Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking, Hayter, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast
Speaker 1: that looks at the future. And says cha tung Ima
Speaker 1: ch Chu Ron Tanny e Chu. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm
Speaker 1: Lauren Paul Obama, and I'm Joe McCormick. I recognize that
Speaker 1: as some form of alien language, and I don't think
Speaker 1: it's cling on. No, it's the opening line to the
Speaker 1: immortal classic Jedi Rocks from the special edition of Return
Speaker 1: of the Jedi. The less said about that, the better,
Speaker 1: So let's move on. I could have gone a yev
Speaker 1: nub Oh, I love ye n I'm I'm actually a
Speaker 1: much bigger fan of you. We got yev nub. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know that there is there's actually a translation
Speaker 1: of those lyrics available online. I found the sheet music
Speaker 1: one time. Of course there is. You might guess from
Speaker 1: the way we're prattling on about Star Wars music that
Speaker 1: today is a Star Wars related topic. Yeah. So, of course,
Speaker 1: the trailer for Star Wars episode seven, The Force Awakens,
Speaker 1: came out, and um, I don't know about you, guys,
Speaker 1: I thought it was a very exciting teaser based upon
Speaker 1: the fact that it gives us no information at all
Speaker 1: about the story, but it felt Star Wars e to
Speaker 1: me visually it was very exciting. Yeah. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I I am cautious about my expectations for this movie,
Speaker 1: but I have to admit the trailer gave me a thrill.
Speaker 1: Especially it was the moment of seeing the storm Troopers
Speaker 1: in the sort of like dark lighting and loading from
Speaker 1: some kind of transport. I was like, Wow, this is
Speaker 1: the Empire again, and I felt excited. X Wings skimming
Speaker 1: over the water was really exciting. Yeah, it was. It
Speaker 1: was the soundtrack for me, it's soundtrack that always gets me.
Speaker 1: And but of course we should get to the most
Speaker 1: contentious part of the trailer, which is of course the
Speaker 1: broadsword light saber. Yes, yes, the lightsaber that has a
Speaker 1: cross guard on it. Uh, well, not just a cross guard.
Speaker 1: It is a cross guard made of the lightsaber energy material,
Speaker 1: whatever you call that. Yeah. So obviously one of those
Speaker 1: things that was going to be divisive. I mean, anytime
Speaker 1: you drift away from a design that is considered iconic,
Speaker 1: people are going to have a lot to say about it. Personally,
Speaker 1: I'm like, bring it on. I I love to see
Speaker 1: the different variations of lightsabers. I don't care if you
Speaker 1: can make it work in the context of the story.
Speaker 1: I don't care about that initial Well, that's weird. I
Speaker 1: can get over that. Yeah, I don't really have a
Speaker 1: feeling about it one way or another yet. I've just
Speaker 1: noticed that a lot of times nerds don't like change. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've never fought with a sword with a cross guard,
Speaker 1: so I'm not sure what function they actually play. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's to protect the hand. Um. I fought with a
Speaker 1: sword with a cross guard, opposite of protecting the hand,
Speaker 1: so that if the other lightsaber blade were to go down,
Speaker 1: your blade contexts your hand from getting Yeah, you noticed
Speaker 1: that a lot of Jedi are missing an arm. That's
Speaker 1: not a big that's not a big surprise. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's the difference between the katana tiny little
Speaker 1: cross guard and the broadsword broad cross guard. Let's try
Speaker 1: to bring this a little bit into the real world
Speaker 1: and whether it's a lightsaber with a cross guard or
Speaker 1: without one. Could we ever make something like a lightsaber
Speaker 1: in the real world and to really understand this. I
Speaker 1: thought first it would be kind of fun, also kind
Speaker 1: of silly to talk about how lightsabers work within the
Speaker 1: Star Wars universe, just to understand what they are in
Speaker 1: that fictional world. What's the techno mythology? Right? And uh, well,
Speaker 1: first we have to say that if you're going by
Speaker 1: Cannon and canonical Star Wars is merely the stuff that
Speaker 1: appears in the movies. That's that's the way, and then
Speaker 1: some Clone Wars stuff too. But but Lucas opposite of
Speaker 1: heretical Lucas Lucas Head always maintained that the movies were
Speaker 1: that was Star Wars and that all the expanded universe
Speaker 1: stuff was interesting, but it didn't didn't impact the mythology
Speaker 1: laid out in the film exactly. It wasn't it wasn't
Speaker 1: meant to be taken as this is actually what happened
Speaker 1: either before after or at the same time as the
Speaker 1: stuff that was going on in the movies. The movies
Speaker 1: are it, and then everything else is just kind of
Speaker 1: you know, superfluous. Yeah yeah, so he um, you know,
Speaker 1: he never really got into how lightsabers are constructed. Now,
Speaker 1: it's definitely part of your training as a Jedi. We
Speaker 1: do here that you have constructed your own lightsaber. Your
Speaker 1: training as a Jedi is complete, So that's considered the
Speaker 1: I guess the graduation, like this is your thesis is
Speaker 1: your lightsaber, So we know that much. So what do
Speaker 1: you what do you use for your lightsaber training while
Speaker 1: you're in training? Usually I guess he would use a
Speaker 1: loaner lightsaber. I mean they've got a lightsaber, pool wouldn't
Speaker 1: lightsaber that they do in Japanese. You know, Luke used
Speaker 1: his father's I mean that was Anakin's lightsaber that he
Speaker 1: used until until he lost it investment um, along with
Speaker 1: the hand that was holding it. But uh so, the
Speaker 1: rules for Star Wars in general, this is laid out
Speaker 1: in the somewhat apocryphal Expanded Universe, are that the lightsabers
Speaker 1: have to be made by a Jedi. In order to
Speaker 1: focus the blade, you have to have the force or yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you at least have to be very strong in the force,
Speaker 1: because not all people strong in the Force are Jedi.
