Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking eitheryone. Welcome to a Forward Thinking the podcast
Speaker 1: that looks at the future and says, dynamite with a
Speaker 1: laser beam guar indeed to blow your mind. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
Speaker 1: I'm Lauren, and I'm Joe McCormick, and I want to
Speaker 1: start with a lamentable fact. Amentable fact. It's quite lamentable.
Speaker 1: You're about to hear the lamentations of your your friend here.
Speaker 1: I am prepared to lament People are less intrigued by
Speaker 1: lasers than they used to be. I think that's that's
Speaker 1: a true fact. When it's something that can be put
Speaker 1: on a key chain on your keys, I agree, like
Speaker 1: when it becomes that commonplace. I get the sense that
Speaker 1: back in the gold Finger era, lasers were this fresh, scary,
Speaker 1: really original and fascinating sci fi trope, and now they're
Speaker 1: boring to us. They're what we used to make the
Speaker 1: cat run into the wall. I will say that I
Speaker 1: was not aware that this was a thing, although it
Speaker 1: makes perfect sense. I saw a video on YouTube recently
Speaker 1: in which a group of people went to a laser
Speaker 1: maze where you go into a dark room where there
Speaker 1: are lasers criss crossing all the room, and your job
Speaker 1: is to navigate from one part of the room to
Speaker 1: the other side without breaking any of the lasers. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like in that bad Sean Connery movie. Yes, what are
Speaker 1: you talk the one that has Jones but going beneath
Speaker 1: the necessarily arching Yeah, yeah, that is unnecessary. You know
Speaker 1: my Mike point to one of those. It's great, is it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I gotta try it. My point of comparison, there is actually,
Speaker 1: I believe the Duck Tails movie in which there's a
Speaker 1: scene where Scrooge McDuck must infiltrate his own compound and
Speaker 1: it has a moving laser beam area. Yeah, like a
Speaker 1: grid of lasers that you have to maneuver through. So
Speaker 1: they're still I would argue, there's still some life left
Speaker 1: in the old laser still at this point, but yeah,
Speaker 1: some of the luster has has worn off. Well, we're
Speaker 1: gonna polish off lasers for you. We are because because
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about the upper end of lasers,
Speaker 1: the ones that are truly astounding and still kind of terrifying. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if you don't agree, you're just wrong. Yeah, that's easy.
Speaker 1: That's that's that's a factual statement. Okay. But so lasers,
Speaker 1: where did they come from? Well, this all goes back to, uh,
Speaker 1: the early days of radio actually, because you've got to
Speaker 1: think about the time where you have people who first
Speaker 1: discover that there is such a thing as electromagnetic radiation,
Speaker 1: and then they start to figure out how to generate
Speaker 1: electromagnetic radiation and to receive it using radio waves. And
Speaker 1: then there was this effort to study this, uh, this
Speaker 1: part of physics and to try and figure out, well,
Speaker 1: if we can do this, you know, this range of frequencies,
Speaker 1: this range of wavelengths really of radio waves, what if
Speaker 1: we could aim at trying to harness shorter wavelengths? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: quick basic physics lesson if if you're not familiar radio waves,
Speaker 1: visible light, these are all the same stuff. It's just
Speaker 1: different wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum. So the way that
Speaker 1: manifests is very different to us. That's the way we
Speaker 1: perceive them or cannot perceive them is dependent upon the
Speaker 1: wavelengths and or frequency. Those two are related. Uh So
Speaker 1: radio wavelengths are long, we can measure those in terms
Speaker 1: of like meters. Uh. Then we started to learn how
Speaker 1: to deal with radar, which deals with frequencies that are
Speaker 1: measured closer to centimeters to millimeters. And then we started
Speaker 1: having some really smart people ask some really interesting questions
Speaker 1: about what else can we do with electro magnetic frequencies
Speaker 1: and wavelengths? Uh. And one of those businicists was named
Speaker 1: Charles H. Towns, who passed away in January two um.
Speaker 1: Actually I remember specifically when he passed because a lot
Speaker 1: of people started saying he is the in essence, he's
Speaker 1: the father of the laser. Although the about that well
Speaker 1: also we should we should mention and this this is
Speaker 1: good to say. Whenever we talk about who invented what,
Speaker 1: it's never as simple as one person coming up with
Speaker 1: an idea of fully formed It's usually the culmination of years,
Speaker 1: if not decades, of work from dozens or hundreds of
Speaker 1: people that lead up to a point where this invention
Speaker 1: is possible. So we do not wish to suggest that
Speaker 1: Charles H. Towns by himself came up with all this,
Speaker 1: but he pushed it forward. This science doesn't happen in
Speaker 1: a vacuum except sometimes experiments too. Yeah, and occasionally you
Speaker 1: get some crazy Einstein who comes up with a fully
Speaker 1: formed fleshed out theory. Well, I've even seen some debate
Speaker 1: about that, like people talking about to what extent Einstein's
Speaker 1: discoveries were inevitable. Would somebody have discovered the same thing
Speaker 1: around the same time if he hadn't interesting, So the
Speaker 1: point being that that, you know, we we don't wish
Speaker 1: to say that other people don't deserve credit. But Towns
Speaker 1: is often pointed at as sort of the father of lasers.
Speaker 1: He was looking at creating precise beams of short wave radiation, um,
Speaker 1: microwave radiation specifically, Yeah, microwave amplification by stimulating the mission
Speaker 1: of radiation is what he called it, or or mazers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh and it's an acronym, folks. We've brought this
Speaker 1: up on the podcast before, but you always got to remember,
Speaker 1: laser is a word now that you spell in lower
Speaker 1: case letters because we use the words so often in
Speaker 1: science fiction that that people got sick of capitalizing it.
