Okay, say it’s the 24th Century and we’re on the USS StraightDope when we come upon some ship in peril.
To get over there we use the nifty transporter that deconstructs us into molecules and shoots us however many thousand miles to the ship. But alas, somehow during transit, my phaser becomes fused to my leg. It seems that the handle of the thing is now completely fused into my leg as if it grew there.
What sort of complications can I expect from this? What if it materialized in a more sensitive area like my eye? Or a possibly fatal area like my stomach or spine?
Should I call you Logan, Weapon X?
No but seriously, on the one hand it seems like your body would reject it and you would suffer consequences similar to that of a mismatched organ transplant, but on the other hand, how is this dealt with in cases of prothetic hips, steel plates, joint screws…etc?
I’m guessing that in any case, by the time we can shoot dopers like waterguns this problem will have been dealt with :).
Hard to answer this question in any meaningful way, but you probably couldn’t rematerialise two chunks of matter in such a way as to only occupy the volume originally taken up by only one of them - so some of the matter from your leg has to have gone somewhere in order for some of the matter from the phaser to be in its place.
Aside from that and if we’re talking about the affected area becoming essentially a molecular-scale 50/50 mix of both original materials (perhaps the other 50% of each object was displaced temporally by the flux variance conduits?) - then it could have serious implications - most of these would (I think) stem from arteries and veins being blocked, nerves being cut off and the mechanical integrity of bones and muscles being messed up.
There’s also a risk that the molecular-scale 50/50 mix would still be fluid enough to travel in the bloodstream, causing poisoning(assuming that some toxic elements were used in constructing the phaser) and blockage/damage in smaller blood vessels further on.
As far as I know, once you get down to that scale there is actually quite a lot of space between the various atoms or whatever it is we’re made of, so I think you could probably “knit” two objects together in the way the OP describes.
Yes, there is losts of space when you get down to the atomic scale, in fact atoms are mostly empty space, but that doesn’t mean the space is available to put things into.
Well… probably not - there’s a heck of a lot of space between the nucleus of an atom and the electron shells (As a comparison of scale, if the sun were the nucleus of an atom, the electrons would be at a distance equivalent to roughtly three times that of the planet Pluto). But you can’t put anything into all that space for two reasons; firstly, you haven’t anything small enough, secondly, putting it in there (if that were possible and if you did have something small enough) would destroy the functionality of the atom.
You can’t fuse two objects together like that. Part of your leg will need to go missing (or end up somewhere next to you) and the phaser replaces that part.
Your Phaser has a powerful energy storage cell in it. By fusing the Phaser into your leg, the containment casing of the energy cell would cease to function, & the entirety of the energy stored in the Phaser would transfer to your body, most likely in the form of heat, either all at once, or over a period of up to several hours.
Bad sunburn there, buddy.
But, the real risk—if a fly gets into the transporter with you…
If I remember correctly, the power storage for a phaser is based on a sarium krellide power cell.
I’ve no idea what the chemical properties of sarium krellide are, but I’d guess that mixing parts of your body with elements from a whole different periodic table is probably a bad idea.
