Source: The Conversation – UK
I’ll admit it, I’m a Trekkie. I blame my mother.
It was on her insistence that my brother and I watched endless re-runs of the original Star Trek series, which is now celebrating its 60th anniversary. She took us further into the unknown with The Next Generation – and I’ve stayed loyal to the franchise ever since.
I’m also a chemist. Was my career choice inspired by Star Trek? Indubitably. What other television series has put the “central science” at the heart of so many episodes? These are four of my favourite storylines.
1. Crude chemistry
Arena (first screened in January 1967) was a formative episode from the original series, based on a 1944 short story by US science fiction writer Fredric Brown.
When Captain James T. Kirk is forced to battle the captain of a Gorn spacecraft on a rocky asteroid, he mixes up a crude form of gunpowder – having remembered a rough recipe and conveniently found piles of sulfur, potassium nitrate and coal to hand.
Despite the flaws in Kirk’s manufacturing process (and my disappointment as a child when I looked in vain for similar mineral deposits in the local park), this episode gave me my first taste of the possibilities offered by chemistry. Kirk uses the gunpowder to shoot tennis-ball sized diamonds at his reptilian-humanoid opponent, severely wounding it.
With the chemistry knowledge I have now, I’d warn the captain that his approach will most likely result in him losing a limb or two. But in the episode, Kirk prevails – and his subsequent decision to show mercy to his defeated opponent is rewarded by god-like Metron observers telling him: “You are still half-savage, but there is hope.”
2. Polywater puzzle
A curious substance known as “polywater” has featured in three different series of Star Trek. It is based on a compound proposed by Soviet scientists Nikolai Fedyakin and Boris Deryagin in the 1960s, with water molecules linked together to form repeating six-sided rings and a higher boiling point than regular water.
Any chemists reading this will hear alarm bells ringing. These properties would imply that polywater is more stable than the regular water in our rivers, oceans and blood, contradicting the laws of thermodynamics.
Even Richard Feynman, who won the 1965 Nobel prize in physics, waded into the theoretical polywaters to discredit its possible existence. Thankfully, the research was eventually debunked: polywater was shown to be nothing more than contaminated regular water.
Nevertheless, it remains immortalised on the small screen, having first appeared in episode four of the original Star Trek series, entitled The Naked Time (September 1966). Polywater causes both hilarity and more than a whiff of danger when the Enterprise crew are accidentally exposed to it during a mission.
The reason is its propensity to remove someone’s inhibitions after reaching their central nervous system. Its most significant achievement? Making the legendarily unemotional Mr Spock cry (after which, actor Leonard Nimoy’s fan mail is reported to have increased dramatically).
3. Heartfelt hydrocarbons
Season four of the franchise’s most recent incarnation, Star Trek: Discovery (2017-24), featured a new alien species, 10-C, with a novel method of communication: a combination of light patterns for context, and a puff of complex hydrocarbons to convey detailed information about their emotional state.
While wincing at the risk that Starfleet captain Michael Burnham took in plunging her hand into an unknown bowl of dust (no chemist would, hopefully, ever do this), I even was more surprised by the premise that the crew of Discovery all share the same receptors as 10-C, and experience the same emotions.
To throw more petrol on this storyline, the fact that the hydrocarbons are depicted as a dust rather than a gas brings into question how easy it would be for the giant jellyfish-esque 10-C (who float amid the dense layers of their gas-giant homeworld) to actually communicate before these hydrocarbons simply drifted away or sank.
There again, chemical communication does exist in a simple form on Earth. The humble fruit fly, for example, is coated in a complex hydrocarbon wax which acts either as an aphrodisiac or deterrent to other fruit flies that come into contact with it.
4. Hellfire and hatred
The chemistry lesson flame test is a right of passage for many schoolchildren – and also, it seems, students at Star Trek: Starfleet Academy taking the “exochemistry” class (which focuses on chemical compounds and properties beyond Earth).
The principle of the flame test is the same as that of modern fireworks. A metal salt is heated, generating an unstable gas radical that may then adopt an excited state due to the heat, before dropping back down to its ground state and releasing energy in the form of light.
The colour of this light depends on the difference in energy between the two states. For strontium salts, this is relatively small, resulting in a red colour. Sadly for the first season’s recurring villain, space pirate Nus Braka, this piece of chemical trivia has passed him by.
If he had known the “red hellfire” that destroyed his mining colony when he was a child was actually caused by strontium burning, rather than Federation weaponry, then a lifetime of hatred of Starfleet and eventual humiliation by Starfleet cadet Caleb Mir in the episode Rubincon (March 2026) might never have happened.
Over the 60 years this groundbreaking franchise has been on our screens, Star Trek has helped to inspire chemistry-related breakthroughs with technology such as handheld tricorder scanners, metamaterials that mimic cloaking devices, and the needle-free hypospray medical device. Writing as both a committed Trekkie and chemist, long may Star Trek fiction continue to become fact.
Gemma Shearman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/08/how-the-chemistry-of-star-trek-changed-my-life-from-a-gunpowder-plot-to-red-hellfire/