Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. He there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says, prepare the
Speaker 1: laser beam. I'm gonna use it tonight. I'm Jonathan and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. So you know, on July two, fourteen,
Speaker 1: a certain someone a Charles Hart towns Uh turned years old,
Speaker 1: and which is an impressive all on its own right,
Speaker 1: but he happens to be the guy who invented the laser.
Speaker 1: That's right. He's Professor emeritus of physics at the University
Speaker 1: of California, Berkeley. He's only just now retiring, so he's
Speaker 1: actually closing down his office this summer. However, he has
Speaker 1: said that he plans to visit their Space Sciences Laboratory daily.
Speaker 1: Years old. Yes, and he he is credited as the
Speaker 1: inventor of the laser, although he did not build the
Speaker 1: first one. So to really we want to talk about
Speaker 1: lasers today, but we thought it'd be kind of cool
Speaker 1: to get first start with like a retrospective on the
Speaker 1: invention of the laser. So let us go into the
Speaker 1: future of the past. Yes, So onward into the past.
Speaker 1: First of all, here's his philosophy, Mr. Towns, Professor Towns
Speaker 1: is philosophy. Uh, I have a good time doing physics.
Speaker 1: It's not work, it's just fun, which is kind of awesome.
Speaker 1: I like that. I like that fun. Yes, physics, it's
Speaker 1: it's physical fun. No, it's physics fun. So anyway, the
Speaker 1: invention of lasers, So the story goes that Towns was
Speaker 1: sitting on a park bench way back in nineteen fifty one,
Speaker 1: and he was thinking about light, high frequency light, and
Speaker 1: how you might want to concentrate light into a beam
Speaker 1: that would be useful for multiple applications. And uh, he
Speaker 1: was thirty five years old at this time and a
Speaker 1: professor at Columbia University and a consultant for Bell tele
Speaker 1: Telephone Laboratories, one of the leading research and development institutions
Speaker 1: at the time. Obviously, lots of stuff came out of
Speaker 1: Bell Labs, including things like the transistor, you know, so
Speaker 1: lots of stuff going on at that time. He would
Speaker 1: had been using light to study the energy states of
Speaker 1: molecules um spectroscopy, so you know how we talk all
Speaker 1: about the relationship between atoms and photons that if you
Speaker 1: excite atoms, electrons move into an excited state, and when
Speaker 1: they come back to the ground state, they have to
Speaker 1: release that energy that they had taken on, and they
Speaker 1: do that in the form of a photon. So he
Speaker 1: knew that stimulating atoms with the right wavelength of light
Speaker 1: could make them admit that same wavelength. Actually, really we're
Speaker 1: telling wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, because when he first started
Speaker 1: working with this, he was working with microwaves, which have
Speaker 1: a longer wavelength than visible light, right, so he was
Speaker 1: looking at this. This was all based off a theory
Speaker 1: that had been um proposed by some physicist named Einstein
Speaker 1: something like that. Yeah, yeah, just just just Albert Albert
Speaker 1: good old Albert Einstein back in nineteen seventeen had said
Speaker 1: that you should be able to to uh, to see
Speaker 1: this in action if you were able to build the
Speaker 1: right set up. And so he had been thinking Towns
Speaker 1: had been thinking about how to actually make this physical reality.
Speaker 1: And the trick was that if you were to excite
Speaker 1: atoms of a gas, they tended to rush off in
Speaker 1: all different directions, and then you you lose the atoms
Speaker 1: that you're trying to excite to try and create more
Speaker 1: of whatever wavelength you're you're shooting at them. So if
Speaker 1: you were to shoot atoms of a gas with microwaves,
Speaker 1: they might omit microwaves, but at the same time they're
Speaker 1: all dashing off into other directions. You don't really amplify anything, right,
Speaker 1: So you want to find some kind of way to
Speaker 1: focus your energy exactly. So uh. He decided that the
Speaker 1: way to do this would to be to build a
Speaker 1: resonant chamber, essentially a kind of a little a little
Speaker 1: enclosed space that would hold onto this gas and allow
Speaker 1: the gas to continuously emit these different wavelengths and amplify
Speaker 1: whatever signal you were sending in. So you could pump
Speaker 1: the gas with an energy source like a microwave, stimulate
Speaker 1: the atoms, which would then start to emit their own microwaves,
Speaker 1: and have a very concentrated beam microwaves as a result,
Speaker 1: and it would be a very coherent burst. He called
Speaker 1: it microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation or MAZER,
Speaker 1: so acronym action there. Yeah. Uh. And in night he
Speaker 1: thought of a way that he might be able to
Speaker 1: achieve the same sort of outcome, but by using light
Speaker 1: instead of microwaves. So in this case it would be
Speaker 1: a laser, not a mazer, so it would be pretty
Speaker 1: much the same principle, but it would be shorter wavelengths.
Speaker 1: Shorter wavelengths, and he was thinking about using a socially.
Speaker 1: Think of it like a tube of gas. So you've
Speaker 1: got like a glass tube that contains gas inside it,
Speaker 1: and you have some mirrors on either end of the tube,
Speaker 1: and then you start, uh putting a certain wavelength of
Speaker 1: light into that tube, a very specific wavelength, whichever one
Speaker 1: it happens to be. And this is also one of
Speaker 1: those reasons why we started seeing red lasers before we
Speaker 1: saw any other colors of lasers. Those are the longer wavelengths.
Speaker 1: So you would use a very specific wavelength of light
Speaker 1: into this this chamber of gas. The mirrors would allow
Speaker 1: the light to reflect back and forth, continuing that stimulation. Now,
Speaker 1: he didn't actually build this yet. He just thought, well,
Speaker 1: Labs patented it. But no, he did not build it.
Speaker 1: No one, no one had built one. They had just
Speaker 1: he had come up with the idea. Bell Labs patents it,
Speaker 1: and the race was on. You had lots of different
Speaker 1: companies actually, all trying to build this at the same time.
Speaker 1: But it's interesting that the first person to build one
Speaker 1: wasn't working on behalf of one of these large companies.
Speaker 1: He had received a fifty thousand dollar budget from the
Speaker 1: research institute he was working with UH two over the
Speaker 1: course of I think nine months to build one of these.
