Samantha Barroso
Mr. Rogers
Physics 1040
05 December 2015
The Faults of Lasers
While cool to look at and fun to watch, laser guns, and by extension lightsabers or laser
swords, make little to no sense in the way that they are depicted.
For one thing a laser travels too fast for one to dodge it. To quote Stephen Hawking’s
book, A Brief History of Time, “nothing may travel faster than light,” due to this it would be
impossible for one to dodge a laser. A person would not be able to move fast enough to get out
of the way of the laser headed in their direction.
Lasers also are invisible to the naked eye without assistance, for instance imagine a laser
pointer. When one uses a laser pointer it is invisible. Unless it is, A) hitting a surface, or B)
going through something like fog or smoke. This means that the lasers you see in movies
(without assistance, from smoke/fog), like Star Trek and Star Wars, can’t exist.
On top of this lasers are also are silent, they just simply don’t make noise. Since a laser is
made up of light, and light can’t make sound on its own, neither would a fantastic laser gun or
lightsaber. The website physics.org states, “In the same way that waving a torch around doesn’t
make any noise---swinging your lightsaber would be silent,” meaning that a fight between these
weapons would not only be invisible, but silent as well.
Another fault in the depiction of lasers comes in the form of the lightsaber fights that take
place throughout the multiple Star Wars movies. Even when one ignores the fact that this sword
shouldn’t even be visible or noisy, the weapon has many other impossibilities, that one cannot
explain. In Star Wars one can witness the lightsabers connecting and clashing against one
another. This in of itself is impossible. There would be no epic lightsaber fights due to the fact
that the sabers would simply pass through each other upon contact, much in the same way that
you can’t block light with even more light, it simply doesn’t work.
This isn’t even taking into account that there would be no way to contain the lasers once
they were turned on. To once again quote physics.org, “A laser beam, just like any kind of light,
never just ‘stops’, unless something in its way absorbs or reflects the energy.” In this way there
would be no way for the laser sword to stop without something such as a mirror or other
substance at the top of it to reflect it back. This would make the weapon impractical and sloppy,
for one could no longer stab their victim and they’d have to make sure the mirror was always
perfectly aligned.
Overall lasers throughout many sci-fi movies, not just Star Wars and Star Trek, are often
depicted wrong and their abilities greatly exaggerated.
Sources
Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time. New York: Bantam Books, 1988. Print.
“Are lightsabers possible?” Physics.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Dec 2014.
<http://www.physics.org/article-questions.asp?id=59>
Blumenthal, George Kay, Laura Palen, Stacey and Smith, Brad. Understanding Our Universe.
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. Print.