Speaker 1: But originally it was an acronym, same same principle as
Speaker 1: maser as an acronym. Yeah, all of masers also now
Speaker 1: just a noun, it's just spelled with lower case letters
Speaker 1: as well. But uh so, so he came up with
Speaker 1: this idea for masers, and he built the first working
Speaker 1: maser in nineteen fifty three. He had some help James P.
Speaker 1: Gordon and H. J. Zeiger worked with him at the
Speaker 1: columb at Columbia University, and this was a great jump
Speaker 1: forward in science and technology. But maser's had limited practical applications.
Speaker 1: What do you do with the focused beam of microwaves? Well,
Speaker 1: you can do lots of different things that that have
Speaker 1: been useful in science and technology, but not to the
Speaker 1: same extent that you would be able to create an
Speaker 1: effect using I don't know, even shorter wavelengths. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So that leads us to Towns thinking about these shorter wavelengths. Now,
Speaker 1: for a while people have been trying to create a
Speaker 1: device that could use the far infrared spectrum, but we're
Speaker 1: running into lots of problems. It was really difficult to control,
Speaker 1: to create, to manipulate these infrared wave lengths. And Towns
Speaker 1: hit upon an idea. He said, you know, it looks
Speaker 1: to me that these shorter wave lengths would actually be
Speaker 1: easier than infrared, Like we could skip this part of
Speaker 1: the spectrum. But once you get shorter than infrared, you
Speaker 1: get into the visible spectrum, which is the light we
Speaker 1: see every day. Yeah, yeah, until you keep going and
Speaker 1: get to a point where it's even shorter than what
Speaker 1: we can see, but exactly that it was in the
Speaker 1: visible spectrum. So he had essentially theorized that we could
Speaker 1: probably build a device that would use visible light, uh
Speaker 1: and just skip the infrared part for now, at any rate,
Speaker 1: And he began to work with another physicist named Arthur Shallow.
Speaker 1: Shallow was his brother in law, and Shallow ended up
Speaker 1: actually cracking the code for creating a working laser. So
Speaker 1: he created a very long, thin chamber, and he put
Speaker 1: mirrors on either end of the chamber. One of the
Speaker 1: mirrors was not perfectly silvered, meaning that some light could
Speaker 1: escape through this mirror, and then he would start to
Speaker 1: pass a ray of light back and forth into this chamber,
Speaker 1: which also had atoms of some substance depended upon what
Speaker 1: he was experimenting with, and found that because he was
Speaker 1: using these mirrors and the light the rays were passing
Speaker 1: back and forth over and over again, it increased the
Speaker 1: chances of them interacting and thus stimulating these atoms, which
Speaker 1: would emit radiation, and some of that radiation would escape
Speaker 1: through the partially silvered mirror on one end, and that
Speaker 1: would create this coherent light, this this focused beam of light,
Speaker 1: and thus the laser was born. However, there was another physicist,
Speaker 1: another colleague of Towns, who had also spoken with Charles
Speaker 1: Towns about this idea, named Gordon Gould, who was working
Speaker 1: on the problem himself, and he came up with a
Speaker 1: name for a device that would do this, and he
Speaker 1: called it Easier and instead microwave, it's light amplification by
Speaker 1: stimulated emission of radiation. So you had Gould working on this,
Speaker 1: and you had a Shallow working on this. Many other
Speaker 1: physicists around the world we're also working on this problem
Speaker 1: and making various contributions that would eventually lead to better
Speaker 1: devices being made down the line. Yeah, yeah, making it practical. Yes.
Speaker 1: So uh, here's where we get into the contention about
Speaker 1: who invented the lasers. So already we've got lots of
Speaker 1: different parties involved. The three big ones that we're talking about,
Speaker 1: of course, are Towns, Shallow, and Gould, but others as well.
Speaker 1: You get to a point where Towns and Shallow were working.
Speaker 1: Shallow was actually employed by Bell Labs, and Towns was
Speaker 1: working as a consultant for Bell Labs. Meanwhile, Gould was
Speaker 1: working for a company called t rg uh it's sort
Speaker 1: of like a a research and development company. And Gould
Speaker 1: maintained that he had filed for a patent for the
Speaker 1: laser idea before shallow And and Towns had um but
Speaker 1: Bell Labs had been awarded the patent. So there was
Speaker 1: this big argument about who came up with the actual idea,
Speaker 1: and it it waged for decades. I would love to
Speaker 1: hear the courtroom proceedings that. I mean, if it actually
Speaker 1: didn't make it to the court or was it legal documentation. Well,
Speaker 1: the settlements didn't start coming into so we're talking like
Speaker 1: decades of of legal battles and multiple ones, not just
Speaker 1: like a single court case. So it was one of
Speaker 1: those things where it got really ugly. I mean, if
Speaker 1: you ever want to read about patent wars, this would
Speaker 1: be a pretty good one to dive into. At any rate,
Speaker 1: we tend to look at the this trio in particular
Speaker 1: as being the physicists who brought lasers into being, although
Speaker 1: keep in mind, like we said, lots of other people
Speaker 1: made contributions, some of them very much significant to the successively.
Speaker 1: Now the main real laser we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: in this episode is going to be a research laser.
Speaker 1: But if you say laser future in the same sentence
Speaker 1: to somebody dr evil, of course you are, because that
Speaker 1: that's the way it has largely been imagined in science fiction.