Speaker 1: That's true. You have to at least be able to
Speaker 1: use the force to construct the lightsaber, even if you
Speaker 1: are incredibly adept with technology. The story is that unless
Speaker 1: you have the force, you cannot create a lightsaber without
Speaker 1: the danger of it exploding in your hand. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: that's because it's driven by a couple of crystals and
Speaker 1: you have to align them so precisely otherwise yes, exploding
Speaker 1: times right, So only someone, only someone trained in the
Speaker 1: worse can get those to be in perfect alignment. Uh
Speaker 1: so because they have incredible press prosthetics in this past
Speaker 1: future science region, but they don't have quantum mechanics. That's okay.
Speaker 1: You know, in the original Star Wars, before the prequels
Speaker 1: came out, it was all mysticism, and mysticism doesn't need
Speaker 1: to follow the rules of science. It's only when we
Speaker 1: get into the prequels with medicicloreans that we okay, I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna go we no bleep that out. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that that is a bliepable word. So at any rate, Uh,
Speaker 1: they are The blades themselves are of pure plasma that's
Speaker 1: contained within a force field. So the force field is
Speaker 1: meant to do two things. It's meant to keep the
Speaker 1: plasma in the right shape, which is the shape of
Speaker 1: a blade. Uh. And it's also meant to contain that
Speaker 1: intense heat to the blade itself so that the person
Speaker 1: wielding the blade doesn't get burned in the process. Uh.
Speaker 1: Two very important things now plasma, for those of you
Speaker 1: who are not familiar, that's an anized gas. It is
Speaker 1: the most plentiful form of matter in the universe. It's
Speaker 1: what stars are made of. Not so much here on Earth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we've got some, but it's not you know,
Speaker 1: we're used to solid or liquid or gas. But plasma
Speaker 1: is in fact the most the most plentiful version, and
Speaker 1: it is an ionized gas. Right. So that means that
Speaker 1: the atomic nuclei, the protons and neutrons at the middle
Speaker 1: of the atom, have become separated from their electrons or
Speaker 1: they've gained more because technically you could have a plasma
Speaker 1: where you have more electrons. But either way they are
Speaker 1: they are conductive, electrically conductive. So that's and that's the
Speaker 1: cool thing about plasma is that because they're electrically conductive,
Speaker 1: we can do some neat stuff with it. Uh. Some
Speaker 1: of the things we do with plasma tend to be
Speaker 1: pretty intense, like creating plasma cutters that can cut through
Speaker 1: sheet metal with like very little effort, which is awesome.
Speaker 1: And we've also talked on this show about the potential
Speaker 1: for plasma waste converters that would use the intense heat
Speaker 1: of plasma to break down the molecular bonds in trash
Speaker 1: so that it either turns into a gas form that
Speaker 1: you can then turn into sin gas, which can use
Speaker 1: as fuel, or it turns into slag liquid slag that
Speaker 1: you can drain off and then it kind of drives
Speaker 1: into what looks like volcanic rock. Also, on a much
Speaker 1: smaller level, the fluorescent lights that exist are are all
Speaker 1: filled with basically plasma. Once you turn them on, it
Speaker 1: ionizes gas inside of the inside of the tube, and
Speaker 1: that is how the light has created a few steps
Speaker 1: down the road, right exactly, you've got some other stuff
Speaker 1: that fluoresces once it's impacted by that light. You are
Speaker 1: exactly right. So these are all things that we use
Speaker 1: plasma for. But getting back to Star Wars, you've got
Speaker 1: these crystals that Lauren was talking about. You have the
Speaker 1: primary crystal. This is the thing that forms the blade um. Also,
Speaker 1: depending upon the version that you're reading or playing or whatever,
Speaker 1: it's what determines the color of the blade. And then
Speaker 1: you've got the focusing crystal that creates the proper blade
Speaker 1: shape within that force field um. Within the lore of
Speaker 1: the Jedi, the Jedi tend to harvest their crystals from
Speaker 1: natural formations. You have to go on some kind of
Speaker 1: like vision quest to find their crystal or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the specific planet they have to go there is a
Speaker 1: planet that has like giant caverns filled with crystals, and
Speaker 1: the two most common types are blue and green, although
Speaker 1: there are other versions that are found throughout the Star
Speaker 1: Wars universe as well. Of course, you've got mace windows
Speaker 1: purple lightsaber, which as far as I know is the only,
Speaker 1: uh time that you ever see one like that. The
Speaker 1: original story that George Lucas had, they were just gonna
Speaker 1: be silver, but then he found that different colors showed
Speaker 1: up better against the backgrounds, and so it was a
Speaker 1: purely practical decision to make them different colors. Now and
Speaker 1: they look they look great. I'm very glad they were
Speaker 1: not just plain silver me too, although it doesn't versus orange. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's pretty funny that that people had to
Speaker 1: invent reasons for the different color other than the fact
Speaker 1: that it was a practical film effect. Yeah. Yeah. Another
Speaker 1: the fact that, like for example, Samuel L. Jackson really
Speaker 1: wanted a purple light right right, and the Sith they
Speaker 1: use red ones because those crystals are uh, synthetic. They
Speaker 1: grow those crystals, they manufacture them, and it's meant to
Speaker 1: make the blade more aggressive. I don't know what that
Speaker 1: specifically means, but anyway, it's not sure that if you're
Speaker 1: synthetically creating, a crystal can be more pure and therefore
Speaker 1: confunction better. That's kind of that's sort of weird, like
Speaker 1: anti technology that that's fine. No, no no, no, no, coming
Speaker 1: back from it, wouldn't it be so much worse to
Speaker 1: get cut in half by a red lightsaber than a
Speaker 1: blue lightsaber? I I dread the day when I'm cut
Speaker 1: in half with a red lightsaber. It's did you guys
Speaker 1: get to see the video where I talked about lightsabers,
Speaker 1: I got to wield a blue one. It was awesome.
