December 26, 2014 • 44 mins
Is there any way we could create an actual working lightsaber? The podcast crew undergoes Jedi training to find out.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, Hayter, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast
that looks at the future. And says cha tung Ima
ch Chu Ron Tanny e Chu. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm
(00:23):
Lauren Paul Obama, and I'm Joe McCormick. I recognize that
as some form of alien language, and I don't think
it's cling on. No, it's the opening line to the
immortal classic Jedi Rocks from the special edition of Return
of the Jedi. The less said about that, the better,
So let's move on. I could have gone a yev
(00:44):
nub Oh, I love ye n I'm I'm actually a
much bigger fan of you. We got yev nub. Yeah,
but you know that there is there's actually a translation
of those lyrics available online. I found the sheet music
one time. Of course there is. You might guess from
the way we're prattling on about Star Wars music that
today is a Star Wars related topic. Yeah. So, of course,
(01:06):
the trailer for Star Wars episode seven, The Force Awakens,
came out, and um, I don't know about you, guys,
I thought it was a very exciting teaser based upon
the fact that it gives us no information at all
about the story, but it felt Star Wars e to
me visually it was very exciting. Yeah. Yeah, you know,
I I am cautious about my expectations for this movie,
(01:30):
but I have to admit the trailer gave me a thrill.
Especially it was the moment of seeing the storm Troopers
in the sort of like dark lighting and loading from
some kind of transport. I was like, Wow, this is
the Empire again, and I felt excited. X Wings skimming
over the water was really exciting. Yeah, it was. It
was the soundtrack for me, it's soundtrack that always gets me.
(01:51):
And but of course we should get to the most
contentious part of the trailer, which is of course the
broadsword light saber. Yes, yes, the lightsaber that has a
cross guard on it. Uh, well, not just a cross guard.
It is a cross guard made of the lightsaber energy material,
whatever you call that. Yeah. So obviously one of those
(02:12):
things that was going to be divisive. I mean, anytime
you drift away from a design that is considered iconic,
people are going to have a lot to say about it. Personally,
I'm like, bring it on. I I love to see
the different variations of lightsabers. I don't care if you
can make it work in the context of the story.
I don't care about that initial Well, that's weird. I
(02:35):
can get over that. Yeah, I don't really have a
feeling about it one way or another yet. I've just
noticed that a lot of times nerds don't like change. Yeah.
I've never fought with a sword with a cross guard,
so I'm not sure what function they actually play. Yeah,
it's to protect the hand. Um. I fought with a
sword with a cross guard, opposite of protecting the hand,
so that if the other lightsaber blade were to go down,
(02:59):
your blade contexts your hand from getting Yeah, you noticed
that a lot of Jedi are missing an arm. That's
not a big that's not a big surprise. Um. Yeah,
I mean it's the difference between the katana tiny little
cross guard and the broadsword broad cross guard. Let's try
to bring this a little bit into the real world
and whether it's a lightsaber with a cross guard or
(03:21):
without one. Could we ever make something like a lightsaber
in the real world and to really understand this. I
thought first it would be kind of fun, also kind
of silly to talk about how lightsabers work within the
Star Wars universe, just to understand what they are in
that fictional world. What's the techno mythology? Right? And uh, well,
(03:42):
first we have to say that if you're going by
Cannon and canonical Star Wars is merely the stuff that
appears in the movies. That's that's the way, and then
some Clone Wars stuff too. But but Lucas opposite of
heretical Lucas Lucas Head always maintained that the movies were
that was Star Wars and that all the expanded universe
(04:04):
stuff was interesting, but it didn't didn't impact the mythology
laid out in the film exactly. It wasn't it wasn't
meant to be taken as this is actually what happened
either before after or at the same time as the
stuff that was going on in the movies. The movies
are it, and then everything else is just kind of
(04:24):
you know, superfluous. Yeah yeah, so he um, you know,
he never really got into how lightsabers are constructed. Now,
it's definitely part of your training as a Jedi. We
do here that you have constructed your own lightsaber. Your
training as a Jedi is complete, So that's considered the
I guess the graduation, like this is your thesis is
(04:45):
your lightsaber, So we know that much. So what do
you what do you use for your lightsaber training while
you're in training? Usually I guess he would use a
loaner lightsaber. I mean they've got a lightsaber, pool wouldn't
lightsaber that they do in Japanese. You know, Luke used
his father's I mean that was Anakin's lightsaber that he
(05:07):
used until until he lost it investment um, along with
the hand that was holding it. But uh so, the
rules for Star Wars in general, this is laid out
in the somewhat apocryphal Expanded Universe, are that the lightsabers
have to be made by a Jedi. In order to
focus the blade, you have to have the force or yeah, yeah,
(05:29):
you at least have to be very strong in the force,
because not all people strong in the Force are Jedi.
That's true. You have to at least be able to
use the force to construct the lightsaber, even if you
are incredibly adept with technology. The story is that unless
you have the force, you cannot create a lightsaber without
the danger of it exploding in your hand. Yeah yeah,
(05:50):
that's because it's driven by a couple of crystals and
you have to align them so precisely otherwise yes, exploding
times right, So only someone, only someone trained in the
worse can get those to be in perfect alignment. Uh
so because they have incredible press prosthetics in this past
future science region, but they don't have quantum mechanics. That's okay.
(06:13):
You know, in the original Star Wars, before the prequels
came out, it was all mysticism, and mysticism doesn't need
to follow the rules of science. It's only when we
get into the prequels with medicicloreans that we okay, I'm
not gonna go we no bleep that out. Oh yeah,
that that is a bliepable word. So at any rate, Uh,
they are The blades themselves are of pure plasma that's
(06:37):
contained within a force field. So the force field is
meant to do two things. It's meant to keep the
plasma in the right shape, which is the shape of
a blade. Uh. And it's also meant to contain that
intense heat to the blade itself so that the person
wielding the blade doesn't get burned in the process. Uh.