Speaker 1: So the odds were stacked against him, and yet Theodore
Speaker 1: Harold Mayman in nineteen sixty built the first working laser.
Speaker 1: He used a ruby crystal, synthetic ruby crystal as the
Speaker 1: lasing medium. That's the active laser medium. And we could
Speaker 1: talk more about what that actually means, but that would
Speaker 1: require going into the physics of lasers, which is incredibly complicated.
Speaker 1: I think it's funny that we now can create verbs
Speaker 1: like lazing. Yeah. Yeah, it was originally an acronym. Nobody
Speaker 1: has the idea anymore that it's an acronym. Laser is
Speaker 1: just a lower case word. Yeah, yeah, it's just a
Speaker 1: it's just a name for a thing. It doesn't you know,
Speaker 1: unless you you really were to look into it, you
Speaker 1: wouldn't realize that those letters originally stood for individual words.
Speaker 1: So how are lasers used right now today? Like, if
Speaker 1: we wanted to talk about typical uses of lasers today,
Speaker 1: what are some of the examples we would see. Uh, well,
Speaker 1: we're still using them for spectroscopy, Yes, yes, we are.
Speaker 1: We use it to study the nature between radiated energy
Speaker 1: and matter, and and there are a bunch of different
Speaker 1: ways that lasers can help with this. But basically it
Speaker 1: turns out that this invention really can have a very
Speaker 1: precise wavelength, which is what you're looking for in this
Speaker 1: sort of thing, because a particular wavelength can interact very
Speaker 1: predictably with atoms and molecules and stuff like that. And
Speaker 1: so by bouncing that light around with atoms and molecules
Speaker 1: and watching what happens, you can kind of figure out
Speaker 1: what it is. Right, So maybe a laser can help
Speaker 1: you look at a sample of matter and and tell
Speaker 1: you what's inside that stuff is. Yeah, and we use
Speaker 1: this for all sorts of things, everything from chemistry labs
Speaker 1: to astronomy and other applications. Then there's a microscopy. Various
Speaker 1: techniques are used in microscopy with lasers to uh, they're
Speaker 1: very complicated. Essentially, you're talking about removing blur, getting really
Speaker 1: precise looks at things in ways that would require me
Speaker 1: to write a textbook to explain. Yeah, how about ledar, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's another use of lasers that's very very much a
Speaker 1: popular one. We have an idea for an upcoming episode
Speaker 1: of Forward Thinking where ldar would play a fairly significant role.
Speaker 1: I think yes, yes, uh so. Lightar would be essentially
Speaker 1: a type of laser ranging sort of. It's like radar lasers,
Speaker 1: your basic laser ranging. It's really simple idea, and that
Speaker 1: simple idea is that you have a laser and a
Speaker 1: sensor that's all part of this one device, right, and
Speaker 1: you pointed at the thing that you're looking at, and
Speaker 1: you say, I wonder how far away that thing is,
Speaker 1: and you turn on the device, and the laser shoots
Speaker 1: out of the device, hits whatever the intended target is.
Speaker 1: Some of that light bounces back, the sensor picks it up,
Speaker 1: and by calculating how much time it took between the
Speaker 1: laser coing out and the the light that was reflected
Speaker 1: back being picked back up, you can determine how far
Speaker 1: away things are because you know what the speed of
Speaker 1: light is within you know certain parameter. Obviously light does
Speaker 1: not travel uh at the same speed through all media,
Speaker 1: but you it's it's it's to the point where you
Speaker 1: don't really need to split hairs unless you need to
Speaker 1: get down to like the nanometer precision level, in which
Speaker 1: case you're probably using some other methodology. Now we can
Speaker 1: use this to check out things like, um, how far
Speaker 1: away the Moon is, which you know is pretty cool.
Speaker 1: The reason we can do that is because some of
Speaker 1: the folks who went walking around on the surface of
Speaker 1: the Moon left some stuff behind, specifically garbage, you know, Well,
Speaker 1: so that too, but also retro retro reflector rays. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, just specific mirrors since garbage on purpose. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So one of the ways that we can prove that,
Speaker 1: in fact, people have been to the Moon is the
Speaker 1: fact that we can shine a laser on one of
Speaker 1: these and detect the light that comes back. Uh so
Speaker 1: it's not moon martians, just bouncing it back for us. No,
Speaker 1: not not lunar martians. The weirdest things. Didn't you have
Speaker 1: some horrible evil scientists shine lasers into your eyes? I
Speaker 1: had someone shining lasers into my eyes. But he wasn't
Speaker 1: horrible nor evil. He was actually quite kind and well
Speaker 1: he was very nice to me, although he did I
Speaker 1: will say he was nice to me, but he also
Speaker 1: held my eyeball down, sliced my cornea, lifted the flat
Speaker 1: back and then shined a laser into it, thus reshaping
Speaker 1: my eyeball so that I might see better. Well, but
Speaker 1: you would ask him to I did. I paid him
Speaker 1: for the for the for the privilege of having this
Speaker 1: done to me. We're talking, of course, about lazing, one
Speaker 1: of the many types of eye surgery that involves lasers. Yes,
Speaker 1: many types of surgery can use lasers as cutting tools.
Speaker 1: These days, the lasers can take the place of physical tools,
Speaker 1: mechanical tools, stuff that could introduce contamination. You know, if
Speaker 1: you're using light, then you don't have to worry about
Speaker 1: any any germs on the cutting device itself. Um So
Speaker 1: there there are a lot of different medical uses for lasers.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about some upcoming possible medical uses for lasers
Speaker 1: as well. Sure, and on a very much larger scale,
Speaker 1: you can use lasers for drilling and cutting into things
Speaker 1: other than Jonathan's eyeballs. Yeah, Like, let's say that you
Speaker 1: wanted to do something similar to cutting into Jonathan's eyeballs,
Speaker 1: except that the thing you wanted to cut into was steel.