Speaker 1: Any any future projection of the use of lasers probably
Speaker 1: has something to do with weaponry. So I was wondering
Speaker 1: what we should actually talk about this before we get
Speaker 1: into the most amazing laser on Earth today? What is
Speaker 1: up with the sci fi depiction of the laser gun
Speaker 1: or you know, the sort of future laser weapon. Is
Speaker 1: there any reality to that? Especially is there any reality
Speaker 1: to the way it's imagined as a kind of handheld device. Well,
Speaker 1: it's kind of the most simplistic application of a laser
Speaker 1: because it's obvious that these things get warm. So so
Speaker 1: I suppose it's just the easiest thing to to imagine,
Speaker 1: is like, well, a big one gets really really warm,
Speaker 1: and then al Durand goes put um. But you know,
Speaker 1: I want to offer my own qualification of the future lasers.
Speaker 1: I have a problem with the fact that every time
Speaker 1: there is a futuristic movie with laser guns in it,
Speaker 1: standing to the side, you can see the laser blast,
Speaker 1: see it traversing like you see like a distinct, distinct
Speaker 1: dash of light. And really, unless you're looking at it
Speaker 1: head on, it should be invisible to you. Right. The
Speaker 1: future is entirely filled with us fog machines. See. It
Speaker 1: really depends. It depends on it doesn't show up on camera,
Speaker 1: but it depends on the wattage of laser. It depends
Speaker 1: upon the frequency it because that will determine the color
Speaker 1: and if it's within the visible spectrum whether or not
Speaker 1: you can see it. And it depends on how long
Speaker 1: the laser is turned on. Like if you were to
Speaker 1: turn it on on, like the laser on a laser pointer,
Speaker 1: and it was a dark enough environment with some particulate
Speaker 1: matter in the area, it's certainly you could see a beam. Uh.
Speaker 1: If it's not, however, you probably wouldn't. Alternately, I would
Speaker 1: say that everyone in the future is wearing augmented reality
Speaker 1: contacts and that do kind of the same thing that
Speaker 1: that television networks do when they're broadcasting football or hockey
Speaker 1: or something like that over a line to show you
Speaker 1: where things are happening. Laser battle with the drawings on
Speaker 1: your eyes. Yeah, at least at least uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the laser blaster type stuff in Star Wars as supposed
Speaker 1: to be uh a blaster in the sense that it's
Speaker 1: actually projecting something besides pure light, because although obviously otherwise
Speaker 1: you would never see the blast move from the gun
Speaker 1: to the target. It would be far too fast. But
Speaker 1: think about how creepy it would be if you made
Speaker 1: that sci fi movie a weapon with the invisible kill.
Speaker 1: Like you pointed, you see nothing, it's actually much scarier. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't quite happen that quickly. Yeah, it's yeah, right,
Speaker 1: it's it's it would not be an immediate blast effect
Speaker 1: the way that we see in movies, or at least
Speaker 1: not anything like that from the technology that we have today.
Speaker 1: Where is the technology to some of it's in the military. Okay,
Speaker 1: so when you come down to the handheld laser gun,
Speaker 1: that's pretty much that's pretty much a non starter right now.
Speaker 1: And I'll get into y in a second. But there
Speaker 1: are multiple reasons why it's not very practical. Um. The
Speaker 1: big one is that, well, we've got some lasers that
Speaker 1: are used for military purposes, like actual semi weaponized type lasers.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and thirteen, the United States Navy announced
Speaker 1: it would equip the USS punts with a laser weapons
Speaker 1: system also known as laws L little a WS, and
Speaker 1: the system had been tested on drones have been proven
Speaker 1: to reduce a drone to no longer a drone or
Speaker 1: garbage or whatever. It just made it no longer work.
Speaker 1: And uh, it's interesting. So so who found the six
Speaker 1: commercial cutting lasers? That's yes, that's really cool. I didn't
Speaker 1: see that. It basically just yeah, stacks six commercial cutting
Speaker 1: lasers um and in the process finds up using really
Speaker 1: quite a lot of energy. Yes, yes, in fact, that
Speaker 1: is one of the big issues. Now, on one hand,
Speaker 1: they're way cheaper on a purse shot basis than using
Speaker 1: alternate methods like missiles. Yeah, because the Navy said, hey,
Speaker 1: it costs US about a buck to shoot this laser
Speaker 1: off once. It costs US hundreds of thousands of dollars
Speaker 1: to launch a single missile that we would launch at
Speaker 1: a drone typically. Sure, because it's filled with a computer
Speaker 1: bits and all kinds of other stuff and expensive metals,
Speaker 1: and light is relatively inexpensive to create. Yeah, it's not
Speaker 1: that not that bad, but it does take a lot
Speaker 1: of energy and there are other things you've got to consider, right,
Speaker 1: if you're going to be using lies the weapon, there
Speaker 1: are other things that can end up being a problem.
Speaker 1: Oh sure, the like the density of the atmosphere, because
Speaker 1: as we have said many times on the show, air
Speaker 1: is not thin. It's a soup. And so even the
Speaker 1: world's most powerful laser, which we will I promise get
Speaker 1: talking to in a few minutes here um, couldn't shoot
Speaker 1: down anything so far away as a satellite, certainly due
Speaker 1: to atmospheric interference. The very best that I've heard of
Speaker 1: a laser doing in terms of distance through the atmosphere
Speaker 1: is a German company called m b d A Deutschland,
Speaker 1: claiming that it can knock out a drone from three
Speaker 1: kilometers away, which is a little bit less than two miles. Now,
Speaker 1: like I said, you've got to use a lot of power.