Two very important things now plasma, for those of you
(06:58):
who are not familiar, that's an anized gas. It is
the most plentiful form of matter in the universe. It's
what stars are made of. Not so much here on Earth. Yeah,
I mean we've got some, but it's not you know,
we're used to solid or liquid or gas. But plasma
is in fact the most the most plentiful version, and
(07:18):
it is an ionized gas. Right. So that means that
the atomic nuclei, the protons and neutrons at the middle
of the atom, have become separated from their electrons or
they've gained more because technically you could have a plasma
where you have more electrons. But either way they are
they are conductive, electrically conductive. So that's and that's the
cool thing about plasma is that because they're electrically conductive,
(07:41):
we can do some neat stuff with it. Uh. Some
of the things we do with plasma tend to be
pretty intense, like creating plasma cutters that can cut through
sheet metal with like very little effort, which is awesome.
And we've also talked on this show about the potential
for plasma waste converters that would use the intense heat
of plasma to break down the molecular bonds in trash
(08:03):
so that it either turns into a gas form that
you can then turn into sin gas, which can use
as fuel, or it turns into slag liquid slag that
you can drain off and then it kind of drives
into what looks like volcanic rock. Also, on a much
smaller level, the fluorescent lights that exist are are all
filled with basically plasma. Once you turn them on, it
(08:24):
ionizes gas inside of the inside of the tube, and
that is how the light has created a few steps
down the road, right exactly, you've got some other stuff
that fluoresces once it's impacted by that light. You are
exactly right. So these are all things that we use
plasma for. But getting back to Star Wars, you've got
these crystals that Lauren was talking about. You have the
primary crystal. This is the thing that forms the blade um. Also,
(08:46):
depending upon the version that you're reading or playing or whatever,
it's what determines the color of the blade. And then
you've got the focusing crystal that creates the proper blade
shape within that force field um. Within the lore of
the Jedi, the Jedi tend to harvest their crystals from
(09:06):
natural formations. You have to go on some kind of
like vision quest to find their crystal or something. Yeah,
the specific planet they have to go there is a
planet that has like giant caverns filled with crystals, and
the two most common types are blue and green, although
there are other versions that are found throughout the Star
Wars universe as well. Of course, you've got mace windows
(09:29):
purple lightsaber, which as far as I know is the only,
uh time that you ever see one like that. The
original story that George Lucas had, they were just gonna
be silver, but then he found that different colors showed
up better against the backgrounds, and so it was a
purely practical decision to make them different colors. Now and
they look they look great. I'm very glad they were
(09:49):
not just plain silver me too, although it doesn't versus orange. Yeah,
I think it's pretty funny that that people had to
invent reasons for the different color other than the fact
that it was a practical film effect. Yeah. Yeah. Another
the fact that, like for example, Samuel L. Jackson really
wanted a purple light right right, and the Sith they
(10:09):
use red ones because those crystals are uh, synthetic. They
grow those crystals, they manufacture them, and it's meant to
make the blade more aggressive. I don't know what that
specifically means, but anyway, it's not sure that if you're
synthetically creating, a crystal can be more pure and therefore
confunction better. That's kind of that's sort of weird, like
(10:31):
anti technology that that's fine. No, no no, no, no, coming
back from it, wouldn't it be so much worse to
get cut in half by a red lightsaber than a
blue lightsaber? I I dread the day when I'm cut
in half with a red lightsaber. It's did you guys
get to see the video where I talked about lightsabers,
I got to wield a blue one. It was awesome.
I was so pleased. All right, So, anyway, there's some
(10:54):
things that lightsabers can't cut through within the lore of
Star Wars. Again, this is in the expanded universe, so essentially,
it's whatever is important to the plot. Is kind of
like Dr Who's sonic screwdriver. Oh no, the sonic screwdriver
can't do that, nothing but that. Yeah, yeah, if only,
if only it didn't have a whatever kind of lock
it is it's just like how the replicator can't recreate
(11:16):
just a few things that latinum. Yeah, so same sort
of deal. The idea that this plasma thing, there's certain
things that just resist it. But anyway, that's how they
work in in the Star Wars universe, however, are at
least according to the Expanding universe, if you were to
just watch the movies, you wouldn't get any of this stuff.
(11:37):
It doesn't look like a plasma blade at all. It
doesn't look like it's plasma. It looks like it's some
sort of laser sword that just ends like three ft
from the end of the hilt. Yeah. And furthermore, I
mean their description of the of the techno science that
that happens in order to make lightsabers function. What they're
describing is is way more like a like a laser
(11:58):
than like a plasma creator. Right right, If you wanted
to create plasma, then you would need to run a
high voltage electrical current and then pass some sort of
gas through that in order to ionize it, right right,
You use an arc and ectric arc and and the
sound that that lightsabers make is indeed an arc wave
noise um. But but it looks more like looks like
(12:21):
a laser. So so what about lasers? I mean they
can cut stuff in real life, we have laser cutters. Yeah,
so why don't we have lightsabers? So the biggest problem
is um figuring out how to make those lightsabers coalesced
into a shape and stay that way. But to understand that,
we've got to talk about the nature of light. Right,
What what is it about light that makes it so
(12:44):
difficult for us to force it into and I don't
mean force in the JETI sense into a specific shape. Well,
I mean one of the things about light is that
in a vacuum at least, light always travels at a
constant speed, which is the speed of light. Right, And
so it's not like a piece of matter that you
can put down on table and put into the shape
you want it. I mean, it's traveling at the speed
(13:07):
of light. Now, that speed varies in different media, like
in a certain gas atmosphere mixture or through glass or
something like that. But even then, it's got a constant
rate of travel and it doesn't want to slow down
except under some very bizarre physical conditions that we can create,
right yeah. Yeah, And basically like like we don't have
a force field material that is air, right, that that
(13:32):
can hold light within it. Yeah. Yeah, that's another big issue.