Speaker 1: Then clearly the laser that works on my eye is
Speaker 1: probably not going to get you very far with this
Speaker 1: massive block of steel. I wouldn't imagine so, but I know,
Speaker 1: but I haven't tested your eyeballs to see whether they're
Speaker 1: made it. It's just assume, um for the moment, that
Speaker 1: we don't actually have to test any of this out. So, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can actually find very high powered lasers that are
Speaker 1: used in precision cutting. Obviously, you could have a laser
Speaker 1: mounted onto a computerized electronic table or a robotic arm
Speaker 1: and and it will follow a very specific pathway as
Speaker 1: dictated by you using a computer program, and thus you
Speaker 1: can carve away things in a very very precise way. Also,
Speaker 1: military lots of military uses, right, I think this separates
Speaker 1: pretty cleanly into two categories, which is lasers that are
Speaker 1: used in some kind of James Bond death trap scenario
Speaker 1: and then lasers that are not used in those scenarios.
Speaker 1: So that's that's hardly the clean scientific way of defining that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: obviously you have things like laser sights, things that allow
Speaker 1: people to be more effective in aiming weaponry for example,
Speaker 1: or uh there are also again laser range finders, are
Speaker 1: lots of other detection devices, and then there are a
Speaker 1: lot of proposed but potential use as of lasers, either
Speaker 1: as a counter weapon, against things like missiles. I mean,
Speaker 1: there was, of course the entire Star Wars program that
Speaker 1: was proposed to allow a satellite based system to either
Speaker 1: fire missiles or lasers at incoming uh, you know, an
Speaker 1: incoming attack that would disarm them. Obviously that never happened,
Speaker 1: but that was a proposed military use for lasers. They
Speaker 1: got the idea from Nicola Tesla, right well, Nikola Tesla
Speaker 1: certainly had a very similar idea about being able to
Speaker 1: bring down airplanes. He was specifically talking about airplanes. Um,
Speaker 1: although that's an entirely different episode. And then we have
Speaker 1: you know, there are other like less weighty uses for lasers,
Speaker 1: things like laser pointers, like if you if you really
Speaker 1: really need two give give your cat, give your cat
Speaker 1: some some stimulation using a laser pointer to make cat
Speaker 1: run as fast as it possibly can into a wall
Speaker 1: is way up there into a wall. Or if you
Speaker 1: want to, yeah, if you want claw marks up your walls.
Speaker 1: Usually I could get a good satisfying thunk out of it.
Speaker 1: It was. Dogs are are also susceptible to both of
Speaker 1: my both of my dogs when I had them, they
Speaker 1: were both very much fans of chasing the laser pointer.
Speaker 1: In fact, one of them even knew where the laser
Speaker 1: was coming from, but that didn't bother him. He still
Speaker 1: wanted to play with He would look at me when
Speaker 1: when the laser would point, when the dot would move away,
Speaker 1: and he's like, hello, we're not done. Um, you were
Speaker 1: obviously not really putting forth nearly the same amount of
Speaker 1: effort I am, So I think we can keep playing. Hey,
Speaker 1: what about the Dark Side of the Moon laser show?
Speaker 1: Or or here in Atlanta. Of course, if you wanted to,
Speaker 1: you could take yourself out to the Stone Mountain Park
Speaker 1: and see the Stone Mountain Laser show or laser backgrounds
Speaker 1: in portrait photography. Okay, yeah, so obviously lots of uses
Speaker 1: today for lasers, but we really wanted to spend a
Speaker 1: lot of time talking about some emerging uses of lasers.
Speaker 1: Some of the the cutting edge uses, and not meaning
Speaker 1: cutting edge in the sense of actually cut cutting necessarily.
Speaker 1: One of them is to use lasers to make optical
Speaker 1: quote unquote cables out of air. Okay, I have seen
Speaker 1: this in our notes, but I do not understand it
Speaker 1: at all. So break break this one down, all right.
Speaker 1: So first, it helps to understand generally speaking, how a
Speaker 1: fiber optic cable works. So fiber optic cable is essentially
Speaker 1: think of it as a glass tube because that's pretty
Speaker 1: much what it is UH, and it's a glass tube
Speaker 1: that is more dense in the middle that is on
Speaker 1: the outside, like the outer edge. UH. That density actually
Speaker 1: allows light to pass through it pretty effectively, whereas the
Speaker 1: outer edge when the light starts to like if light
Speaker 1: tries to escape this tube, it gets reflected back into
Speaker 1: the core, so it continues down its path until it
Speaker 1: gets to wherever you want it to go. So typically
Speaker 1: with telecommunication systems, we use this to allow data to
Speaker 1: pass between different nodes, whether those are computers or telephone systems, whatever, whatever,
Speaker 1: we're using fiber optics for now. Using UH lasers to
Speaker 1: make optical cables quote unquote cables out of the air
Speaker 1: is a little different, but it uses the same principle.
Speaker 1: Researchers at the University of Maryland have been really pioneering
Speaker 1: this research and what they're doing is they're using UM
Speaker 1: they're using high powered UH lasers to create kind of
Speaker 1: a channel through the air. So if you just use
Speaker 1: a regular laser through the air and you're just trying
Speaker 1: to use it to to get some data about something
Speaker 1: like inspector scopy, then um, you might be uh suffering
Speaker 1: some problems at greater distances. Because light does disperse as
Speaker 1: it travels, you lose some of that focus the longer
Speaker 1: it So if you're using just a regular laser without
Speaker 1: any kind of of control over how that disperses, you
Speaker 1: lose precision over the course of you know, whatever distance
Speaker 1: you're talking about, and the greater the distance, the more
Speaker 1: precision you lose. So they were looking at a way
Speaker 1: of fixing that, and by using this high powered laser.
Speaker 1: Essentially they create a core of dense air that's then
Speaker 1: surrounded by a an expanding circumference of air that's lower density,
Speaker 1: so you've got a lower density uh surrounding a a
Speaker 1: high density core. That high density core acts like the
Speaker 1: core of a fiber optic cable, so light can travel.