Speaker 1: I was so pleased. All right, So, anyway, there's some
Speaker 1: things that lightsabers can't cut through within the lore of
Speaker 1: Star Wars. Again, this is in the expanded universe, so essentially,
Speaker 1: it's whatever is important to the plot. Is kind of
Speaker 1: like Dr Who's sonic screwdriver. Oh no, the sonic screwdriver
Speaker 1: can't do that, nothing but that. Yeah, yeah, if only,
Speaker 1: if only it didn't have a whatever kind of lock
Speaker 1: it is it's just like how the replicator can't recreate
Speaker 1: just a few things that latinum. Yeah, so same sort
Speaker 1: of deal. The idea that this plasma thing, there's certain
Speaker 1: things that just resist it. But anyway, that's how they
Speaker 1: work in in the Star Wars universe, however, are at
Speaker 1: least according to the Expanding universe, if you were to
Speaker 1: just watch the movies, you wouldn't get any of this stuff.
Speaker 1: It doesn't look like a plasma blade at all. It
Speaker 1: doesn't look like it's plasma. It looks like it's some
Speaker 1: sort of laser sword that just ends like three ft
Speaker 1: from the end of the hilt. Yeah. And furthermore, I
Speaker 1: mean their description of the of the techno science that
Speaker 1: that happens in order to make lightsabers function. What they're
Speaker 1: describing is is way more like a like a laser
Speaker 1: than like a plasma creator. Right right, If you wanted
Speaker 1: to create plasma, then you would need to run a
Speaker 1: high voltage electrical current and then pass some sort of
Speaker 1: gas through that in order to ionize it, right right,
Speaker 1: You use an arc and ectric arc and and the
Speaker 1: sound that that lightsabers make is indeed an arc wave
Speaker 1: noise um. But but it looks more like looks like
Speaker 1: a laser. So so what about lasers? I mean they
Speaker 1: can cut stuff in real life, we have laser cutters. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so why don't we have lightsabers? So the biggest problem
Speaker 1: is um figuring out how to make those lightsabers coalesced
Speaker 1: into a shape and stay that way. But to understand that,
Speaker 1: we've got to talk about the nature of light. Right,
Speaker 1: What what is it about light that makes it so
Speaker 1: difficult for us to force it into and I don't
Speaker 1: mean force in the JETI sense into a specific shape. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean one of the things about light is that
Speaker 1: in a vacuum at least, light always travels at a
Speaker 1: constant speed, which is the speed of light. Right, And
Speaker 1: so it's not like a piece of matter that you
Speaker 1: can put down on table and put into the shape
Speaker 1: you want it. I mean, it's traveling at the speed
Speaker 1: of light. Now, that speed varies in different media, like
Speaker 1: in a certain gas atmosphere mixture or through glass or
Speaker 1: something like that. But even then, it's got a constant
Speaker 1: rate of travel and it doesn't want to slow down
Speaker 1: except under some very bizarre physical conditions that we can create,
Speaker 1: right yeah. Yeah, And basically like like we don't have
Speaker 1: a force field material that is air, right, that that
Speaker 1: can hold light within it. Yeah. Yeah, that's another big issue.
Speaker 1: And also light it's made up of photons, right, that's
Speaker 1: the that's the force carrying particle of light, which is,
Speaker 1: to all intents and purposes, massless. I mean you can
Speaker 1: talk about how it has a relativistic mass, has arrest
Speaker 1: zero mass state. So it's it's this particle that doesn't
Speaker 1: have mass the way we would think of physical particles
Speaker 1: having it. One result of that is that you cannot
Speaker 1: clash to two beams of light, two lasers, for example,
Speaker 1: together and and have them interact, right, Well, you could,
Speaker 1: You can't have a lightsaber duel you would. They would
Speaker 1: just pass right through each other when you slam them together. Right,
Speaker 1: Photons don't interact with one another under regular conditions. They
Speaker 1: will pass directly through them. If we were to have
Speaker 1: these laser beams or lights or whatever, you wouldn't see
Speaker 1: this interruption. I mean you it might look weird where
Speaker 1: the two beams crossed, but they would continue on their
Speaker 1: path as if nothing had happened. There's not like some
Speaker 1: sort of weird divergence because of them. Speaking of continuing
Speaker 1: on their path. That's another problem with trying to make
Speaker 1: a real lightsaber with a laser. A laser, you can't
Speaker 1: make a laser that's just okay, go three feet out
Speaker 1: and then stop right there. Light continues to travel until
Speaker 1: it reflects off of something. Yeah, it could be absorbed
Speaker 1: by something, reflect off something, but but but your way. Basically,
Speaker 1: every time that Luke turns his lightsaber on, it's just
Speaker 1: going to like go through the whole of the of
Speaker 1: the Millennium falcon, right, and then yeah, the ship implodes
Speaker 1: out we all die. It was even written on the handle.
Speaker 1: I shouldn't have done that. Um yeah, it's it's a problem.
Speaker 1: So these are all really difficult issues. That are These
Speaker 1: are non trivial problems, right if you wanted to make
Speaker 1: your own lightsaber and you want to make it light.
Speaker 1: This is why Jonathan does not have one. Yeah, one
Speaker 1: of the many reasons I probably wouldn't be allowed to
Speaker 1: have one if we could make one, But I certainly
Speaker 1: can't have one because of the laws of business. Um.
Speaker 1: But I wanted to talk about an experiment that happened
Speaker 1: in two thousand thirteen that's really cool. It actually has
Speaker 1: photons behaving in a way that's similar to what you
Speaker 1: would see in a lightsaber. In fact, that was the
Speaker 1: analogy that almost every press release used to talk about
Speaker 1: this experiment. They talked about two things. That the light
Speaker 1: would behave like atoms in a molecule. They would clump.
Speaker 1: The photons would clump together in this experiment already, and
Speaker 1: that they could push against each other so that there
Speaker 1: could be a physical interaction between photons which normally would
Speaker 1: never happen. That's similar to how you can think of
Speaker 1: it in one of two ways, how a lightsaber holds
Speaker 1: together or how to lightsabers can have this impact. And right,
Speaker 1: So here's the experiment. It took place, and this is
Speaker 1: the best name for a center I have ever read,
Speaker 1: at the Harvard M. I. T. Center for Ultra Cold Atoms. Uh,
Speaker 1: that's a very specific center, the KUA. Yeah, so they
Speaker 1: excuse me, Yeah, I didn't mean to leave hardh Uh.
