would be yelling 'lasers can't do that' at their screens whenever the weapons were used for fantastical things like stunning people, or vaporising targets without damaging the surrounding area. By creating an entirely fictional technology, they were able to avoid scientific inaccuracies by just making it all up.