Speaker 1: Lauren mentioned this to you gotta use a lot of
Speaker 1: power for this laser to work. So lasers are not
Speaker 1: always terribly efficient, and in fact usually only a fraction
Speaker 1: of the amount of electricity you pour into a laser
Speaker 1: gets represented in the power output of the laser itself.
Speaker 1: So I imagine there's a lot lost just to heat.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's that's one of the biggest problems. And
Speaker 1: also just focusing the laser, like using the energy so
Speaker 1: that the laser is truly focused. That that requires a
Speaker 1: lot of energy as well. So you might hear about
Speaker 1: something like a twenty kill a watt laser, which is
Speaker 1: incredibly powerful. It pales in comparison to the one we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about in a minute, but way stronger than
Speaker 1: anything you or I could get. Yeah, that's that's like
Speaker 1: a high end military laser, right, Yeah, so twenty what
Speaker 1: laser actually needs way more than a wats of electricity
Speaker 1: for it to run. So wats is referring to the laser,
Speaker 1: not the laser output. Yeah, I'll talk a little bit
Speaker 1: more about wattage with lasers and a little bit to
Speaker 1: explain exactly what power output means. But yes, some systems
Speaker 1: are working on making that power output more efficient, um
Speaker 1: by creatively amplifying and combining multiple laser beams. For example,
Speaker 1: Lockheed Martin is working on this spectral beam combining system
Speaker 1: for the Army that merges hundreds of little optical fiber
Speaker 1: lasers into one coherent beam, which allows pretty sharp focus
Speaker 1: at longer distances. One of the project's leaders describes it
Speaker 1: as sort of like the the reverse of how a
Speaker 1: prism splits a beam of light. It instead the system
Speaker 1: is combining um so that that does let you cut
Speaker 1: down on the energy wasted in in in heat sink
Speaker 1: by letting you cool each individual fiber rather than trying
Speaker 1: to cool one giant system. Yeah, I do look forward
Speaker 1: to the hit song by Kermit the Frog the laser connection.
Speaker 1: They will be based on this principle. Uh So, laser
Speaker 1: systems also have to use like like the ones the
Speaker 1: one on the USS ponds has to use multiple laser
Speaker 1: beams just to be able to to track and fire correctly.
Speaker 1: Because an energy weapon is going to be substantially different
Speaker 1: than shooting a missile. I mean, the advantage of a
Speaker 1: missile might be that if it has if it's very advanced,
Speaker 1: it might have its own target seeking capabilities some kind
Speaker 1: like once you've launched it, it can still seek after
Speaker 1: the target. With a laser, you need to aim right
Speaker 1: the first time, but you're projectile moves at the speed
Speaker 1: of light so well, and you're probably aiming at a
Speaker 1: moving target, which means and like we said, a laser
Speaker 1: hitting a target is it's not instantaneous destruction. You may
Speaker 1: have to have that laser concentrated on the target for
Speaker 1: a matter of a couple of seconds to follow it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and it sounds like it requires some good guidance
Speaker 1: and tracking. And that's exactly right. So one issue Lauren
Speaker 1: already mentioned the fact about the atmosphere being a just
Speaker 1: having a distorting effect. Uh. The version that is on
Speaker 1: the U S S PONTS has three beams. The first
Speaker 1: beam is just meant to measure that atmospheric distortion so
Speaker 1: that a computer system can then account for that. For
Speaker 1: the actual fire beam, the one that's going to dismantle
Speaker 1: or disable the target, Uh, there's a second laser that
Speaker 1: is used specifically for targeting purposes. And then the third
Speaker 1: laser is the one that actually does the pew pew
Speaker 1: part that makes the drone no longer a drone. And
Speaker 1: uh uh these systems are big, Like the one the
Speaker 1: US SPOTS is quite large and far larger than what
Speaker 1: any human being could ever carry. Even if you had,
Speaker 1: you know, like a right, Yeah, you would need essentially
Speaker 1: a tank behind you that was carrying the whole thing.