Speaker 1: That that sounds like that could be an alien race
Speaker 1: from Star Wars, the Hammat Kua. At any rate, the
Speaker 1: researchers super cooled some gas it out of rubidium atoms,
Speaker 1: and they used the laser to do it. Which first,
Speaker 1: when I read this, I had heard about laser cooling before,
Speaker 1: but I really wanted to know how it worked because
Speaker 1: it seems so counterintuitive. Exactly, Usually, photons excite atoms that
Speaker 1: they hit and uh and make them move faster and
Speaker 1: if anything, heat them up, if if nothing, have no effect,
Speaker 1: right exactly, Yeah, you would think of a laser generally
Speaker 1: being like something that if it's powerful enough and you
Speaker 1: pointed at something that's flammable, that something's gonna catch fire.
Speaker 1: You don't think of it as cooling it down. So
Speaker 1: what actually is going on here? Well, now we get
Speaker 1: into another weird thing about photons. So photons don't really
Speaker 1: have mass, but they do have momentum, and momentum means
Speaker 1: that they have some energy that they can impart to
Speaker 1: other particles. So imagine that you've gone adam moving in
Speaker 1: a straight line and in opposite direction, you mount a
Speaker 1: laser pointed at that atom and you fire the laser.
Speaker 1: The momentum of those photons, we'll start to slow that
Speaker 1: atom down. Now, Ultimately, like you were saying, Lauren, heat
Speaker 1: is really a tomic movement or a molecular movement. It's
Speaker 1: it's the movement of particles. So if you slow a
Speaker 1: particle down you are cooling it down. And if you
Speaker 1: get it to the point where it's not moving at all,
Speaker 1: it's at zero kelvin. Right, That's that's absolute zero, where
Speaker 1: there's no molecular movement and it's as cold as it
Speaker 1: can get um barring the negative kelvin stories that we've
Speaker 1: seen in scientific experiments that are too confusing to go
Speaker 1: into right now. But at then your eight um. If
Speaker 1: you use lasers in this way, you can actually slow
Speaker 1: down atoms. You have to keep hitting them the right
Speaker 1: way to cool them and cool them and cool them
Speaker 1: until they are ultra cold. So once I figured that
Speaker 1: part out, and but I figured that part out, I
Speaker 1: mean read about other people who figured this stuff out
Speaker 1: long before I ever even knew it existed. I didn't
Speaker 1: come up with this obviously. Uh. Once I once I
Speaker 1: learned that part, I thought, all right, so what is
Speaker 1: going on? Once these rubidium atoms are ultra cold and
Speaker 1: you've got gas cloud of ultra cold atoms, Well, at
Speaker 1: that point they would introduce a photon into the gas cloud.
Speaker 1: Now we're talking about single photon in this case. The
Speaker 1: photon would enter the gas cloud, transfer some of its energy,
Speaker 1: the momentum that it has to some of the rubidium
Speaker 1: atoms and the light would slow down. This is what
Speaker 1: you were talking about, Joe, how light travels at different
Speaker 1: speeds through different media. So it's technically going slower than
Speaker 1: the speed of light because we tend to mean the
Speaker 1: speed of light as the speed of light through a vacuum,
Speaker 1: so it goes a little slower than that. But once
Speaker 1: it escapes out the other side of the gas cloud,
Speaker 1: that energy rejoins with the photon, so it now is traveling.
Speaker 1: It doesn't continue to travel at that slower speed. It's
Speaker 1: now moving through the normal speed it would through whatever
Speaker 1: medium it's going through at this point. So everything in
Speaker 1: the balance, right, you don't have an imbalance of the universe.
Speaker 1: And suddenly there's a black hole in the m I
Speaker 1: T is like whoops, so um, so what happens if
Speaker 1: you put to photons in this? And this is where
Speaker 1: we get into another really odd physics. The experimenters were
Speaker 1: expecting this at all. It's certainly something that that had
Speaker 1: been theorized before but never directly observed. And the idea
Speaker 1: is called the read Berg blockade, which is sounds like
Speaker 1: some sounds like something from Star Wars, right. The read
Speaker 1: blockade runner. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what caused the
Speaker 1: prequels to happen, right, there was the whole red bird
Speaker 1: blockade around the boo um. You know what the reaper
Speaker 1: blockade is in physics is this concept that let's say
Speaker 1: you've got uh several atoms together, uh at like in
Speaker 1: a gas of let's say ultracoled rubidium, for example, if
Speaker 1: you were to excite one of those atoms, you could
Speaker 1: not excite the neighboring atoms to that same degree. You
Speaker 1: could not add as much energy as you did to
Speaker 1: that first atom to the surrounding atoms. So it's it's
Speaker 1: almost like there's a saturation there. So when two photons
Speaker 1: would enter this gas cloud, there would be this kind
Speaker 1: of push poll relationship between the photo atons that was
Speaker 1: limited by the fact that once one photon passed on
Speaker 1: energy to a rubidium atom, the other one couldn't do
Speaker 1: the same with the other nearby rubidium atoms. Right. It's
Speaker 1: like that that second photon needs the first photon to
Speaker 1: move out of the way to go ahead and move
Speaker 1: forward before the second one can go on and affect
Speaker 1: the particles to to lose that energy into the particles
Speaker 1: around it, right, Um, so it winds up being the
Speaker 1: sort of like like leap frog sort of action where
Speaker 1: where each one is pushing and pulling the other until
Speaker 1: they both exit the cloud as a single mushy photon unit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of kind of crazy, like a photon molecule.