Speaker 1: A laser can travel down that core, and whenever it
Speaker 1: encounters that lower density on the outer edge, it reflects
Speaker 1: back into that core. The whole thing lasts for a
Speaker 1: split second, a fraction of a second, but a fraction
Speaker 1: of a second is an eternity for a laser. Because
Speaker 1: lasers are travel ling at the speed of light, they
Speaker 1: are light, so you don't have to worry about something
Speaker 1: lasting only a fraction of a second. Because light that
Speaker 1: they're like, it seemed like it was forever to me
Speaker 1: um although they don't really say that because as far
Speaker 1: as we know, because they're not sentiented. So what you
Speaker 1: would do is you could set up a system where
Speaker 1: you have essentially two lasers. You have the high powered
Speaker 1: laser that creates this channel to whatever destination you're looking at,
Speaker 1: and then within a split second of it firing, a
Speaker 1: second laser, the one that you're actually using to measure
Speaker 1: whatever the target is, would fire and it would travel
Speaker 1: along this pathway created by the first laser. So you
Speaker 1: would have this more dedicated channel, and that would allow
Speaker 1: you to have that precision, to retain that precision that
Speaker 1: you would have as if it were traveling through fiber optic,
Speaker 1: and not have to worry about the the light getting
Speaker 1: less focused as it goes along. I've seen a similar
Speaker 1: technique to this used in in other science branches, and
Speaker 1: what I suspectus going on here is that the first
Speaker 1: laser is is heating the air in a very particular pattern,
Speaker 1: causing that pattern of density density difference and that's that's
Speaker 1: what's creating the channel more or less. Yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: essentially what's happening. You can actually see. There was one
Speaker 1: example I saw where they were using four of these
Speaker 1: high powered lasers together and then the four expanding areas
Speaker 1: of low density air would converge in the center and
Speaker 1: that would become the channel. So that becomes even more crazy.
Speaker 1: So that's that's cool. I feel like my head just
Speaker 1: like Cronenberg style. But that's awesome. The whole point the
Speaker 1: researchers used it to analyze the air itself that was
Speaker 1: affected by this high powered laser. They found that the
Speaker 1: signal from their measurements was about one and a half
Speaker 1: time stronger than if they had not used a wave guide.
Speaker 1: That is that that channel, right, So if they had
Speaker 1: used just a regular laser and regular air they hadn't
Speaker 1: changed anything, it would have been one point five times
Speaker 1: weaker than the what they had experienced once they did
Speaker 1: use the wave guide. So that was pretty cool. And
Speaker 1: while that's not such a huge deal for a a
Speaker 1: short range analysis where they were talking like three feet,
Speaker 1: once you start getting to really more significant distances, one
Speaker 1: point five times improvement in signal strength is a huge deal,
Speaker 1: and so the U. S. Military is very interested in this,
Speaker 1: but so are a lot of research institutions. So it
Speaker 1: could be that we could see this used in upper
Speaker 1: atmosphere applications where obviously using something like fiber optics would
Speaker 1: be difficult, if not impossible, to do. So it's kind
Speaker 1: of cool that they're actually thinking about using lasers to
Speaker 1: change the air itself and just to act as this
Speaker 1: temporary fiber optic cable, like I said, within them, within
Speaker 1: less than a second, the effect disappears. So to us,
Speaker 1: we humans, we would never be able to detect this,
Speaker 1: you know, in any meaningful way without the use of
Speaker 1: very precise distrimentation. Yeah, so that was one that I
Speaker 1: thought was really super cool. Of course, there's another one
Speaker 1: that we've talked about before, right, uh, not on this show,
Speaker 1: but on our sister show, Tech Stuff. We did a
Speaker 1: whole episode back in early we've talked about on the
Speaker 1: show Beam Tractor Beams. That's that's right. I had forgotten completely. Well,
Speaker 1: Lauren and I do a lot of episodes about technical
Speaker 1: and scientific things, but this is one of those super
Speaker 1: awesome emerging uses of lasers. Yeah, and okay, not for
Speaker 1: entire spaceships the way that you might think of tractor
Speaker 1: beams being used, because a laser that beg would mostly
Speaker 1: just burn up a spaceship. But different types of laser
Speaker 1: beams can indeed beas to trap and manipulate and move
Speaker 1: small particles from cells to molecules to atoms. And since
Speaker 1: the last time we talked about it was a little
Speaker 1: bit over a year ago, I'll go through some of
Speaker 1: some of our favorites here. Um optical tweezers are are
Speaker 1: the first one, and these are made with Gaussian beams,
Speaker 1: which are just laser beams that are brighter in the
Speaker 1: center than they are at their edges. And if you
Speaker 1: focus the beam with optical microscopes, you can, um like,
Speaker 1: remove bacteria from a sample, or sort cells, or move
Speaker 1: medical particles, or manipulate DNA strands or alter cell membranes.
Speaker 1: And the idea of optical tweezers is that light has momentum. Okay,
Speaker 1: so when light hits an object, the object bends the light,
Speaker 1: which changes the light's momentum, and due to the law
Speaker 1: of conservation of momentum, the light will then push back
Speaker 1: on the object equally and oppositely. The Gauzian nature of
Speaker 1: the beam here is important because if the sample gets
Speaker 1: off center in the beam, the weaker light at the
Speaker 1: edges will be bending around the object and pushing it out,
Speaker 1: but the stronger light in the center will be bending
Speaker 1: around it and pushing it back in, and the stronger
Speaker 1: force wins. This is really incredible stuff. And and again
Speaker 1: it's one of those things where when you first think
Speaker 1: about when you think about our our normal experience with light,
Speaker 1: you don't think of light as having momentum necessarily. I mean,
Speaker 1: you don't think of it as having a force, right,
Speaker 1: especially since you think of photons is being massless. But
Speaker 1: they do have a relativistic mass, meaning that at least
Speaker 1: when you get down to the to the math level,
Speaker 1: you have to take into account the fact that they
Speaker 1: have this this mass that exists on a relativistic level,
Speaker 1: if not on a practical physical real world I can
Speaker 1: feel this level. And then again we get into that
Speaker 1: realm of when you start getting into the real the
Speaker 1: world of the really small things get crazy you. That
Speaker 1: is the official science line, the slogan. I mean, you
Speaker 1: know obviously in Latin, but if you if you go
Speaker 1: to CERN, it is written above the door In Latin,
Speaker 1: what's what's the translation for y'all and y'all? You know,
Speaker 1: uh funny you should say that. Actually, in ancient languages
Speaker 1: there were often words that specifically meant groups of you
Speaker 1: being like larger than three people as opposed to you singular.