Speaker 1: And even then, I don't think you would be holding
Speaker 1: any kind of a mirror, It wouldn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: You would make more sense for you to have this
Speaker 1: be a automated system that could track and move with
Speaker 1: precise moments, because the further way you are from your target,
Speaker 1: then the smaller degree will matter, like or the more
Speaker 1: a degree will matter, Like if I change my orientation
Speaker 1: by a single degree if you're really far away, that
Speaker 1: could mean the difference between whether I hit you or
Speaker 1: I missed by a long shot. Right. Let's say I
Speaker 1: suddenly had lots of money and I wanted to melt
Speaker 1: my neighbor's mailbox because that would be funny. Could I
Speaker 1: buy a kill at laser? No, but you could buy
Speaker 1: You could buy a pretty decent powerful laser that is
Speaker 1: far greater than what you would find in a like
Speaker 1: a keychain laser pointer. Yeah, yeah, something you know in
Speaker 1: between melting a mailbox and I'm using your cat maybe
Speaker 1: maybe like putting a pretty good singe mark on your wall. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can. You can get something like a two thousand
Speaker 1: milliwatt laser, which is more than enough to be able
Speaker 1: to do things like pop balloons or light matches or
Speaker 1: even light other material if you focus on it long enough. Uh,
Speaker 1: These are legal, they're available, you can actually purchase one
Speaker 1: of them. I don't recommend playing with one because they
Speaker 1: are dangerous. You would need to wear eye protection and
Speaker 1: be aware that the beam you are playing with can
Speaker 1: in fact cause real damage both to living and non
Speaker 1: living things. Um, if you want to melt your your
Speaker 1: neighbor's mailbox, I suggest don't do it. But if you're
Speaker 1: everman to do it, charcoal would probably suffice. You really
Speaker 1: need to go out and get a laser. Um, but
Speaker 1: don't do it is the main message. Uh. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: there are some commercial lasers out there that we we
Speaker 1: regular consumers can get our hands on that are definitely
Speaker 1: you know, they're definitely to a level powerful enough that
Speaker 1: they are dangerous you don't handle them properly. But there
Speaker 1: are really a lot of applications for lasers that aren't
Speaker 1: just setting stuff on fire. Ruff well, I mean they're yeah,
Speaker 1: like like like secret agents, no, Mr bond Um. There
Speaker 1: are lasers that are used for industrial purposes, whether to
Speaker 1: drill holes or to cut or to weld lots of
Speaker 1: different UM means practical means to put lasers to work
Speaker 1: in that sense, but they're also lasers that are meant
Speaker 1: to do things that don't involve cutting or burning or
Speaker 1: drilling and are really it's just the the use of
Speaker 1: light as a a useful tool, for example, to figure
Speaker 1: out the distance between two very far apart objects. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how about surveyors lasers. Yeah, that's a great example. We
Speaker 1: use those here where typically what you're doing is you
Speaker 1: take a a tripod that has a laser mounted to it,
Speaker 1: You aim it at a reflective surface that is, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, off in the distance, and when you fire
Speaker 1: the laser, you have sensors that detect when some of
Speaker 1: that laser light returns when it's been reflected off of
Speaker 1: that reflective surface, and by taking the time it took
Speaker 1: for the laser to go out and bounce back, you
Speaker 1: know how far away you are from that distant object.
Speaker 1: What about something way more distant like the moon, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could do that too. So yeah, when Apollo eleven
Speaker 1: form of surveying, yeah, surveying how far away the moon is?
Speaker 1: Kind so, you know, we we've known for a while,
Speaker 1: like in general, how far away the moon was. But
Speaker 1: when Apollo eleven landed on the Moon, one of the
Speaker 1: things the astronauts left behind was this funky mirror that
Speaker 1: they left on the surface and people on Earth. What
Speaker 1: they could do is aim a nice powerful laser up
Speaker 1: toward that that mirror, and same sort of principle, you know,
Speaker 1: using the survey or tool essentially to measure the amount
Speaker 1: of time it took for a laser to go from
Speaker 1: the laser itself, bounce off the mirror and returned back
Speaker 1: to Earth. You can then find out how far away
Speaker 1: the moon was from Earth with much greater accuracy. In fact,
Speaker 1: it was described as being just a couple of inches
Speaker 1: or about the length of your finger, Like that's about
Speaker 1: the level of accuracy. Not that the moon was the
Speaker 1: length of your finger away, I'd hope not. That would
Speaker 1: have been a very bad day for us, for for
Speaker 1: many people, not just the three the three of us
Speaker 1: know we we probably also would not have had a
Speaker 1: day because this is we're talking about. That's that's true too.
Speaker 1: But yeah, lasers can also be used in medical procedures,
Speaker 1: of course, and we have talked implicated in the beginning
Speaker 1: of surgical fires indeed, and uh and on this very
Speaker 1: show we have talked about how lasers can be used
Speaker 1: to manipulate microscopic materials like like cells or something like that,
Speaker 1: to to study them or sort them up, or do
Speaker 1: other science that starts with S. Yeah. Yeah, there's lots
Speaker 1: of science stuff that has falls in the S category. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, we know the most important future technological application
Speaker 1: of lasers will be in the continued use of the
Speaker 1: laser disc. Oh yeah, you know, guys, I did find
Speaker 1: my capacitance electronic discs that I had as a kid
Speaker 1: that Yeah. No, I was going somewhere real with this kidding.
Speaker 1: So no, I don't think laser discs are coming back,
Speaker 1: as much as it pains me to say that. But
Speaker 1: I don't know if you'all ever saw the system that
Speaker 1: was put together for mosquito hunting, the targeted mosquito hunting system.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, we talked about it in our episode
Speaker 1: about mosquitoes and the idea there was using lasers for
Speaker 1: insect patrol. See. I like that idea, but only if
Speaker 1: you train ants to fire laser turrets and mosquitoes like
Speaker 1: just having this kind of insect on insect warfare type thing.
Speaker 1: I think it's kind of cool that possibly in the
Speaker 1: backyards of the future or whatever kind of outdoor environments
Speaker 1: we want to protect from from mosquito infestation, you could
Speaker 1: just have a perimeter system set up that blasts each
Speaker 1: mosquito with about the type of laser light you'd used
Speaker 1: to read a CD. So essentially, this would be kind
Speaker 1: of a high tech version of those bug zappers that
Speaker 1: we used to have, except it would know not to
Speaker 1: harm other insects insects, and it would also it's not
Speaker 1: using light to attract anything, it's just zapping stuff that
Speaker 1: happens to be within that perimeter. Interesting. Yeah, well, we're
Speaker 1: gonna now talk about the super powerful, crazy laser that
Speaker 1: we've been alluding to this whole episode and talk about
Speaker 1: what kind of super crazy powerful science that can do.
Speaker 1: And that laser itself is located in Japan, right so,
Speaker 1: at Osaka University in Japan, researchers have They didn't build
Speaker 1: a new laser. They upgraded an existing laser, got a
Speaker 1: patch downloaded that you know you need to before you
Speaker 1: shut down. Do you want to install updates to this laser.