Speaker 1: This is so nuts, is Bunkers. Now. They referred to
Speaker 1: it specifically as a photonic interaction that's mediated by the
Speaker 1: atomic interaction, meaning that normally, under regular circumstances, these two
Speaker 1: photons wouldn't even have any interaction with one another. It's
Speaker 1: only because of this particular effect, the red bird blockade,
Speaker 1: that this is happening at all. It's are like two
Speaker 1: people talking to each other at a party who otherwise
Speaker 1: would never have anything to do with one happen. It's
Speaker 1: exactly like that. That's but only because after the first
Speaker 1: person started talking, everybody around him or her got so
Speaker 1: bored that they couldn't listen to a second person. Right,
Speaker 1: this is starting to sound eerily like every party experience
Speaker 1: I've been in, all right, at any rate? Uh So,
Speaker 1: the question is, now, we've got this idea, this this
Speaker 1: particular situation, this this particular implementation, if you will. Where
Speaker 1: we've got light seemingly pushing against itself, we've got this
Speaker 1: ability for light to actually exert some sort of physical
Speaker 1: force on itself. Photons are interacting. So does that mean
Speaker 1: we can finally build real lightsabers? No? No, not at all.
Speaker 1: So disappointed in that. In the video, My favorite part
Speaker 1: of the video is this is the point where I
Speaker 1: my lightsaber turns on right, I've got the lightsaber, like, so,
Speaker 1: could we make a real lightsaber? And they say no,
Speaker 1: And I look sad and the lightsaber slow really goes down.
Speaker 1: I had come up with that gag when we were
Speaker 1: when we were getting ready to shoot, and they laughed
Speaker 1: so hard they said, all right, well that's what we
Speaker 1: have to do now. So uh so I was glad
Speaker 1: that I got one got to wheel the lightsaber, and
Speaker 1: two got to make it the subject of a site gag.
Speaker 1: Uh that was a little behind the gag for think. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: you know, once in a while, I'm so proud of
Speaker 1: a dumb joke I make, I have to talk about it.
Speaker 1: If you haven't seen the video, you should go check
Speaker 1: it out. It Actually it came out really well. But
Speaker 1: there are some things that this might help us do
Speaker 1: down the road. Again, this would require a lot more
Speaker 1: development and experimentation to make sure that we could in
Speaker 1: fact use light to do these sort of things. But
Speaker 1: one of the things that was suggested was that we
Speaker 1: could end up with using a lights actually interacting with
Speaker 1: the photons interacting with each other. We could use as
Speaker 1: the basis for some some quantum computing computations. So one
Speaker 1: of the issues with quantum computing is figuring out how
Speaker 1: to create this quantum state that's as stable as you
Speaker 1: can possibly make it um, which is difficult, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: any disturbance of a quantum state and it you lose coherence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they have talked about using photonic interactions, but how
Speaker 1: do you get the photons to interact? And this maybe
Speaker 1: an in road to that. We're still yeah, we're still
Speaker 1: way in the early stages, but it's a possibility. And
Speaker 1: another one that the project leader had apparently mentioned that
Speaker 1: I think is bizarre is the idea that eventually we
Speaker 1: might get to a point where you can make three
Speaker 1: dimensional objects out of light, including crystals. That is so
Speaker 1: bizarre to me because I'm trying to picture Let's say
Speaker 1: you could create a stationary three D object out of light?
Speaker 1: What would that look like? I mean, considering the fact
Speaker 1: that how something looks is the light coming from it
Speaker 1: reaching your eyes, right, and if the light is not
Speaker 1: leaving the object but remaining as part of it, this
Speaker 1: entire thing is breaking my brain. I'm not sure. I
Speaker 1: the closest I can guess is that it's some kind
Speaker 1: of hologram looking thing. Yeah, I mean, would other light
Speaker 1: reflect photons bounce off of those photons right? Well? Because yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're talking about if it's acting otherwise the way lightwood,
Speaker 1: then you wouldn't have photonic interactions in the first place.
Speaker 1: Would it be invisible? I don't know. The thing about
Speaker 1: it is that this is all coming from Uh, this
Speaker 1: is sorcery, Jonathan's witchcraft. I don't want to hear anymore. Look,
Speaker 1: hokey religions have no place in this podcast. Now. This
Speaker 1: this is all coming from hard the Harvard Gazette. The
Speaker 1: Harvard Gazette reported on this, and it was the project
Speaker 1: I believe you. I'm not saying you got your story
Speaker 1: from the National Enquiry, No, I just wanted to explain
Speaker 1: to our listeners it came from the Harvard Gazette, which
Speaker 1: did not go into detail. The researcher, the lead researcher, Lucan,
Speaker 1: didn't Lucan, that's great, isn't It did not go into detail,
Speaker 1: or at least the story didn't about what how this
Speaker 1: would happen, or what it would mean, or what it
Speaker 1: would look like. It's literally a sentence which kind of
Speaker 1: throwaway line way at the end of the article. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in fact, I can read it right now, says Lucan.
Speaker 1: Also suggested that the system might one day even be
Speaker 1: used to create complex three D structures, such as crystals
Speaker 1: wholly out of light. Now, granted, that may not be
Speaker 1: a physical structure. It may simply be a three D structure,
Speaker 1: which would be closer to a hologram. So then we
Speaker 1: might say it's a three dimensional structure made of light,
Speaker 1: but it is not itself physical. You couldn't touch it.
Speaker 1: Light is physical, You mean it wouldn't be substantial, right, Well,
Speaker 1: when I say a physical object, that's what I mean,
Speaker 1: as opposed to an ethereal check. I think we should
Speaker 1: we should email this person and try to figure out
Speaker 1: what the heck that means. That would be fantastic. I
Speaker 1: would love to hear back from some photon crystals right now,
Speaker 1: and and if it's and if it is a hologram,
Speaker 1: then we can update our Holograms episode. So no matter what,
Speaker 1: we win, Okay, Well, I think we should go down
Speaker 1: another road because obviously that's really interesting on its own,
Speaker 1: but it's really not a path to lightsabers. No, And
Speaker 1: I think that really they talked about it in in
Speaker 1: terms of lightsabers because that's a kitchy, fun way to
Speaker 1: to get people interested in your research. I agree you
Speaker 1: mentioned Star Wars. People are gonna be like, oh, I
Speaker 1: want to read that article so well. I mean, if
Speaker 1: it helps with quantum computing and stuff like that, this
Speaker 1: is probably actually more useful than a real lightsaber would be, right,
Speaker 1: what's the point of a real lightsaber other than that
Speaker 1: it's cool? Yeah, I think the cool factor is pretty
Speaker 1: much the only reason you would want a lightsaber box
Speaker 1: on my tongue, sir, I mean, lightsabers are infinitely okay,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, cut and toast your bagel at the same time.