Speaker 1: So not really that unusual, but that's a linguistics course
Speaker 1: for another day. Next, we have optical conveyors, which are
Speaker 1: made of Bessel beams Vessel beams being light formed in
Speaker 1: concentric circles around a central dot, so they look kind
Speaker 1: of like a target. Yeah, yeah, And the central dot
Speaker 1: itself is created by the light from the surrounding circles,
Speaker 1: so it can it can therefore reform behind a solid object.
Speaker 1: So here we have that. That's right. These are the
Speaker 1: beams that, if they encounter something physical, will continue on
Speaker 1: as if they had not been interrupted. Yes, which is
Speaker 1: pretty nifty all on its own. But if you take
Speaker 1: two of these beams and kind of bend and overlap
Speaker 1: them using a lens, you can create essentially like a
Speaker 1: like a laser strobe that will hit the front of
Speaker 1: a particle um and then reform on the other side
Speaker 1: with enough energy to push the particle back towards the
Speaker 1: source of the light. I see. So when you have
Speaker 1: the two beams focus so that the you get that
Speaker 1: formation right on the very rear side of whatever the
Speaker 1: particle is, that the combination of those two forming together
Speaker 1: create that push necessary to move the particle forward. I
Speaker 1: don't understand it extremely technically, but I think I think
Speaker 1: that's about it. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna go with that.
Speaker 1: Any particle physicists out there who are experts in this
Speaker 1: sort of thing, or like, you know, you're you've oversimplified that,
Speaker 1: Mr Strickland far too much. You just let me know,
Speaker 1: because I like to learn. It's just this is certainly
Speaker 1: one of those areas where, uh my, my brain tries
Speaker 1: to make analogies to deal with stuff that's foreign to me. Well,
Speaker 1: I think we were just saying recently, and I still
Speaker 1: stand by it that for some reason, I think optical
Speaker 1: physics is like the most difficult thing to understand and
Speaker 1: talk about all the things. For sure. I mean, photons,
Speaker 1: they're they're dual nature, and the fact that it's light
Speaker 1: and that that alone is just a very confusing concept
Speaker 1: because because we all like to work in the dark. Yes,
Speaker 1: in yeah, well, and not not you, Jonathan. You would
Speaker 1: prefer us to have like all of the lights on
Speaker 1: all the time. I'm not the one who turns on
Speaker 1: the lights. I turned the lights off. I have a
Speaker 1: lamp at my desk that I never turn on, and
Speaker 1: I get what I wonder when it is on. I
Speaker 1: need some tractor beams to pull you all apart. Move
Speaker 1: on to the next one. Okay, yeah, the the really
Speaker 1: cool new one. These past two have been around for well, okay,
Speaker 1: the optical tweezers have been around since the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: so that's not necessarily cutting edge. Conveyors are within the
Speaker 1: past few years. I think eleven was when they began development.
Speaker 1: But the really cool new things are anti Kepler tractor beams.
Speaker 1: And they're called anti Kepler because, Okay, Kepler observed that
Speaker 1: comets tails always point away from the sun um and
Speaker 1: we gleaned from this that the beams of light push objects. Well, there,
Speaker 1: I think there are a couple of things pushing, right.
Speaker 1: There's the solar wind and there's the light. I've tried
Speaker 1: to oversimplify things, Joe, but you're you're you're totally correct. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: but but you know, but light will it stands push
Speaker 1: at an object along the direction of its stream. All right, um,
Speaker 1: But sometimes this this Kepler force can reverse because science.
Speaker 1: Uh by that, I I mean that the reasons for
Speaker 1: this reversal are way beyond my immediate grasp of photonic physics.
Speaker 1: But researchers are working on creating that reversal on purpose.
Speaker 1: And they found that by using a mirror to bounce
Speaker 1: a Gaussian laser beam back across itself, they can create
Speaker 1: a sort of interference within the beam that will actually
Speaker 1: pull we little particles back towards the source of light. Um.
Speaker 1: And I understand the least about this one of the
Speaker 1: three that we've just talked about, none of which I
Speaker 1: really understand extraordinarily well. Um, But under certain conditions, the
Speaker 1: particles held by these beams have been shown to rearrange
Speaker 1: themselves into structures that can make the poll stronger. Um.
Speaker 1: And by rotating the polarization of the beam, they that
Speaker 1: the researchers can sort particles by like their size or
Speaker 1: their mass or etcetera. Okay, that last part just you
Speaker 1: just stole it from Star Trek, right. Oh yeah, Okay, No,
Speaker 1: I didn't know. That's real. That's real science. That's pretty awesome. Uh.
Speaker 1: One of the other ones I wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: was using lasers to simulate conditions in planet cores, as
Speaker 1: in the core, as in the core of the Pupid.
Speaker 1: Yeah not not Earth, uh specific or other planets. Joe.
Speaker 1: I hate to hate to drop a bombshell on you
Speaker 1: in the middle of an episode, but yes, uh so specifically,
Speaker 1: what we're talking about here are using lasers to create
Speaker 1: a pressure wave. It's pretty incredible. So scientists with the
Speaker 1: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories Ignition Facility use lasers to create
Speaker 1: these conditions found in cores of giant planets that are
Speaker 1: heavy and carbon. Carbon is the fourth most common element
Speaker 1: in our galaxy. So first they created synthetic diamonds, so
Speaker 1: you know that's standard. Okay, So you got these synthetic diamonds.
Speaker 1: Then they decided to point a hundred and seventy six
Speaker 1: high powered lasers at these synthetic diamonds. I don't know
Speaker 1: what the diamonds did to merit such treatment. By powering
Speaker 1: up these lasers, they create a pressure wave greater than
Speaker 1: fifty million times that of Earth's atmospheric pressure to compress
Speaker 1: that diamond. Now the diamond vaporized in ten billions of
Speaker 1: a second. What Yeah, the diamond. They used such incredible
Speaker 1: pressure simultaneously from these hundred and seventy six or was
Speaker 1: a hundred hundred seventy six lasers that it vaporized the
Speaker 1: diamond within ten billions of a second. I think that's
Speaker 1: pretty fair. I mean I wanted the diamond ever due
Speaker 1: to you. I mean, this was a synthetic diamond too.