And also light it's made up of photons, right, that's
the that's the force carrying particle of light, which is,
to all intents and purposes, massless. I mean you can
talk about how it has a relativistic mass, has arrest
zero mass state. So it's it's this particle that doesn't
(13:56):
have mass the way we would think of physical particles
having it. One result of that is that you cannot
clash to two beams of light, two lasers, for example,
together and and have them interact, right, Well, you could,
You can't have a lightsaber duel you would. They would
just pass right through each other when you slam them together. Right,
(14:18):
Photons don't interact with one another under regular conditions. They
will pass directly through them. If we were to have
these laser beams or lights or whatever, you wouldn't see
this interruption. I mean you it might look weird where
the two beams crossed, but they would continue on their
path as if nothing had happened. There's not like some
sort of weird divergence because of them. Speaking of continuing
(14:40):
on their path. That's another problem with trying to make
a real lightsaber with a laser. A laser, you can't
make a laser that's just okay, go three feet out
and then stop right there. Light continues to travel until
it reflects off of something. Yeah, it could be absorbed
by something, reflect off something, but but but your way. Basically,
(15:00):
every time that Luke turns his lightsaber on, it's just
going to like go through the whole of the of
the Millennium falcon, right, and then yeah, the ship implodes
out we all die. It was even written on the handle.
I shouldn't have done that. Um yeah, it's it's a problem.
So these are all really difficult issues. That are These
(15:21):
are non trivial problems, right if you wanted to make
your own lightsaber and you want to make it light.
This is why Jonathan does not have one. Yeah, one
of the many reasons I probably wouldn't be allowed to
have one if we could make one, But I certainly
can't have one because of the laws of business. Um.
But I wanted to talk about an experiment that happened
in two thousand thirteen that's really cool. It actually has
(15:45):
photons behaving in a way that's similar to what you
would see in a lightsaber. In fact, that was the
analogy that almost every press release used to talk about
this experiment. They talked about two things. That the light
would behave like atoms in a molecule. They would clump.
The photons would clump together in this experiment already, and
(16:06):
that they could push against each other so that there
could be a physical interaction between photons which normally would
never happen. That's similar to how you can think of
it in one of two ways, how a lightsaber holds
together or how to lightsabers can have this impact. And right,
So here's the experiment. It took place, and this is
(16:27):
the best name for a center I have ever read,
at the Harvard M. I. T. Center for Ultra Cold Atoms. Uh,
that's a very specific center, the KUA. Yeah, so they
excuse me, Yeah, I didn't mean to leave hardh Uh.
(16:51):
That that sounds like that could be an alien race
from Star Wars, the Hammat Kua. At any rate, the
researchers super cooled some gas it out of rubidium atoms,
and they used the laser to do it. Which first,
when I read this, I had heard about laser cooling before,
but I really wanted to know how it worked because
it seems so counterintuitive. Exactly, Usually, photons excite atoms that
(17:15):
they hit and uh and make them move faster and
if anything, heat them up, if if nothing, have no effect,
right exactly, Yeah, you would think of a laser generally
being like something that if it's powerful enough and you
pointed at something that's flammable, that something's gonna catch fire.
You don't think of it as cooling it down. So
what actually is going on here? Well, now we get
(17:37):
into another weird thing about photons. So photons don't really
have mass, but they do have momentum, and momentum means
that they have some energy that they can impart to
other particles. So imagine that you've gone adam moving in
a straight line and in opposite direction, you mount a
laser pointed at that atom and you fire the laser.
(17:58):
The momentum of those photons, we'll start to slow that
atom down. Now, Ultimately, like you were saying, Lauren, heat
is really a tomic movement or a molecular movement. It's
it's the movement of particles. So if you slow a
particle down you are cooling it down. And if you
get it to the point where it's not moving at all,
it's at zero kelvin. Right, That's that's absolute zero, where
there's no molecular movement and it's as cold as it
(18:21):
can get um barring the negative kelvin stories that we've
seen in scientific experiments that are too confusing to go
into right now. But at then your eight um. If
you use lasers in this way, you can actually slow
down atoms. You have to keep hitting them the right
way to cool them and cool them and cool them
until they are ultra cold. So once I figured that
(18:42):
part out, and but I figured that part out, I
mean read about other people who figured this stuff out
long before I ever even knew it existed. I didn't
come up with this obviously. Uh. Once I once I
learned that part, I thought, all right, so what is
going on? Once these rubidium atoms are ultra cold and
you've got gas cloud of ultra cold atoms, Well, at
that point they would introduce a photon into the gas cloud.
(19:05):
Now we're talking about single photon in this case. The
photon would enter the gas cloud, transfer some of its energy,
the momentum that it has to some of the rubidium
atoms and the light would slow down. This is what
you were talking about, Joe, how light travels at different
speeds through different media. So it's technically going slower than
the speed of light because we tend to mean the
(19:26):
speed of light as the speed of light through a vacuum,
so it goes a little slower than that. But once
it escapes out the other side of the gas cloud,
that energy rejoins with the photon, so it now is traveling.
It doesn't continue to travel at that slower speed. It's
now moving through the normal speed it would through whatever
medium it's going through at this point. So everything in
(19:47):
the balance, right, you don't have an imbalance of the universe.