Speaker 1: Great point, I take it all back. Lightsabers are more
Speaker 1: important than curing any disease, than solving any problem on Earth,
Speaker 1: number one number one problem. Okay, So how else could
Speaker 1: we make one well, earlier we talked about plasma. I
Speaker 1: think we we may have decided that lasers are just
Speaker 1: there's just it's nothing doing. You can't make a lightsaber
Speaker 1: out of lasers as far as we know. It's impractical
Speaker 1: for at least three or four reasons. But what about plasma.
Speaker 1: So again, plasma, it's it's ionized superheated gas. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like cloud of incredibly hot stuff. It sounds like
Speaker 1: kind of like a lightsaber blade to me. We mentioned
Speaker 1: earlier that the Star Wars Expanded Universe specifically said that
Speaker 1: lightsaber blades were made of plasma, and I think that's
Speaker 1: actually a good place to look. Actually, on his Science
Speaker 1: Channel show, Michio Kaku thought the same thing about maybe
Speaker 1: we need to look less at a laser and more
Speaker 1: at something like a plasma torch as the basis for
Speaker 1: a real life lightsaber, like really big plasma torch. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so what is a plasma torch. It's it's a thing
Speaker 1: you use for what's called plasma cutting, where you would
Speaker 1: be cutting really really tough materials, say like sheets of steel,
Speaker 1: even ones that are several inches thick, And a plasma
Speaker 1: torch works by creating a flow of pressurized gas like
Speaker 1: and it could just be oxygen from the air. It
Speaker 1: doesn't really matter too much what the gas is. You
Speaker 1: can use different kinds of gas. And then it ignites
Speaker 1: an electrical arc that causes the gas to ionize and
Speaker 1: turn into plasma. So the atomic nuclei lose the electrons
Speaker 1: and the gas becomes so hot. Right now, the jet
Speaker 1: of ridiculously hot plasma shoots at the tip of the
Speaker 1: torch and it becomes kind of a super blade and
Speaker 1: cut through steel iron. It's just killer. Obviously, this sounds
Speaker 1: like what a lightsaber is, but it's just a little
Speaker 1: kind of It's more like a light stub. It doesn't
Speaker 1: it's not like something yeah, you could really duel with.
Speaker 1: So Kiku looked at that and he was like, well,
Speaker 1: we could modify this in several ways to make it
Speaker 1: more like the lightsabers in the movie. And so he
Speaker 1: had a few stipulations for the real approximation of a lightsaber.
Speaker 1: He said it had to be it had to reach
Speaker 1: temperatures of twelve thousand degrees. I assume he meant fahrenheit.
Speaker 1: I don't think he said though, but fahrenheit. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: he could quote slice through steel like butter. Why is
Speaker 1: it always like butter? There are so many other things
Speaker 1: that are easy to slice through well, butter is one
Speaker 1: of those most common ones. I mean, I guess you
Speaker 1: could say, like marshmallow fluff, but that's not as common
Speaker 1: as butter. Why not like jello could slice through steel?
Speaker 1: Like jello, jello is proprietary. Oh that's a good point anyway.
Speaker 1: He also dessert treats. Oh, no, we're gonna get sued now.
Speaker 1: He stipulated that it actually had to function in a
Speaker 1: do well so you can clash swords, so to speak.
Speaker 1: And uh, and also has to be basically lightsaber sized. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're gonna make a lightsaber, needs to be lightsaber sized. Okay,
Speaker 1: So he designed this proposal where it would be something
Speaker 1: like a lightsaber handle. It's a little uh, it's a
Speaker 1: little cylinder that you can fit in your hand. At
Speaker 1: the bottom of the cylinder is a titanium fan that
Speaker 1: sucks in a bunch of air, and then the air
Speaker 1: is ionized and heated to twelve thousand degrees again I
Speaker 1: assume he means fahrenheit. And the blade part is a
Speaker 1: telescoping rod of ceramic tubes that extend out from the handle,
Speaker 1: so you've got a solid founta core for your blade,
Speaker 1: right the blade. So it would be like one of
Speaker 1: those toy lightsabers where you whip it out and it
Speaker 1: telescopes out in little pieces of cylindrical material. I'm familiar
Speaker 1: with them. Yes, I had one as a child. I
Speaker 1: have one now. Nice. But of course, and it would
Speaker 1: have to be ceramics, because they'd be the only thing
Speaker 1: that could withstand. And so he proposed you drill a
Speaker 1: bunch of holes in them, and then this sort of
Speaker 1: becomes the conduit through which the plasma outflow is directed.
Speaker 1: So the plasma goes out through the handle up through
Speaker 1: this tube that telescopes outward and then escapes through all
Speaker 1: these little holes, creating a bad an that yeah, like
Speaker 1: a cloud of superheated plasma around this tube. You can
Speaker 1: think of it as kind of like each of those
Speaker 1: holes becomes its own little plasma cutter. Yeah, and if
Speaker 1: you've got enough of them close enough together, then you've
Speaker 1: just got a big plasma cutter field right dangerous his head.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah. He also proposed you have an electromagnetic coil
Speaker 1: inside the blade assembly, and that keeps the plasma sort
Speaker 1: of tight against the surface, right, because you can control
Speaker 1: plasma with electromagnetic fields. Right, because it's charged, right, you
Speaker 1: can use a magnet to control where it goes. And
Speaker 1: that would be important because otherwise, if it's talking about
Speaker 1: creating an ionized gas and you have no way of
Speaker 1: controlling it, then you rapidly turn into a self melting mechanism.