Speaker 1: This wasn't like some diamond that's been out in the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so no, but the reason for this was really to
Speaker 1: study what happens in that instant that which, again to us,
Speaker 1: is over so quickly there's no way to perceive it, right.
Speaker 1: We we would never be able to perceive something that
Speaker 1: happens in ten billions of a second. But with the
Speaker 1: proper instrumentation, we're talking about stuff that's on the same
Speaker 1: level as what you would find at the large Hadron collider.
Speaker 1: You can actually study the uh, the what actually happened
Speaker 1: at that moment. And the reason for this is to
Speaker 1: really get an idea of the core of these planets
Speaker 1: and how planets developed, how they evolved, really just about
Speaker 1: the nature of carbon based planets themselves. Uh. There there's
Speaker 1: talk of them using similar methods to reproduce the conditions
Speaker 1: of planet cores that are besides like, you know, Jupiter,
Speaker 1: So we could see this as a tool to check
Speaker 1: out all sorts of uh conditions that we just cannot
Speaker 1: directly observe and we can't see the core of Jupiter.
Speaker 1: This is based upon the information we've already gleaned from
Speaker 1: various scientific disciplines like astronomy and combining it with using
Speaker 1: lasers to blow up diamonds, which I think it's pretty cool. Uh,
Speaker 1: or it's a little cool, Joe, this this one's this
Speaker 1: one's for you. This was this is the one that
Speaker 1: you're really going to think. It's cool. Okay, so Joe,
Speaker 1: how's that three D printer treating you? It's great? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he had a had one or two little three D
Speaker 1: print job fails. Well, yes, as is the nature of
Speaker 1: three D printing, you will often have things go a
Speaker 1: little bit awry. In fact, it's probably one of my
Speaker 1: favorite things to do on the Internet is just look
Speaker 1: up all the pictures of people's failed three D print job.
Speaker 1: It kind of looks like a who's who of HP
Speaker 1: Lovecraft mythology, really, doesn't it? This is even more eldritch
Speaker 1: than the last three D print job I looked at. Oh,
Speaker 1: it starts off as an a blinking head and ends
Speaker 1: with plastic tentacles going hair and pain. So, so, Joe,
Speaker 1: what if let's say, in a typical situation, let's say
Speaker 1: that you have a three D print job that has
Speaker 1: a fail at some point. Let's say it's a fail
Speaker 1: that even the machine detects and it stops printing. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: typically you would just have to call that a loss, right,
Speaker 1: You would have to start the print job all over.
Speaker 1: You remove the failed print job, you take it to
Speaker 1: the three D graveyard, and which I think is your
Speaker 1: desk right now. Yeah, added to all of the other
Speaker 1: whistles that never the whistles in potentia, they're not actually whistles.
Speaker 1: They are the idea of a whistle not fully formed.
Speaker 1: All the would be whistles would be pyramids, would be
Speaker 1: Illuminati pyramids that's making for the stuff they don't want
Speaker 1: you to know, guys, would be how stuff works logos. Um,
Speaker 1: So what if you could, instead of just tossing away
Speaker 1: a failed three D print job, use a laser scanner
Speaker 1: to scan the failed job, detect all the parts that
Speaker 1: did not print properly, in other words, the missing pieces
Speaker 1: because the print job ended prematurely, and then put that
Speaker 1: back and have it start up again and finish the
Speaker 1: print jobs as if it was fine from the beginning.
Speaker 1: To end witchcraft, Lauren, we've got to burn him. Well,
Speaker 1: don't don't burn me. I'm not the one who came
Speaker 1: up with this. Students at m I T. Did they
Speaker 1: built a a device. Well, really, it's not even They
Speaker 1: didn't even really build a device. They purposed a laser
Speaker 1: scanner for this, where they were able to take a
Speaker 1: failed three D print job to put it through a
Speaker 1: laser scanner so it can scan exactly the parameters of
Speaker 1: this in in three dimensions, and then run it through
Speaker 1: some software that compares the model made from the scan
Speaker 1: against the virtual model of what it was supposed to
Speaker 1: look like, and then say, all right, well here's the
Speaker 1: part of the the virtual model that's missing from what
Speaker 1: really came out of that three D printer, and then
Speaker 1: send those as directions to the three D printer so
Speaker 1: it could continue its print job and build upon the
Speaker 1: the what had been a failed print job and finish it.
Speaker 1: That's pretty cool, but of course this is not the
Speaker 1: only use of laser scanners in three D printing. I mean,
Speaker 1: we talked last week in a podcast about using scanners
Speaker 1: three D scanners to say, just gather the information about
Speaker 1: a three D object converted to a digital file so
Speaker 1: you can print a copy of it. Absolutely so yeah,
Speaker 1: this is sort of a continuation of that and an
Speaker 1: adaptation to deal with the realities of three D printing,
Speaker 1: which is that sometimes things don't work out the way
Speaker 1: you thought they would. Uh. And then we have another
Speaker 1: medical use for lasers. I like this one a lot,
Speaker 1: collecting a blood sample without having to use an actual needle,
Speaker 1: which is kind of cool just having to use a laser.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, but but well, a laser can be very
Speaker 1: very precise and actually be so so tiny and if
Speaker 1: you if you place it in an area that doesn't
Speaker 1: have h you know, isn't really nerve dense, you could
Speaker 1: have a painless method of drawing blood. Um that would
Speaker 1: mostly be what this would be used for. You wouldn't
Speaker 1: use it for other intravenous kind of applications like like
Speaker 1: putting in an ivy. You can't really do that with
Speaker 1: a laser. But you could use this for drawing blood
Speaker 1: and in fact, there's a startup called No Needles Vinny
Speaker 1: Puncture that's working on device that would do just this.
Speaker 1: It would use a laser that would fire for one
Speaker 1: quadrilliant of a second that would pierce your skin and
Speaker 1: make a little opening in a vein. There would be
Speaker 1: a a collection port that would connect. I don't know
Speaker 1: how because I didn't see any any pictures of this,
Speaker 1: but the collection port would create a seal so it
Speaker 1: could collect the blood and then the laser. After blood
Speaker 1: collection was done, the laser would fire again and close
Speaker 1: that opening in your veins, so you don't have any bleeding,
Speaker 1: you don't have to have any healing. It just yeah,
Speaker 1: which is kind of cool. It's kind of like you
Speaker 1: think of it and you're like, wow, this is like
Speaker 1: just one step away from the Star Trek kind of
Speaker 1: methodology of waving a wand in front of someone and
Speaker 1: say hey, you're sick. Uh. This would actually uh, you know,
Speaker 1: potentially cut down on things like again contamination, also just pain.