Speaker 1: It is a minor upgrade this laser. It's called the LFECTS,
Speaker 1: which stands for Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments. That's kind
Speaker 1: of ominous, so it can produce now a new record
Speaker 1: breaking amount of energy. But this is also not a
Speaker 1: laser that you could carry around in your hand or
Speaker 1: put in a holster. Uh No, it's about a hundred
Speaker 1: meters long, that's something like three thirty feet and it
Speaker 1: contains these four beam amplifiers, which I have seen described
Speaker 1: as something like a very fancy light bulb. Um. I
Speaker 1: did not read into the technology of how it works,
Speaker 1: so I can't say for sure. Um, but yeah, it
Speaker 1: oper it's in a vacuum, which allows it to skirt
Speaker 1: around certain issues like like air being pretty dense. Huh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you don't have to worry about the atmospheric distortion.
Speaker 1: That's a good idea. Yeah. So the laser produces not
Speaker 1: a continuous beam as you might be thinking about in
Speaker 1: the lasers you've seen in the past, but it's pulses.
Speaker 1: It produces a split second pulse of light at incredibly
Speaker 1: high energy output two thousand trillion watts for one trillionth
Speaker 1: of a second. So an unimaginably powerful laser beam for
Speaker 1: an unimaginably short amount of time. Right, But that two
Speaker 1: thousand trillion watts, and now that's a number that's hard
Speaker 1: to grapple with. Yes, but it's going to the thing
Speaker 1: that's going to be important and interpreting that is the
Speaker 1: length of the pulse because a what isn't just energy,
Speaker 1: it's energy with relationship to time. What hour is energy
Speaker 1: and relationship to time? What When we talk about what's
Speaker 1: with electronic what we're really talking about is the load
Speaker 1: that they require in order to operate. Uh In this case,
Speaker 1: we're not talking about the load that the laser requires.
Speaker 1: We're talking about its power output. UM. But yeah, there's
Speaker 1: there's this relationship with time that is an important part
Speaker 1: of it. Uh So in lasers, what's are how we
Speaker 1: describe that optical power output? Um? And we determine that
Speaker 1: by multiplying the pulse energy of a laser times the
Speaker 1: repetition rate of the laser, that gives you essentially the
Speaker 1: average optical power output. Yeah. Similarly, that that concentration and
Speaker 1: amplia and amplification and that very short burst are all
Speaker 1: that the keys to LFEX is super huge output. According
Speaker 1: to its creators, the device only consumes a couple of
Speaker 1: hundred jewels of energy to create that burst, which is
Speaker 1: like what it takes to run a microwave for a
Speaker 1: couple of seconds or a light bulb. Yeah. Now keep
Speaker 1: in mind that's so that you can operate this this
Speaker 1: laser for one trillion of us set. Yes, So it's
Speaker 1: it's that's telling you about the rate. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: telling you exactly saying like, oh, it only takes this much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but when you factor in the times, you're like, well,
Speaker 1: that's like an eternity. If you were to measure the
Speaker 1: energy that the microwave takes every trillion of a second,
Speaker 1: it would suddenly see where this disparity comes. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: what I wonder what would happen if this laser were
Speaker 1: left on continuously for two seconds? It would well, it
Speaker 1: would require two thousand trillion watts per probably require more
Speaker 1: energy than we could give it, right yeah, probably. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So like if we look at your your appliance at home,
Speaker 1: like if you have a five hundred uh you know,
Speaker 1: kill a lot uh laundry machine, and you leave it
Speaker 1: on for an hour, that's five hours. So if we
Speaker 1: left this on for an hour, would be two thousand
Speaker 1: trillion killer are two thousand trillion what hours or way
Speaker 1: more electricity than the entire world consumes in that same
Speaker 1: amount of time. We're talking like one thousand times the
Speaker 1: world's demand for electricity Uh, that's only if you were
Speaker 1: again to add up everything else the world uses for
Speaker 1: electricity in a in a general like time period. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They offered a couple of other comparisons about what two
Speaker 1: thousand trillion watts is. Yeah, all of which are still
Speaker 1: kind of difficult to understand. Like a stadium floodlight. Alright,
Speaker 1: look at a look at the amount of light and
Speaker 1: imagine the the energy output of a stadium floodlight. Then
Speaker 1: multiply that by a billion times Again, doesn't really help.
Speaker 1: Or how about take all the solar energy that falls
Speaker 1: on London. Now, is that the actual London city or
Speaker 1: London metro area. I'm thinking that has to be the
Speaker 1: London metro area because one square mile area doesn't sound
Speaker 1: like it's the same as two thousand trillion watts. But
Speaker 1: what do I know? Uh? And what do you know? Indeed? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So if you're looking at if you're looking at something
Speaker 1: like your your little key chain laser, and you're wondering,
Speaker 1: how does this measure up? Well, those are measured in milliwatts,
Speaker 1: and usually just a few milliwatt's, even those super powerful
Speaker 1: ones I was talking about, the consumer ones that we
Speaker 1: can get our hands on, Those top outed around like
Speaker 1: two thousand milliwatts, So orders of magnitude are separating these
Speaker 1: two things. Okay, so what on earth do you use
Speaker 1: a two thousand trillion watt laser for. All Right, let's
Speaker 1: say that you are working really hard to get your
Speaker 1: galaxy in order. But they are these troublesome rebels who
Speaker 1: just cause issues wherever you go. They're on done jan
Speaker 1: Well that's too far away for an effective demonstration. I
Speaker 1: think we'll use Aldaron is our example. But they're so
Speaker 1: peace loving that means it's just gonna be way easier
Speaker 1: to blow them all. So if you heard a million
Speaker 1: souls crowd in English and then were suddenly silenced, I apologize.