Speaker 1: You turn it on. It's actually really a Jedi eliminator. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you just this was a terrible idea. So the other
Speaker 1: big question is what about power? So to create something
Speaker 1: as hot as a lightsaber blade, you need way more
Speaker 1: power than you could fit in something like a lightsaber
Speaker 1: handle with conventional batteries. So he proposes this array of
Speaker 1: trillions of nano batteries based on carbon nanotubes, and I
Speaker 1: love I love that whenever you need to do something
Speaker 1: with future technology, you just put nano in front of it.
Speaker 1: And it's like, oh, yeah, but they are they are
Speaker 1: the force of real sign Where can I where can
Speaker 1: I pick some of these up? Because I am tired
Speaker 1: of changing out batteries and everything. This sounds amazing. They don't, yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't really exist yet. What they would sympathetically deliver
Speaker 1: the power necessary to fit inside the handle. So the
Speaker 1: stuff that doesn't exist could help power this other thing
Speaker 1: that doesn't exist. Yeah, he sort of implies this might
Speaker 1: be doable within fifty years. Okay, I suppose an alternative
Speaker 1: would be would be to power it with a cord,
Speaker 1: just plug it on in. So I don't know you,
Speaker 1: I don't know what the voltage requirements on that would be,
Speaker 1: but it might require a pretty heavy duty cord. I
Speaker 1: I think that we should go back to our often
Speaker 1: referenced energy backpack, like a little engine backpack that you
Speaker 1: can write everywhere. I think that that would be real
Speaker 1: good for this, for this particular thing. We should make
Speaker 1: you a little less agile. You can't do all those
Speaker 1: flips and stuff. Well, you just have to train harder.
Speaker 1: Two things. One, the Death Star was infamous for having
Speaker 1: really inconvenient power outlets, So lightsaber battles would be like,
Speaker 1: get over here, but thirty feet away, I can't get
Speaker 1: any closer. The cord only reaches so far. Yeah, all
Speaker 1: the lights go down, the life support is gone. It's terrible.
Speaker 1: But the other thing, the other thing that what that
Speaker 1: was a total joke, obviously, But the other thing, which
Speaker 1: is not a total joke, is that within the Expanded Universe,
Speaker 1: the predecessors to the light sabers that we see in
Speaker 1: the movies. According to some of the Expanded Universe actually
Speaker 1: did have a connection of physical cord that went back
Speaker 1: to a power pack that was worn on the back.
Speaker 1: So you actually did have the predecessors to Jedi and
Speaker 1: Sithe wielding these these plasma blades that were powered by
Speaker 1: this enormous pack. At that point, it's essentially a proton pack. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it kind of is. Yeah. Yeah, So when I went
Speaker 1: into watching this episode he did on it, I I
Speaker 1: sort of had my BS detector already. I was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm a little skeptical about this, But then I was like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, that's not a bad way of approaching it.
Speaker 1: That that actually seems pretty smart to me, especially because
Speaker 1: he just conceded you're going to have to have some
Speaker 1: material telescoping rod at the center of it, right, that
Speaker 1: seems like the only reasonable way to do this, Right.
Speaker 1: We can't create some sort of electro magnetic force field
Speaker 1: that's in the shape of a hollow tube with a
Speaker 1: cap at the end through which plasma could inhabit. We
Speaker 1: can't do that, And that's even other fictional forms of lightsabers,
Speaker 1: like the like the Energy Sword in Halo is constructed
Speaker 1: in a similar manner with with the force field and
Speaker 1: some kind of ionized gas and then you electrify it
Speaker 1: and and it's warm and cutty. But yeah, I had
Speaker 1: a couple of questions about a design like this though,
Speaker 1: and one of them would be would you have to
Speaker 1: wear eye protection to duel with one of these things? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean that would be such a bummer if you
Speaker 1: had to wear a mask steampunk, it would just all
Speaker 1: be steampunk. Actually, lightsaber that might be kind of cool wielders.
Speaker 1: First of all, Darth Vader did it all the time,
Speaker 1: and he was he was pretty awesome. Maybe that's what
Speaker 1: that blast shield that Luke's wearing shield down. I can't
Speaker 1: see anything. How am I expected to fight? Maybe the
Speaker 1: same is true of the Elder's mask. Well anyway, so
Speaker 1: I should back up. People who do plasma cutting need
Speaker 1: to wear eye protection to avoid a condition called welder
Speaker 1: splash or arc. I uh, the corny it can get
Speaker 1: damaged by exposure to UV light, just kind of the
Speaker 1: same way your corny it can get damaged if you
Speaker 1: stare at the sun and the arc that turns the
Speaker 1: rushing gas into hot plasma can give off that UV light.
Speaker 1: So staring at a plasma torch arc is a bad idea.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like staring at the sun. Uh, and
Speaker 1: you you need to wear eye protection. But perhaps in
Speaker 1: this set up, the UV producing elements are actually hidden
Speaker 1: from view, since the arc itself seems to be inside
Speaker 1: the handle that I don't know for sure if you
Speaker 1: were to actually try to make something like this, but
Speaker 1: that's one possibility. The UV radiation has to go somewhere, right,
Speaker 1: It can't just continuously dissipate inside the handle. It would
Speaker 1: eventually make its way out. So essentially what we're saying
Speaker 1: is that Jedi would have to wear shades. It just
Speaker 1: makes them cooler. Well, the other thing is you mentioned
Speaker 1: that energy has to go somewhere at I'm not sure
Speaker 1: exactly how the UV would work. Maybe it wouldn't actually
Speaker 1: be a U V I risk, but you would have
Speaker 1: a lot of energy in this thing in your Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a highly highly energetic object and
Speaker 1: I don't know, like, I don't know would you be
Speaker 1: able to hold it well. Even if you were able
Speaker 1: to direct the flows such that you didn't have to
Speaker 1: worry about heat building up in the actual handle. The
Speaker 1: blade itself would be incredibly hot. Now, air is not
Speaker 1: a good conductor of heat. Um. You know it, it
Speaker 1: will get warmer and warmer. I mean that's like if
Speaker 1: you're standing near a source of heat, like a fire,
Speaker 1: you're gonna feel the heat increase as you get closer
Speaker 1: to it. So imagine holding a long blade that's at
Speaker 1: twelve thousand degrees fahrenheit. That's gonna get a little toasty
Speaker 1: after a while, even considering the fact that air is
Speaker 1: a poor conductor of heat. Um. And if you're swinging
Speaker 1: around all over the place, well, two things. One, you've
Speaker 1: cut this plasma trail going everywhere because we don't have
Speaker 1: any way of keeping it truly locked to the blade shape.
