I’d just like to point out, in the interests of accuracy, that the book jacket indicates that Dr. Wilk is not, in fact, a professor at the University of Rochester, or anywhere else. I think Rochester would be shocked if he was.
I feel as slow as one of those visible laser beams that people can duck out of the way of.
I discovered the book in a profile of the Good Doctor in the UofR magazine, which normally saves those for current professors and which certainly left the impression in my brain he was one. And I got the ebook edition. Ain’t no jacket. Another reason I prefer print.
So the penny just dropped, Cal, and Dr. Wilk can be assured that the compliment was totally disinterested.
Wiki mentions old home movies were filmed at 16 or 18fps, but you can see them flicker. I think 20fps is around the flicker limit of human vision, and that’s why the film industry standardized at 24fps early on.
On lasers versus “blasters”: Babylon 5 made a creditable effort to handle the distinction. Their energy weapons were PPGs–“phased plasma guns”, which fired magnetically encapsulated bursts of plasma. It makes sense for them to appear as discrete bolts of light, because the relatively slow-moving projectiles are made of superheated gas that emits light. (The reason they’re preferred over slug-throwers is that they’re much less likely to penetrate bulkheads or hulls–the plasma splashes on hard targets that a slug might punch a hole in.)
They’re still made of unobtainium and powered by handwavium cells, but at least some thought went into them.
Oh, I certainly believe Mapcase and others; I also believed the book I was reading back in the 1970’s. As for citing it, sorry ChrisK but I was a good boy and returned it to the library on time and I no longer remember the title. I do remember that the section on the prospects of laser technology seemed to be a filler tacked onto an already thin book, but I don’t recall the subject matter at this point. It might have been something about pulsars, quasars, and lasers (and I was more interested in the first two at the time) but one must remember it was written for young teen readers so not all that detailed (and apparently inaccurate about the lasers).
Films are shot at 24 fps, true, but they are projected at 48 or 72 fps (i.e., each frame is paused so that the light shines through it 2 or 3 times) to reduce the perceptible flicker.
Simplified or not, I can’t figure out what sound you could think is being emitted.
Kirk and Picard probably should be using their phasers that way, though, as those generally are beams rather than bursts (though there have been some exceptions).
Um, no. The 24fps standard was adopted with the introduction of sound; the sound equipment required that speed for fidelity (or what passed for it in those days).
Silent films were not really standardized, but varied between 12 to 26 fps. Studios might have their own particular frame rate, but standardization was not easily achieved, since cameras were hand cranked (That’s one of the amazing things about Buster Keaton’s 1921 film “The Playhouse” – where he played the entire audience). Films may also have been projected at different rates, and the rates varied within a film.
In any case, I’m surprised no one has hit upon the obvious answer to the question in the OP: They were shown as individual projectiles because it looked cool. No one gave the slightest thought to how it might look in reality; their job was to make it look impressive to the audience.
