lasers they can be found in everything from grocery store scanners and printers
to lethal alien blasting weapons and
ill-tempered sharks to protect your freaking evil layer okay the last two
are science fiction but lasers were originally developed for scientific
applications that were very much real it was all the way back in 1917 that the
illustrious Albert Einstein published a paper containing the underlying science
that would allow light to be Amplified enough to form a laser beam but it
wasn't until the late 1950s that the idea really took off with the first ever
laser being turned on in 1960 it didn't take long then for people
to find real applications for lasers as the laser was used to treat an eye
patient the very next year and then by 1969 we were using lasers to estimate
the distance to the Moon but how do lasers generate powerful enough light
for these cool uses the idea basically boils down to the way electrons that
spin around the nuclei of atoms behave you see electrons can gain or lose
energy in a number of ways which can happen if light hits them inside of a
laser a powered lamp flashes and the light from this flash energizes or
excites electrons in a material called a gain medium some of these excited
electrons spontaneously lose their energy and in the process give off a
photon an extremely tiny unit of light the photons then hit other excited
electrons causing more and more photons to be released which travel at exactly
the same angle and phase as the original Photon eventually enough inphase photons
will bounce back and forth off of two mirrors on either side of the laser and
shine through one mirror which is semi-transparent forming a laser beam
that you can use to play with your cat laser beams are powerful due to the way
the internals amplify the light and they're narrow due to the fact that the
photons are coherent or in phase and
although the first laser was that familiar red col
these days we can produce many different colors of laser light by using different
gain media different materials will emit different wave lengths of light and also
need different amounts of energy to excite their electrons both the costs of
these various materials and their different energy requirements contribute
to the fact that some colors of laser are more expensive than others with red
typically being the most readily available and cheapest and with
advancements in laser design it's become one of the most versatile pieces of
Technology invented in the last 100 years high energy lasers have made it
possible to cut things with light alone send data over very long distances
through fiber optic lines identify fingerprints with Precision at crime
scenes and even remove embarrassing body hair we're seeing other cool stuff too
like Facebook Aquilla an experimental drone that transmits data at very high
bandwidth using laser light and of course we'd be remiss if we didn't
mention the humble optical drive which while it might be on its way out really
got people thinking about the benefits of using lasers to store access and send
information but if lasers have been around for over half a century why then
don't we have cool weapons like the phasers from Star Trek well the main
hurdles to a real life laser guns are power we just haven't gotten energy
sources powerful enough to weaponize lasers shrunk down to any kind of
practical size and efficiency as lasers
strong enough to cause physical damage are susceptible to overheat heating
however active Research into directed energy weapons has made some progress in
recent years just don't hold your breath waiting for someone to turn the moon
into oh I don't know a space station
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