Speaker 1: And to uh, it's the convection that you're causing by
Speaker 1: the air molecules moving around means that air around you
Speaker 1: is going to get hotter faster. So really what we're
Speaker 1: talking about is that we need to have super advanced
Speaker 1: air conditioning systems UM. And also, all jedis where it
Speaker 1: is it singular or plural? Jedi? Okay? Cool? So all
Speaker 1: Jedi wear wicking undergarments, packs, in the ice packs in
Speaker 1: the road. Sure, well, you know, I was just trying
Speaker 1: to think of an analogy. I don't know exactly how
Speaker 1: hot the heating element inside your oven gets. Surely it's
Speaker 1: not twelve degrees and so I mean, since the inside
Speaker 1: of an oven tops out usually around five to six
Speaker 1: hundred degrees fahrenheit, I'm going to say less than twelve thousand. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so if that heating element, that little thing can heat
Speaker 1: your kitchen up, because if you turn your oven on high,
Speaker 1: your kitchen typically will get warm. Um. If that will
Speaker 1: heat up your kitchen that fast and it's not even
Speaker 1: close to twelve degrees and you've got the door shut,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It seems to me like a room
Speaker 1: could get pretty sweaty and nasty if it's got a
Speaker 1: lightsaber deal going on in it. Yeah, and if you
Speaker 1: if you're sweating too hard to to hold onto your lightsaber,
Speaker 1: that's just bad news. Also, yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 1: Imagine what would happen if you Joe and you Lauren
Speaker 1: each had one of these ceramic core plasma blades and
Speaker 1: then you swung them so that they hit together. I
Speaker 1: can't imagine that anything that came out of that would
Speaker 1: be good that I wouldn't sign up to try that.
Speaker 1: No that Yeah, no, we'd have to. We have to
Speaker 1: build some sort of lightsaber swinging robot and have no
Speaker 1: emotional attachment to it whatsoever. We have to make it
Speaker 1: real ugly. Yeah, I I mean, I'm kind of I'm
Speaker 1: kind of a lizard like, I'm sort of cold blooded.
Speaker 1: I really like warm things, but that sounds too warm. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: so ultimately, I think we have to come down on
Speaker 1: the side of lightsabers are are really cool fantasy slash
Speaker 1: science fiction idea, we can just stop it at fantasy.
Speaker 1: Fantasy is that well the well they expanded Universe tries
Speaker 1: to explain how it works, so it kind of falls
Speaker 1: into science I think of Star Wars is fantasy more
Speaker 1: than science fiction. But again, the Expanded Universe attempts to
Speaker 1: explain the more mystical things that were just considered to
Speaker 1: be true in the in the movies. Um so yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think this is possible. I don't think we're
Speaker 1: ever going to have something that's truly analogous to a
Speaker 1: lightsaber in reality. And and like you said, Joe and
Speaker 1: really bagel slicing aside, there the uses of a lightsaber
Speaker 1: would be really limited. There are other ways that we
Speaker 1: could uh either cut things or fight off people of
Speaker 1: it probably are going to be distance oriented. We have
Speaker 1: actual plasma torches. We don't need lightsabers in our machining
Speaker 1: you know workshops. Yeah, so I don't think this is
Speaker 1: ever gonna become possible. The next question is that we'll
Speaker 1: have to tackle in a future episode. Will blasters ever
Speaker 1: be possible? Because blasters don't fire lasers because the projectiles
Speaker 1: move slower than the speed of light. They move slower
Speaker 1: than bullets do. So one wonders if we could actually
Speaker 1: make something that would be some sort of energy based
Speaker 1: cohesive unit of whatever that could fly through the air
Speaker 1: slower than the speed of light and impact something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they also fire plasma too, don't they. Again, I think
Speaker 1: it depends. You would have to look at the expanded universe,
Speaker 1: looked into it. One more question, Okay, why why does
Speaker 1: the Stormtroopers armor not protect them from blasters at all?
Speaker 1: You know what? What this is? The Stormtroopers armor serve.
Speaker 1: Considering that it doesn't help against blasters, it doesn't help
Speaker 1: against it doesn't help against e walks, and it's clunky
Speaker 1: slows you down, and and and it is a problem
Speaker 1: like it it's an inhibitor of your vision, like I
Speaker 1: don't under the Emperor really hates Stormtroopers, actually just really
Speaker 1: hated Djengo Fet a lot and wanted to kill him.
Speaker 1: As many times sposible, the entire series is just actually
Speaker 1: a story about how much it's the untold but implied
Speaker 1: tale of Star Wars. Well, I'm glad that we've unraveled
Speaker 1: a mystery in this episode. We've done good work today,
Speaker 1: I think so, I think so. I think by deconstructing
Speaker 1: a beloved franchise, we have done our duty. Now, guys,
Speaker 1: you out there who have been listening to the show,
Speaker 1: what do you want us to cover in the future.
Speaker 1: Is there a science fiction type idea that you would
Speaker 1: like us to however, or just an interesting science story,
Speaker 1: technology story, something else that's future oriented. You've always wondered
Speaker 1: what blank will be like in the future. Please write
Speaker 1: us let us know. We'll be happy to take a
Speaker 1: look at that topic. Our address is FW Thinking at
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