Speaker 1: So they're really looking at this as a possible application
Speaker 1: for things like, uh, pediatricians who you know when you're
Speaker 1: working with kids and they're smaller, yes, essentially, but they're
Speaker 1: they're smaller it istually how I feel about Sorry wait, okay,
Speaker 1: here's the thing though, kids obviously are smaller than adults. Uh,
Speaker 1: they have you know, they can have a very traumatic
Speaker 1: reaction to getting poked and prodded. Um, and so having
Speaker 1: something that can reduce that that stress and pain on
Speaker 1: a child is something I'm sure a lot of parents
Speaker 1: would very much welcome for their their visits to the pediatrician.
Speaker 1: So that's pretty cool. Now, Granted, the that's still in
Speaker 1: the research phase. It's not like there's a working prototype
Speaker 1: out there that's used right now as far as I know. Um.
Speaker 1: In fact, all the all the stuff I read said
Speaker 1: if this works the way we intend it to, which
Speaker 1: means to me that they are still fine tuning it
Speaker 1: to make sure that it's perfectly safe, that it's going
Speaker 1: to be effective and uh that you know, it'll end
Speaker 1: up actually being something that can potentially replace uh the
Speaker 1: needles that we use for drawing blood. And again, we
Speaker 1: would still need needles for those other purposes, right like
Speaker 1: an ivy, as we will talk about in another episode
Speaker 1: very soon, possibly before this one comes out. There there's
Speaker 1: a very long preclinical and also clinical trial process for
Speaker 1: getting any kind of medical technology out into the world. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there Obviously, when you're talking about something that is uh
Speaker 1: potentially you know, life altering, because we're talking about health here,
Speaker 1: then there are a lot of different regulations that you
Speaker 1: have to make sure you meet before you can just
Speaker 1: launch a product out there unless you're not ever by
Speaker 1: the FDA. But that's an entirely different story. So then
Speaker 1: we've got meta materials. Now. We talked about these on
Speaker 1: our sisters show Tex stuff meta materials, and we mentioned
Speaker 1: them on board the GAKE a couple of times. Meta
Speaker 1: materials are really cool. They are physical synthetic materials that
Speaker 1: we humans have created that are able to interact with
Speaker 1: electromagnetic radiation in some sort of interesting way, or not
Speaker 1: just electromagnetic really anything that travels in a wave, it
Speaker 1: can interact in a in a special way depending upon
Speaker 1: the actual physical structure of the stuff itself. Right, We
Speaker 1: create them like atom by atom nanostructure wise, to have
Speaker 1: these very strange properties that go against a lot of
Speaker 1: what we know about physics. Yeah, it seems to be
Speaker 1: very counterintuitive, like you could in theory create a a
Speaker 1: a substance that has repeating structure inside of it. That
Speaker 1: matches up to the wavelength of certain sounds, and you
Speaker 1: could create a soundproofed room out of the stuff. You
Speaker 1: wouldn't put anything else on it, it it would just be
Speaker 1: the actual physical structure. Again, it wouldn't necessarily matter what
Speaker 1: it was made out of. It was the actual nanostructure
Speaker 1: of the material itself that could allow either sound to
Speaker 1: pass through it as if there were no wall there,
Speaker 1: which would not be sound proof that be the opposite,
Speaker 1: or it could absorb the sound perfectly. It's really cool.
Speaker 1: But this could also work with electromagnetic radiation. Uh. This
Speaker 1: is whenever anyone talks about a cloaking device, chances are
Speaker 1: they're talking about meta materials. There are other ways to
Speaker 1: achieve an apparent cloaking device, but the way that a
Speaker 1: lot of the reports, you know, if you see a
Speaker 1: press release, it tends to be about meta materials. Those
Speaker 1: usually focused specifically on microwaves, because again, microwaves, as far
Speaker 1: as I know, entirely so. No, there's actually some that
Speaker 1: are working on with visible light, but only very specific
Speaker 1: wavelengths of visible light and lasers and lasers, so there
Speaker 1: are some, but it's limited success and also of very
Speaker 1: limited amounts because making these things is pretty hard to do.
Speaker 1: You're talking about having to build it on the nanoscale. Nanoscale,
Speaker 1: you know, you're talking about a billionth of a meter
Speaker 1: with a nanometer. I mean, that's so tiny that it's
Speaker 1: very difficult for us to manipulate stuff. Right, it's so small.
Speaker 1: But lasers can come back in and help with that
Speaker 1: part two, right, Yeah, the University of Cambridge has some
Speaker 1: researchers who have been using unfocused lasers. I'm not entirely
Speaker 1: certain what that means. Yeah, I thought sort of the
Speaker 1: point of a lationships, well, it's it's it's coherent, I guess,
Speaker 1: but not focused. Yeah, there's different kinds of you know,
Speaker 1: like I was talking, there's different kinds of beams. That's true.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that this is a specific type of beams,
Speaker 1: slacker beams, right, this is this is a beam that
Speaker 1: doesn't know what it's doing in its life. But no,
Speaker 1: they used unfocused laser light to pull together gold nanoparticles
Speaker 1: to stitch them together. They actually use the analogy of
Speaker 1: saying imagine that it's like a needle and thread physically
Speaker 1: stitching these tiny particles together to form specific chains. So
Speaker 1: the hope is that this particular methodology can be scalable,
Speaker 1: because that's one of the biggest challenges with meta materials
Speaker 1: is not that we can't make certain types of stuff
Speaker 1: that could work with different wavelengths. It's that how can
Speaker 1: you make enough of it for it to be useful
Speaker 1: as opposed to just well, this is what it would
Speaker 1: do if we could build it on a larger scale,
Speaker 1: but we can't. So this is a possible UH solution
Speaker 1: for that, and I think that's pretty awesome. There's some
Speaker 1: other methods that other kind of cutting edge or potential
Speaker 1: uses of lasers that we could see in the future.
