Why Don’t La Forge and Ro fall through the floor? How do they breathe?
Why does Ro’s religious awakening allow her to tough the console?
The first two to do with the conservation of momentum with kenetic velocities in hyper space.
The last: Those Bajorans are tough cookies.
I really think you’d enjoy this book.
Zev Steinhardt
…And why don’t these questions have any context?
It is not a nitpick. It goes right to the heart of what the episode is about.
Well, considering that “nitpick” is subject to interpretation, we can argue that point till the cows come home.
Nonetheless, if questions like this bother you, you’d like the book.
Zev Steinhardt
Because you’re not enough of a geek. I understood instantly what the questions were about.
I always just sorta kinda assumed that they don’t fall through the floors due to some weird effect related to the gravity-generating deck plating. Either that or magic.
Maybe the floor’s where they run all the wires through, and they can’t phase through the energy in them? That’d have to be the same for Federation and Romulan ships, though.
I was looking forward to one of them going through the wall and out into space, before exploding, but figured they wouldn’t have that on Star Trek. And then they did it! No exploding, though. 
Maybe it was that plush Enterprise carpeting.
Obviously, it’s because the floors exist thru out all the possible alternate universes and phases. Geez. :dubious:
I have been a charter member of the Nitpicker’s Guild since before there even was a first book. 
- signed, Not Phil Farrand (he ain’t picky enough)
I would hazard a guess that the phase-cloaking process somehow produces a low-level side effect which allows sentient beings to exert an extremely mild degree of subconscious control over their phased condition. Although evidently the effect does not enable a person to materialize fully, it fortunately appears just strong enough to facilitate a slight interaction with the ship’s gravitational fields, deck substrate and atmosphere-- features of the environment which a person might subconsciously consider of primary importance to their well-being. Less obviously, a completely phased person ought not to be able to see or hear, since they would present no barrier to either sound or light waves; plainly, then, perception is also a subconscious priority. It would seem that the amount of force required for these continuous small-scale interactions exhausts a person’s minimal subconsicous control over the phase-cloak effect, so that they are unable to further interact with other non-phased objects or beings.
It may be significant that phase-cloaked individuals are observed to generate chroniton fields, since chronitons are one of the few known ways to demonstrably affect intangible energy beings such as the entities native to the Bajoran wormhole. This suggests that the phase-cloak effect is in some way akin to the ability of some energy beings to manipulate time and matter by force of will, albeit on a much smaller scale. This may also explain why rigorous mental exertion might temporarily allow a phase-cloaked person to materialize more fully. I don’t recall enough about the TNG episode to say whether Ensign Ro’s religious epiphany was a possible example of this. However, when Captain Kirk found himself in a similar situation in “The Tholian Web,” he was seemingly able to briefly render himself visible even while still trapped in a phased state, which may have been another instance of focused willpower exerting control over a condition of quantum flux.
Parenthetically, this hypothesis may account for the numerous technical difficulties and mishaps which have thus far prevented the development of a reliable phase-cloak, since the engineers’ own subconscious impressions could be introducing dangerously uncontrolled variables into the experiments. The Observer Effect does not mix well with antimatter-fueled warp plasma.
Actually I’m pretty sure it has something to do with a Polarized Linear Oscillating Transducer device.
A Q did it.
They didn’t fall through the floor due to the MacGuffin Effect. Like many of the special fake science thingies employed in the Star Trek franchises, the effect is frequently employed but a single time, and then forgotten forever. Add to this the general state of scientific illiteracy among the screenwriters for the franchise, and you get lots of idiotic special phenomena that magically promote a plotline, but fail all reasonable rules of technical consistency, even within the framework of the internal fake science environment.
In other words, they wanted a characters-out-of-water/facing-mortality/watch-your-own-funeral episode, and the phase nonsense was what was needed. As for the Romulan subplot, it was a working rule that the ship and/or planet(s) had to be in mortal jeopardy every single freaking week.
The more important question is, what air are they breathing?
If only I had come up with such a profound question - see my OP.
:smack:
I’m not entirely sure of the answer. But I think it probably has something to do with reversing the polarity of something.
It usually does.
Ah, yeah, well, whenever you notice something like that, a wizard did it