Speaker 1: Now we're talking actually about using it for science, not
Speaker 1: for destruction. So it's not that's what they always say. Well,
Speaker 1: it's not currently being installed in a death star or
Speaker 1: being pointed at enemies over here. Is trying to get
Speaker 1: him grant. I don't know, man, I don't think that
Speaker 1: Palpatine like ran on a platform of science. I don't
Speaker 1: think that's what he was saying. No, he was pretty much.
Speaker 1: I mean he was orchestrating the whole Clone warst thing.
Speaker 1: Remember the movies that never happened. I don't the So
Speaker 1: what's what's actually going on here is that when when
Speaker 1: a laser this powerful hits matter in plasma, fizes it,
Speaker 1: it essentially vaporizes it into an ionized gas that would
Speaker 1: be plasma. This is the stuff that out of everything
Speaker 1: that's not dark matter. It represents the matter that we
Speaker 1: have seen out in the galaxy, that's the stuff of stars.
Speaker 1: This this ionized high energy gas. And uh so while
Speaker 1: while you wouldn't like fire this at a person and
Speaker 1: then see that person puff away into vapor, uh it
Speaker 1: would plasma ify the surface where the laser hit. In fact,
Speaker 1: this is the idea behind certain pain weapons that the
Speaker 1: military has developed, where the ideas that you direct high
Speaker 1: energy at a person, it plasma fies their clothing, which
Speaker 1: creates an incredible sense of pressure and heat and thus
Speaker 1: is an overwhelming sensation of pain. And it thus, uh
Speaker 1: you know, renders them unable to be violent against you. Sure.
Speaker 1: But but back in the lab, that also is a
Speaker 1: terrific tool for letting a study plasma. Yes, it means
Speaker 1: that we can actually create in the lab conditions that
Speaker 1: otherwise we would have to go, say into the Sun's
Speaker 1: atmosphere to discover. So like we have a manned mission
Speaker 1: to the Sun planned anytime soon, nighttime soon? Uh science
Speaker 1: fiction science fiction films. Aside, we do not have any
Speaker 1: current plans to visit the Sun up close and personal
Speaker 1: with a manned mission. What if we went in the
Speaker 1: wintertime when the sun is cold? Well, that's an excellent idea.
Speaker 1: I think we should just do it at night, that's
Speaker 1: when it's coolest. But uh, now we we This means
Speaker 1: that we can actually create a a kind of plasma
Speaker 1: in the lab that we can study that and we
Speaker 1: and depending upon what material we used to you know,
Speaker 1: in vaporizing, we can study lots of different stuff and
Speaker 1: see how it behaves, what are its various attributes. This
Speaker 1: will tell us a lot more about how stars work.
Speaker 1: It will tell us about more about their lifespans, like
Speaker 1: how stars evolve over time, giving us a greater understanding
Speaker 1: of stuff that we we know bits and pieces about.
Speaker 1: We know a lot about stars, but this will give
Speaker 1: us even more observable data that will let us build
Speaker 1: stronger ideas of stars and how they operate, and even
Speaker 1: how the whole universe operates. We we can use this
Speaker 1: for for Big Bang related studies, right. Yeah. In fact,
Speaker 1: there have been a lot of people who have suggested
Speaker 1: that these sort of lasers could potentially stand in for
Speaker 1: other massive facilities like particle accelerators, and that you could
Speaker 1: use a laser to vaporize material and create a plasma
Speaker 1: that would be similar to the conditions that you would
Speaker 1: see shortly after the Big Bang, So you could actually
Speaker 1: observe this this these conditions and get a better idea
Speaker 1: of what the Big Bang was, you know, what the
Speaker 1: the events following the Big Bang were like? Um, and
Speaker 1: how are our universe kind of formed over time? Okay,
Speaker 1: but I, like Emperor Palpatine, do not really believe in science.
Speaker 1: Let me give me something practical that could come out
Speaker 1: of this, right right, because you know, obviously, if we're
Speaker 1: politicians and we're going to fund something, then we're going
Speaker 1: to demand that there will be some practical application, not
Speaker 1: just we learned stuff we need to make a weapon.
Speaker 1: Come on, well, now we're not necessarily weapon, but we
Speaker 1: could potentially use the two. And in fact, this is
Speaker 1: the one of the big things that alf X is
Speaker 1: looking at, is using lasers in our pursuit of creating
Speaker 1: nuclear fusion. Here on Earth as an energy source. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as a means of producing electricity. You can get electricity
Speaker 1: from fusion. Uh. And it's not even it doesn't even
Speaker 1: involve turning turbines like every other method that we talked
Speaker 1: about practically with the with a couple of exceptions, I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously solar is different. But anyway, Uh, with nuclear fusion,
Speaker 1: you can generate electricity. The problem we've run into a
Speaker 1: nuclear fusion is that while we know it works because
Speaker 1: that's what stars do, that's how the Sun generates the
Speaker 1: energy that we enjoy here on Earth, it is very
Speaker 1: difficult to create that same scenario here on our planet
Speaker 1: because we have to create incredible pressure, we have to
Speaker 1: create create an incredible amount of heat in order to
Speaker 1: start the fusion reaction. And it's difficult to get more
Speaker 1: energy out of that than it required us to put
Speaker 1: into it, right, which means that it's scientifically interesting but
Speaker 1: not practical exactly, Because if you're spending more energy to
Speaker 1: make this thing happen then you're getting out of it,
Speaker 1: Then it's a net loss. Obviously, it's a it's a
Speaker 1: crappy motor. Yeah, it's you don't want to do that
Speaker 1: if you can avoid that avoid it, because obviously you
Speaker 1: could have just used that that starting energy to do
Speaker 1: something else rather than pour it into a losing system.