Speaker 1: We talked about space elevators a few times on Forward
Speaker 1: Thinking exactly beam propulsion, either either using it in space
Speaker 1: itself or with a space elevator. You'd probably have a
Speaker 1: sensor that would you beam lasers directly at the sensor.
Speaker 1: This converts the light energy into electricity, which then can
Speaker 1: turn an electric motor which can power climbers that make
Speaker 1: the elevator either climb or descend the long cable that
Speaker 1: extends out from the surface of the Earth into space. UH,
Speaker 1: that's one potential. One. Long distance communication is another. This
Speaker 1: would be a line of sight style of communication, which
Speaker 1: in some ways is less useful than say radio, but
Speaker 1: it also can allow for a greater throughput of information
Speaker 1: than radio waves can. So if you're able to communicate
Speaker 1: with lasers across space and you need to send a
Speaker 1: lot of information to the destination let's say that there's
Speaker 1: a Mars colony, for example, then using lasers might mean
Speaker 1: you could cut down on the amount of time it
Speaker 1: takes to transmit a single message. It's still going to
Speaker 1: take several minutes to get from Earth to Mars. It's
Speaker 1: not like it's not like the laser is traveling faster
Speaker 1: than radio waves. It can just carry more information on
Speaker 1: that on that journey, and it's by the speed of light. Yes,
Speaker 1: we don't. We don't make it move faster than other
Speaker 1: forms of electromagnetic radiation. It just can it can hold
Speaker 1: more data, is really what we're talking about. Um. There's
Speaker 1: also the use of lasers and space exploration rovers like
Speaker 1: the Curiosity rover has a laser that allows it to
Speaker 1: vaporize rocks so that uh Nasakin can have its Yeah,
Speaker 1: well it's it's partly you know, spite take that Mars
Speaker 1: showing them whose boss. But it's also you know, the
Speaker 1: idea of of of measuring the vapors that are given
Speaker 1: off by rocks that are vaporizing so that we know
Speaker 1: more about the actually constitute uh. And then there's high
Speaker 1: throughput optical fiber communications. I'm sure you guys have seen
Speaker 1: at least at some point a news release about some
Speaker 1: research facility breaking all records in you know, the fastest
Speaker 1: data transferent speeds of all time. Now again we're talking
Speaker 1: about moving at the speed of light. It's not really speed,
Speaker 1: it's throughput how much data was able to be moved
Speaker 1: in that span of time. And I've seen some really
Speaker 1: interesting ones. Some use multiplexing. Multiplexing is when you use
Speaker 1: lots of different fiber optic cables and lots of different
Speaker 1: lasers of different colors in order to transmit a ton
Speaker 1: of information simultaneously across one solid cable that's just made
Speaker 1: up of a whole bunch of fiber optics um Or
Speaker 1: you could have a fiber a single fiber optic line
Speaker 1: that has multiple cores that operates in kind of the
Speaker 1: same way. I saw a report about recently about a
Speaker 1: team in Denmark who have said that they using a
Speaker 1: seven core fiber optic cable we're able to transmittive terabits
Speaker 1: per second, which is it's hard for me to even
Speaker 1: grasp I say that now, but then keep in mind,
Speaker 1: I'm old enough to remember when uh like sixty four megabytes.
Speaker 1: Who would ever need this much memory? Yeah? Yeah, my
Speaker 1: brain just snapped back to a five and a quarter
Speaker 1: inch floppy and I was just trying to understand what
Speaker 1: that number of terabytes even means. Yeah, it's a it's
Speaker 1: a lot of data and in a very little Now. Granted,
Speaker 1: there are other other benchmarks that are faster than that,
Speaker 1: but they're using multiplexing. They're not using a single fiber
Speaker 1: optic cable, so you know. But so if you were
Speaker 1: to use that kind of multi core fiber optic cable
Speaker 1: and then multiplex it, then you would get even more
Speaker 1: data transference per second, which is pretty amazing. And this
Speaker 1: is stuff that we have to think about because in
Speaker 1: the era of big data, where we're creating lots and
Speaker 1: lots of information, we have to have ways to move
Speaker 1: that information around so it can be analyzed, processed, and
Speaker 1: used in a way that makes sense. I mean, it
Speaker 1: doesn't do us any good to make data if we
Speaker 1: can't do anything with it. Right. The Internet of things
Speaker 1: depends upon the ability to make action on the information
Speaker 1: that it gathers. So we have to have all this
Speaker 1: infrastructure in order to support that kind of future that
Speaker 1: we want, because I want the world where my environment
Speaker 1: is is catering itself to my personal needs all the
Speaker 1: time and not complaining the way everybody here does when
Speaker 1: I make them do it. I got a dream anyway.
Speaker 1: Lasers are pretty awesome, one of my favorite kinds of
Speaker 1: technology for all the different reasons we've talked about. They're
Speaker 1: just so versatile and people are coming up with crazy
Speaker 1: ways of using them all the time. It's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: What I assume you two are are on board the
Speaker 1: laser train. I'm maybe not quite as a Michaeloman nikel
Speaker 1: as you are, but yes, ILL slightly prefer phasers, but
Speaker 1: I could understand that overall lasers are very I can
Speaker 1: I can understand that I actually I still like blasters, which,
Speaker 1: depending upon whom you ask, I have nothing to do
Speaker 1: with lasers. But that's a controversial topics. That's a whole
Speaker 1: other episode. So if you guys have any questions about
Speaker 1: what we've talked about, or maybe you have suggestions for
Speaker 1: future episodes. Perhaps you really want us to talk about
Speaker 1: things like phasers and blasters and just explain what within
Speaker 1: how in the context of the the various forms of fiction,
Speaker 1: how do they work, and would they ever in reality?
Speaker 1: We'd love to tackle a show like that. We're just
Speaker 1: waiting for some direction from you, guys, so let us know.
Speaker 1: You can drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook
Speaker 1: or Google Plus. We have to handle f W thinking.
Speaker 1: We look forward to hearing from you, and you'll hear
Speaker 1: from us again really soon. For more on this topic
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