And suddenly there's a black hole in the m I
T is like whoops, so um, so what happens if
you put to photons in this? And this is where
we get into another really odd physics. The experimenters were
expecting this at all. It's certainly something that that had
been theorized before but never directly observed. And the idea
(20:11):
is called the read Berg blockade, which is sounds like
some sounds like something from Star Wars, right. The read
blockade runner. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what caused the
prequels to happen, right, there was the whole red bird
blockade around the boo um. You know what the reaper
blockade is in physics is this concept that let's say
you've got uh several atoms together, uh at like in
(20:34):
a gas of let's say ultracoled rubidium, for example, if
you were to excite one of those atoms, you could
not excite the neighboring atoms to that same degree. You
could not add as much energy as you did to
that first atom to the surrounding atoms. So it's it's
almost like there's a saturation there. So when two photons
(20:54):
would enter this gas cloud, there would be this kind
of push poll relationship between the photo atons that was
limited by the fact that once one photon passed on
energy to a rubidium atom, the other one couldn't do
the same with the other nearby rubidium atoms. Right. It's
like that that second photon needs the first photon to
move out of the way to go ahead and move
(21:15):
forward before the second one can go on and affect
the particles to to lose that energy into the particles
around it, right, Um, so it winds up being the
sort of like like leap frog sort of action where
where each one is pushing and pulling the other until
they both exit the cloud as a single mushy photon unit. Yeah,
(21:35):
it's kind of kind of crazy, like a photon molecule.
This is so nuts, is Bunkers. Now. They referred to
it specifically as a photonic interaction that's mediated by the
atomic interaction, meaning that normally, under regular circumstances, these two
photons wouldn't even have any interaction with one another. It's
only because of this particular effect, the red bird blockade,
(21:58):
that this is happening at all. It's are like two
people talking to each other at a party who otherwise
would never have anything to do with one happen. It's
exactly like that. That's but only because after the first
person started talking, everybody around him or her got so
bored that they couldn't listen to a second person. Right,
this is starting to sound eerily like every party experience
(22:19):
I've been in, all right, at any rate? Uh So,
the question is, now, we've got this idea, this this
particular situation, this this particular implementation, if you will. Where
we've got light seemingly pushing against itself, we've got this
ability for light to actually exert some sort of physical
force on itself. Photons are interacting. So does that mean
(22:42):
we can finally build real lightsabers? No? No, not at all.
So disappointed in that. In the video, My favorite part
of the video is this is the point where I
my lightsaber turns on right, I've got the lightsaber, like, so,
could we make a real lightsaber? And they say no,
And I look sad and the lightsaber slow really goes down.
I had come up with that gag when we were
(23:03):
when we were getting ready to shoot, and they laughed
so hard they said, all right, well that's what we
have to do now. So uh so I was glad
that I got one got to wheel the lightsaber, and
two got to make it the subject of a site gag.
Uh that was a little behind the gag for think. Yeah, well,
you know, once in a while, I'm so proud of
a dumb joke I make, I have to talk about it.
(23:24):
If you haven't seen the video, you should go check
it out. It Actually it came out really well. But
there are some things that this might help us do
down the road. Again, this would require a lot more
development and experimentation to make sure that we could in
fact use light to do these sort of things. But
one of the things that was suggested was that we
(23:45):
could end up with using a lights actually interacting with
the photons interacting with each other. We could use as
the basis for some some quantum computing computations. So one
of the issues with quantum computing is figuring out how
to create this quantum state that's as stable as you
can possibly make it um, which is difficult, right, I mean,
(24:06):
any disturbance of a quantum state and it you lose coherence. Yeah,
so they have talked about using photonic interactions, but how
do you get the photons to interact? And this maybe
an in road to that. We're still yeah, we're still
way in the early stages, but it's a possibility. And
(24:27):
another one that the project leader had apparently mentioned that
I think is bizarre is the idea that eventually we
might get to a point where you can make three
dimensional objects out of light, including crystals. That is so
bizarre to me because I'm trying to picture Let's say
you could create a stationary three D object out of light?
(24:51):
What would that look like? I mean, considering the fact
that how something looks is the light coming from it
reaching your eyes, right, and if the light is not
leaving the object but remaining as part of it, this
entire thing is breaking my brain. I'm not sure. I
the closest I can guess is that it's some kind
(25:12):
of hologram looking thing. Yeah, I mean, would other light
reflect photons bounce off of those photons right? Well? Because yeah,
if you're talking about if it's acting otherwise the way lightwood,
then you wouldn't have photonic interactions in the first place.
Would it be invisible? I don't know. The thing about
(25:32):
it is that this is all coming from Uh, this
is sorcery, Jonathan's witchcraft. I don't want to hear anymore. Look,
hokey religions have no place in this podcast. Now. This
this is all coming from hard the Harvard Gazette. The
Harvard Gazette reported on this, and it was the project
I believe you. I'm not saying you got your story
from the National Enquiry, No, I just wanted to explain
(25:55):
to our listeners it came from the Harvard Gazette, which
did not go into detail. The researcher, the lead researcher, Lucan,
didn't Lucan, that's great, isn't It did not go into detail,
or at least the story didn't about what how this
would happen, or what it would mean, or what it
would look like. It's literally a sentence which kind of
(26:17):
throwaway line way at the end of the article. Yeah,
in fact, I can read it right now, says Lucan.
Also suggested that the system might one day even be
used to create complex three D structures, such as crystals
wholly out of light. Now, granted, that may not be
a physical structure. It may simply be a three D structure,
which would be closer to a hologram. So then we
might say it's a three dimensional structure made of light,
(26:38):
but it is not itself physical. You couldn't touch it.