Speaker 1: But there are a lot of different research labs across
Speaker 1: the world. They're looking at lasers as a way of
Speaker 1: initiating fusion reactions and seeing if they can create a
Speaker 1: fusion reaction that does in fact generate more energy than
Speaker 1: it required to start it up. And uh leave. It
Speaker 1: was actually two thousand and fourteen when I heard of
Speaker 1: the first time that a lab managed to get a
Speaker 1: reaction that produced more energy than it required to start.
Speaker 1: But it didn't use up very much of the actual fuel,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't efficient. In other words, it wasn't a
Speaker 1: sustained thing. It was one. But it showed that there
Speaker 1: is at least some prom us that we could get
Speaker 1: this to work. And if we can get it to work,
Speaker 1: that would be a boon for humankind because we would
Speaker 1: have a clean source of electricity, more than enough electricity
Speaker 1: to meet all of our needs right now. Although obviously
Speaker 1: every time we come up with a new way to
Speaker 1: generate more than what we need, we find new ways
Speaker 1: of needing it. But but, but most theories say that
Speaker 1: this would if we were to crack fusion and really
Speaker 1: get to work, just based upon the the the basic
Speaker 1: fuels we would have access to right now, that would
Speaker 1: last us for like five thousand years without us having
Speaker 1: to figure out anything else. So that's it's one of
Speaker 1: the things that could potentially end uh scarcity. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: certainly could end our dependence upon fossil fuels, and it
Speaker 1: could end up really helping us fight things like climate change.
Speaker 1: Although I mean, obviously there are certain things in motion
Speaker 1: now that that's happening. Whether we quit fossil fuels today
Speaker 1: or not, we could decrease the severity of those consequences
Speaker 1: if we were able to make this work. So there
Speaker 1: are a lot of incentives to getting fusion to work.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, uh And and really, I we've been
Speaker 1: joking about it, but I want to hammer home that
Speaker 1: this is not the beginning of death star technology. I
Speaker 1: read a really good blog post by a physics PhD
Speaker 1: student by the name of Matt Springer who calculated the
Speaker 1: gravitational binding energy of the Earth a k A, the
Speaker 1: amount of force that it would take to blow the
Speaker 1: Earth apart, and he said it was about two point
Speaker 1: two times ten to the thirty second power jewels, which
Speaker 1: is a few more than the two hundred jewels that
Speaker 1: it takes to run this laser. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: this laser is not fully operational now, at least for
Speaker 1: death stares, not for death star purposes. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of different organizations around the world that are already
Speaker 1: planning on building either comparable laser systems or ones that
Speaker 1: would be even more powerful than and this one. So
Speaker 1: this one, as of the recording of this podcast, is well,
Speaker 1: it has the greatest power output laser in all of Earth.
Speaker 1: It's people bigger about what most powerful laser really means,
Speaker 1: because there is a time element to operating a laser.
Speaker 1: But at any rate, uh, it is the one that
Speaker 1: has the greatest power output per unit of time than
Speaker 1: any other laser out there. But there are other ones
Speaker 1: that are going to be bigger, assuming that they get built.
Speaker 1: The Extreme Light Infrastructure is an organization in Eastern Europe
Speaker 1: that has plans to build a laser that will be
Speaker 1: ten times more powerful than the elfects. So well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean well, I mean if it works for fusion,
Speaker 1: if it does get fusion to make sense, then this
Speaker 1: will be a huge practical um improvement in the lives
Speaker 1: of people all over the world. But even if it
Speaker 1: turns out that lasers are an important part but not
Speaker 1: the secret sauce to getting fusion to work, we still
Speaker 1: have opportunity to learn so much. And like we've said
Speaker 1: on this podcast multiple times, learning you can't you can't
Speaker 1: put a value on learning because you never can anticipate
Speaker 1: the sort of things that can come out of what
Speaker 1: you learn. You might be able to come up with
Speaker 1: something that we cannot anticipate right now, simply because we
Speaker 1: don't know what we don't know. And that's why I
Speaker 1: love any sort of scientific endeavor that's purely for scientific purposes,
Speaker 1: because it's never purely for scientific purposes. There's something that
Speaker 1: will always come out of that that will be of
Speaker 1: some practical use somewhere down the road. We just can't
Speaker 1: anticipate it. Yes to Hey, I'm just saying I have
Speaker 1: plans for twenty and in order for them to come about,
Speaker 1: lasers need to really get on board. That's all I'm saying. So, uh,
Speaker 1: this is really a cool story and there's plenty for
Speaker 1: you to read up on. You can actually see picture
Speaker 1: of the facility, and you know when you see it
Speaker 1: you're like, so that's what a laser looks like, because
Speaker 1: it's enormous, right, it's a huge like they're scaffolding everywhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're like, yeah, it's kind of like when you first
Speaker 1: see the large hadron collider and you're like, whoa okay
Speaker 1: deal for something that's just pushing protons around. This thing
Speaker 1: is enormous, so really interesting stuff. And guys, if you
Speaker 1: have any suggestions about things we should tackle in future
Speaker 1: episodes of Forward Thinking, some sort of topic that you
Speaker 1: want to know what is the future of this? Let
Speaker 1: us know. Send us a message. Our email is FW
Speaker 1: thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or you can
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