Light is physical, You mean it wouldn't be substantial, right, Well,
when I say a physical object, that's what I mean,
as opposed to an ethereal check. I think we should
we should email this person and try to figure out
what the heck that means. That would be fantastic. I
would love to hear back from some photon crystals right now,
(26:59):
and and if it's and if it is a hologram,
then we can update our Holograms episode. So no matter what,
we win, Okay, Well, I think we should go down
another road because obviously that's really interesting on its own,
but it's really not a path to lightsabers. No, And
I think that really they talked about it in in
terms of lightsabers because that's a kitchy, fun way to
(27:20):
to get people interested in your research. I agree you
mentioned Star Wars. People are gonna be like, oh, I
want to read that article so well. I mean, if
it helps with quantum computing and stuff like that, this
is probably actually more useful than a real lightsaber would be, right,
what's the point of a real lightsaber other than that
it's cool? Yeah, I think the cool factor is pretty
much the only reason you would want a lightsaber box
on my tongue, sir, I mean, lightsabers are infinitely okay,
(27:44):
I'm sorry, cut and toast your bagel at the same time.
Great point, I take it all back. Lightsabers are more
important than curing any disease, than solving any problem on Earth,
number one number one problem. Okay, So how else could
we make one well, earlier we talked about plasma. I
think we we may have decided that lasers are just
(28:06):
there's just it's nothing doing. You can't make a lightsaber
out of lasers as far as we know. It's impractical
for at least three or four reasons. But what about plasma.
So again, plasma, it's it's ionized superheated gas. You know,
it's like cloud of incredibly hot stuff. It sounds like
(28:28):
kind of like a lightsaber blade to me. We mentioned
earlier that the Star Wars Expanded Universe specifically said that
lightsaber blades were made of plasma, and I think that's
actually a good place to look. Actually, on his Science
Channel show, Michio Kaku thought the same thing about maybe
we need to look less at a laser and more
(28:49):
at something like a plasma torch as the basis for
a real life lightsaber, like really big plasma torch. Yeah,
so what is a plasma torch. It's it's a thing
you use for what's called plasma cutting, where you would
be cutting really really tough materials, say like sheets of steel,
(29:10):
even ones that are several inches thick, And a plasma
torch works by creating a flow of pressurized gas like
and it could just be oxygen from the air. It
doesn't really matter too much what the gas is. You
can use different kinds of gas. And then it ignites
an electrical arc that causes the gas to ionize and
turn into plasma. So the atomic nuclei lose the electrons
(29:33):
and the gas becomes so hot. Right now, the jet
of ridiculously hot plasma shoots at the tip of the
torch and it becomes kind of a super blade and
cut through steel iron. It's just killer. Obviously, this sounds
like what a lightsaber is, but it's just a little
(29:54):
kind of It's more like a light stub. It doesn't
it's not like something yeah, you could really duel with.
So Kiku looked at that and he was like, well,
we could modify this in several ways to make it
more like the lightsabers in the movie. And so he
had a few stipulations for the real approximation of a lightsaber.
(30:15):
He said it had to be it had to reach
temperatures of twelve thousand degrees. I assume he meant fahrenheit.
I don't think he said though, but fahrenheit. Yeah, so
he could quote slice through steel like butter. Why is
it always like butter? There are so many other things
that are easy to slice through well, butter is one
of those most common ones. I mean, I guess you
could say, like marshmallow fluff, but that's not as common
(30:39):
as butter. Why not like jello could slice through steel?
Like jello, jello is proprietary. Oh that's a good point anyway.
He also dessert treats. Oh, no, we're gonna get sued now.
He stipulated that it actually had to function in a
(30:59):
do well so you can clash swords, so to speak.
And uh, and also has to be basically lightsaber sized. Yeah,
if you're gonna make a lightsaber, needs to be lightsaber sized. Okay,
So he designed this proposal where it would be something
like a lightsaber handle. It's a little uh, it's a
little cylinder that you can fit in your hand. At
(31:21):
the bottom of the cylinder is a titanium fan that
sucks in a bunch of air, and then the air
is ionized and heated to twelve thousand degrees again I
assume he means fahrenheit. And the blade part is a
telescoping rod of ceramic tubes that extend out from the handle,
so you've got a solid founta core for your blade,
(31:42):
right the blade. So it would be like one of
those toy lightsabers where you whip it out and it
telescopes out in little pieces of cylindrical material. I'm familiar
with them. Yes, I had one as a child. I
have one now. Nice. But of course, and it would
have to be ceramics, because they'd be the only thing
that could withstand. And so he proposed you drill a
(32:03):
bunch of holes in them, and then this sort of
becomes the conduit through which the plasma outflow is directed.
So the plasma goes out through the handle up through
this tube that telescopes outward and then escapes through all
these little holes, creating a bad an that yeah, like
a cloud of superheated plasma around this tube. You can
(32:25):
think of it as kind of like each of those
holes becomes its own little plasma cutter. Yeah, and if
you've got enough of them close enough together, then you've
just got a big plasma cutter field right dangerous his head.
Oh yeah. He also proposed you have an electromagnetic coil
inside the blade assembly, and that keeps the plasma sort
(32:46):
of tight against the surface, right, because you can control
plasma with electromagnetic fields. Right, because it's charged, right, you
can use a magnet to control where it goes. And
that would be important because otherwise, if it's talking about
creating an ionized gas and you have no way of
controlling it, then you rapidly turn into a self melting mechanism.
(33:07):
You turn it on. It's actually really a Jedi eliminator. Yeah,
you just this was a terrible idea. So the other
big question is what about power? So to create something
as hot as a lightsaber blade, you need way more
power than you could fit in something like a lightsaber
handle with conventional batteries. So he proposes this array of
(33:28):
trillions of nano batteries based on carbon nanotubes, and I
love I love that whenever you need to do something
with future technology, you just put nano in front of it.
And it's like, oh, yeah, but they are they are
the force of real sign Where can I where can
I pick some of these up? Because I am tired
of changing out batteries and everything. This sounds amazing. They don't, yeah,
(33:52):
they don't really exist yet. What they would sympathetically deliver
the power necessary to fit inside the handle. So the
stuff that doesn't exist could help power this other thing
that doesn't exist. Yeah, he sort of implies this might
be doable within fifty years. Okay, I suppose an alternative
would be would be to power it with a cord,
(34:12):
just plug it on in. So I don't know you,
I don't know what the voltage requirements on that would be,
but it might require a pretty heavy duty cord. I
I think that we should go back to our often
referenced energy backpack, like a little engine backpack that you
can write everywhere. I think that that would be real
good for this, for this particular thing. We should make
you a little less agile. You can't do all those
(34:33):
flips and stuff. Well, you just have to train harder.
Two things. One, the Death Star was infamous for having
really inconvenient power outlets, So lightsaber battles would be like,
get over here, but thirty feet away, I can't get
any closer. The cord only reaches so far. Yeah, all
(34:54):
the lights go down, the life support is gone. It's terrible.
But the other thing, the other thing that what that
was a total joke, obviously, But the other thing, which
is not a total joke, is that within the Expanded Universe,
the predecessors to the light sabers that we see in
the movies. According to some of the Expanded Universe actually
did have a connection of physical cord that went back
(35:17):
to a power pack that was worn on the back.
So you actually did have the predecessors to Jedi and
Sithe wielding these these plasma blades that were powered by
this enormous pack. At that point, it's essentially a proton pack. Yeah,
it kind of is. Yeah. Yeah, So when I went
into watching this episode he did on it, I I
(35:39):
sort of had my BS detector already. I was like, Okay,
I'm a little skeptical about this, But then I was like, well,
you know, that's not a bad way of approaching it.
That that actually seems pretty smart to me, especially because
he just conceded you're going to have to have some
material telescoping rod at the center of it, right, that
seems like the only reasonable way to do this, Right.
(36:00):
We can't create some sort of electro magnetic force field
that's in the shape of a hollow tube with a
cap at the end through which plasma could inhabit. We
can't do that, And that's even other fictional forms of lightsabers,
like the like the Energy Sword in Halo is constructed
in a similar manner with with the force field and
some kind of ionized gas and then you electrify it
(36:23):
and and it's warm and cutty. But yeah, I had
a couple of questions about a design like this though,
and one of them would be would you have to
wear eye protection to duel with one of these things? Yeah?
I mean that would be such a bummer if you
had to wear a mask steampunk, it would just all
be steampunk. Actually, lightsaber that might be kind of cool wielders.
(36:45):
First of all, Darth Vader did it all the time,
and he was he was pretty awesome. Maybe that's what
that blast shield that Luke's wearing shield down. I can't
see anything. How am I expected to fight? Maybe the
same is true of the Elder's mask. Well anyway, so
I should back up. People who do plasma cutting need
to wear eye protection to avoid a condition called welder
(37:07):
splash or arc. I uh, the corny it can get
damaged by exposure to UV light, just kind of the
same way your corny it can get damaged if you
stare at the sun and the arc that turns the
rushing gas into hot plasma can give off that UV light.
So staring at a plasma torch arc is a bad idea.
It's kind of like staring at the sun. Uh, and
(37:29):
you you need to wear eye protection. But perhaps in
this set up, the UV producing elements are actually hidden
from view, since the arc itself seems to be inside
the handle that I don't know for sure if you
were to actually try to make something like this, but
that's one possibility. The UV radiation has to go somewhere, right,
It can't just continuously dissipate inside the handle. It would
(37:52):
eventually make its way out. So essentially what we're saying
is that Jedi would have to wear shades. It just
makes them cooler. Well, the other thing is you mentioned
that energy has to go somewhere at I'm not sure
exactly how the UV would work. Maybe it wouldn't actually
be a U V I risk, but you would have
a lot of energy in this thing in your Yeah,
(38:15):
I mean, this is a highly highly energetic object and
I don't know, like, I don't know would you be
able to hold it well. Even if you were able
to direct the flows such that you didn't have to
worry about heat building up in the actual handle. The
blade itself would be incredibly hot. Now, air is not
(38:35):
a good conductor of heat. Um. You know it, it
will get warmer and warmer. I mean that's like if
you're standing near a source of heat, like a fire,
you're gonna feel the heat increase as you get closer
to it. So imagine holding a long blade that's at
twelve thousand degrees fahrenheit. That's gonna get a little toasty
after a while, even considering the fact that air is
(38:57):
a poor conductor of heat. Um. And if you're swinging
around all over the place, well, two things. One, you've
cut this plasma trail going everywhere because we don't have
any way of keeping it truly locked to the blade shape.
And to uh, it's the convection that you're causing by
the air molecules moving around means that air around you
is going to get hotter faster. So really what we're
(39:18):
talking about is that we need to have super advanced
air conditioning systems UM. And also, all jedis where it
is it singular or plural? Jedi? Okay? Cool? So all
Jedi wear wicking undergarments, packs, in the ice packs in
the road. Sure, well, you know, I was just trying
(39:39):
to think of an analogy. I don't know exactly how
hot the heating element inside your oven gets. Surely it's
not twelve degrees and so I mean, since the inside
of an oven tops out usually around five to six
hundred degrees fahrenheit, I'm going to say less than twelve thousand. Yeah. Yeah,
so if that heating element, that little thing can heat
(40:02):
your kitchen up, because if you turn your oven on high,
your kitchen typically will get warm. Um. If that will
heat up your kitchen that fast and it's not even
close to twelve degrees and you've got the door shut,
I don't know. It seems to me like a room
could get pretty sweaty and nasty if it's got a
lightsaber deal going on in it. Yeah, and if you
if you're sweating too hard to to hold onto your lightsaber,
(40:24):
that's just bad news. Also, yeah, that's a good point.
Imagine what would happen if you Joe and you Lauren
each had one of these ceramic core plasma blades and
then you swung them so that they hit together. I
can't imagine that anything that came out of that would
(40:45):
be good that I wouldn't sign up to try that.
No that Yeah, no, we'd have to. We have to
build some sort of lightsaber swinging robot and have no
emotional attachment to it whatsoever. We have to make it
real ugly. Yeah, I I mean, I'm kind of I'm
kind of a lizard like, I'm sort of cold blooded.
I really like warm things, but that sounds too warm. Yeah. So,
(41:08):
so ultimately, I think we have to come down on
the side of lightsabers are are really cool fantasy slash
science fiction idea, we can just stop it at fantasy.
Fantasy is that well the well they expanded Universe tries
to explain how it works, so it kind of falls
into science I think of Star Wars is fantasy more
(41:31):
than science fiction. But again, the Expanded Universe attempts to
explain the more mystical things that were just considered to
be true in the in the movies. Um so yeah,
I don't think this is possible. I don't think we're
ever going to have something that's truly analogous to a
lightsaber in reality. And and like you said, Joe and
(41:52):
really bagel slicing aside, there the uses of a lightsaber
would be really limited. There are other ways that we
could uh either cut things or fight off people of
it probably are going to be distance oriented. We have
actual plasma torches. We don't need lightsabers in our machining
you know workshops. Yeah, so I don't think this is
(42:15):
ever gonna become possible. The next question is that we'll
have to tackle in a future episode. Will blasters ever
be possible? Because blasters don't fire lasers because the projectiles
move slower than the speed of light. They move slower
than bullets do. So one wonders if we could actually
make something that would be some sort of energy based
(42:37):
cohesive unit of whatever that could fly through the air
slower than the speed of light and impact something. Yeah,
they also fire plasma too, don't they. Again, I think
it depends. You would have to look at the expanded universe,
looked into it. One more question, Okay, why why does
the Stormtroopers armor not protect them from blasters at all?
(42:58):
You know what? What this is? The Stormtroopers armor serve.
Considering that it doesn't help against blasters, it doesn't help
against it doesn't help against e walks, and it's clunky
slows you down, and and and it is a problem
like it it's an inhibitor of your vision, like I
don't under the Emperor really hates Stormtroopers, actually just really
(43:23):
hated Djengo Fet a lot and wanted to kill him.
As many times sposible, the entire series is just actually
a story about how much it's the untold but implied
tale of Star Wars. Well, I'm glad that we've unraveled
a mystery in this episode. We've done good work today,
(43:44):
I think so, I think so. I think by deconstructing
a beloved franchise, we have done our duty. Now, guys,
you out there who have been listening to the show,
what do you want us to cover in the future.
Is there a science fiction type idea that you would
like us to however, or just an interesting science story,
technology story, something else that's future oriented. You've always wondered
(44:06):
what blank will be like in the future. Please write
us let us know. We'll be happy to take a
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(44:26):
that way, and you'll hear from us again really soon.
For more on this topic in the future of technology,
visit forward Thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota.
(44:50):
Let's Go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, Hayter, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast
that looks at the future. And says cha tung Ima
ch Chu Ron Tanny e Chu. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm
(00:23):
Lauren Paul Obama, and I'm Joe McCormick. I recognize that
as some form of alien language, and I don't think
it's cling on. No, it's the opening line to the
immortal classic Jedi Rocks from the special edition of Return
of the Jedi. The less said about that, the better,
So let's move on. I could have gone a yev
(00:44):
nub Oh, I love ye n I'm I'm actually a
much bigger fan of you. We got yev nub. Yeah,
but you know that there is there's actually a translation
of those lyrics available online. I found the sheet music
one time. Of course there is. You might guess from
the way we're prattling on about Star Wars music that
today is a Star Wars related topic. Yeah. So, of course,
(01:06):
the trailer for Star Wars episode seven, The Force Awakens,
came out, and um, I don't know about you, guys,
I thought it was a very exciting teaser based upon
the fact that it gives us no information at all
about the story, but it felt Star Wars e to
me visually it was very exciting. Yeah. Yeah, you know,
I I am cautious about my expectations for this movie,
(01:30):
but I have to admit the trailer gave me a thrill.
Especially it was the moment of seeing the storm Troopers
in the sort of like dark lighting and loading from
some kind of transport. I was like, Wow, this is
the Empire again, and I felt excited. X Wings skimming
over the water was really exciting. Yeah, it was. It
was the soundtrack for me, it's soundtrack that always gets me.
(01:51):
And but of course we should get to the most
contentious part of the trailer, which is of course the
broadsword light saber. Yes, yes, the lightsaber that has a
cross guard on it. Uh, well, not just a cross guard.
It is a cross guard made of the lightsaber energy material,
whatever you call that. Yeah. So obviously one of those
(02:12):
things that was going to be divisive. I mean, anytime
you drift away from a design that is considered iconic,
people are going to have a lot to say about it. Personally,
I'm like, bring it on. I I love to see
the different variations of lightsabers. I don't care if you
can make it work in the context of the story.
I don't care about that initial Well, that's weird. I
(02:35):
can get over that. Yeah, I don't really have a
feeling about it one way or another yet. I've just
noticed that a lot of times nerds don't like change. Yeah.
I've never fought with a sword with a cross guard,
so I'm not sure what function they actually play. Yeah,
it's to protect the hand. Um. I fought with a
sword with a cross guard, opposite of protecting the hand,
so that if the other lightsaber blade were to go down,
(02:59):
your blade contexts your hand from getting Yeah, you noticed
that a lot of Jedi are missing an arm. That's
not a big that's not a big surprise. Um. Yeah,
I mean it's the difference between the katana tiny little
cross guard and the broadsword broad cross guard. Let's try
to bring this a little bit into the real world
and whether it's a lightsaber with a cross guard or
(03:21):
without one. Could we ever make something like a lightsaber
in the real world and to really understand this. I
thought first it would be kind of fun, also kind
of silly to talk about how lightsabers work within the
Star Wars universe, just to understand what they are in
that fictional world. What's the techno mythology? Right? And uh, well,
(03:42):
first we have to say that if you're going by
Cannon and canonical Star Wars is merely the stuff that
appears in the movies. That's that's the way, and then
some Clone Wars stuff too. But but Lucas opposite of
heretical Lucas Lucas Head always maintained that the movies were
that was Star Wars and that all the expanded universe
(04:04):
stuff was interesting, but it didn't didn't impact the mythology
laid out in the film exactly. It wasn't it wasn't
meant to be taken as this is actually what happened
either before after or at the same time as the
stuff that was going on in the movies. The movies
are it, and then everything else is just kind of
(04:24):
you know, superfluous. Yeah yeah, so he um, you know,
he never really got into how lightsabers are constructed. Now,
it's definitely part of your training as a Jedi. We
do here that you have constructed your own lightsaber. Your
training as a Jedi is complete, So that's considered the
I guess the graduation, like this is your thesis is
(04:45):
your lightsaber, So we know that much. So what do
you what do you use for your lightsaber training while
you're in training? Usually I guess he would use a
loaner lightsaber. I mean they've got a lightsaber, pool wouldn't
lightsaber that they do in Japanese. You know, Luke used
his father's I mean that was Anakin's lightsaber that he
(05:07):
used until until he lost it investment um, along with
the hand that was holding it. But uh so, the
rules for Star Wars in general, this is laid out
in the somewhat apocryphal Expanded Universe, are that the lightsabers
have to be made by a Jedi. In order to
focus the blade, you have to have the force or yeah, yeah,
(05:29):
you at least have to be very strong in the force,
because not all people strong in the Force are Jedi.
That's true. You have to at least be able to
use the force to construct the lightsaber, even if you
are incredibly adept with technology. The story is that unless
you have the force, you cannot create a lightsaber without
the danger of it exploding in your hand. Yeah yeah,
(05:50):
that's because it's driven by a couple of crystals and
you have to align them so precisely otherwise yes, exploding
times right, So only someone, only someone trained in the
worse can get those to be in perfect alignment. Uh
so because they have incredible press prosthetics in this past
future science region, but they don't have quantum mechanics. That's okay.
(06:13):
You know, in the original Star Wars, before the prequels
came out, it was all mysticism, and mysticism doesn't need
to follow the rules of science. It's only when we
get into the prequels with medicicloreans that we okay, I'm
not gonna go we no bleep that out. Oh yeah,
that that is a bliepable word. So at any rate, Uh,
they are The blades themselves are of pure plasma that's
(06:37):
contained within a force field. So the force field is
meant to do two things. It's meant to keep the
plasma in the right shape, which is the shape of
a blade. Uh. And it's also meant to contain that
intense heat to the blade itself so that the person
wielding the blade doesn't get burned in the process. Uh.
Two very important things now plasma, for those of you
(06:58):
who are not familiar, that's an anized gas. It is
the most plentiful form of matter in the universe. It's
what stars are made of. Not so much here on Earth. Yeah,
I mean we've got some, but it's not you know,
we're used to solid or liquid or gas. But plasma
is in fact the most the most plentiful version, and
(07:18):
it is an ionized gas. Right. So that means that
the atomic nuclei, the protons and neutrons at the middle
of the atom, have become separated from their electrons or
they've gained more because technically you could have a plasma
where you have more electrons. But either way they are
they are conductive, electrically conductive. So that's and that's the
cool thing about plasma is that because they're electrically conductive,
(07:41):
we can do some neat stuff with it. Uh. Some
of the things we do with plasma tend to be
pretty intense, like creating plasma cutters that can cut through
sheet metal with like very little effort, which is awesome.
And we've also talked on this show about the potential
for plasma waste converters that would use the intense heat
of plasma to break down the molecular bonds in trash
(08:03):
so that it either turns into a gas form that
you can then turn into sin gas, which can use
as fuel, or it turns into slag liquid slag that
you can drain off and then it kind of drives
into what looks like volcanic rock. Also, on a much
smaller level, the fluorescent lights that exist are are all
filled with basically plasma. Once you turn them on, it
(08:24):
ionizes gas inside of the inside of the tube, and
that is how the light has created a few steps
down the road, right exactly, you've got some other stuff
that fluoresces once it's impacted by that light. You are
exactly right. So these are all things that we use
plasma for. But getting back to Star Wars, you've got
these crystals that Lauren was talking about. You have the
primary crystal. This is the thing that forms the blade um. Also,
(08:46):
depending upon the version that you're reading or playing or whatever,
it's what determines the color of the blade. And then
you've got the focusing crystal that creates the proper blade
shape within that force field um. Within the lore of
the Jedi, the Jedi tend to harvest their crystals from
(09:06):
natural formations. You have to go on some kind of
like vision quest to find their crystal or something. Yeah,
the specific planet they have to go there is a
planet that has like giant caverns filled with crystals, and
the two most common types are blue and green, although
there are other versions that are found throughout the Star
Wars universe as well. Of course, you've got mace windows
(09:29):
purple lightsaber, which as far as I know is the only,
uh time that you ever see one like that. The
original story that George Lucas had, they were just gonna
be silver, but then he found that different colors showed
up better against the backgrounds, and so it was a
purely practical decision to make them different colors. Now and
they look they look great. I'm very glad they were
(09:49):
not just plain silver me too, although it doesn't versus orange. Yeah,
I think it's pretty funny that that people had to
invent reasons for the different color other than the fact
that it was a practical film effect. Yeah. Yeah. Another
the fact that, like for example, Samuel L. Jackson really
wanted a purple light right right, and the Sith they
(10:09):
use red ones because those crystals are uh, synthetic. They
grow those crystals, they manufacture them, and it's meant to
make the blade more aggressive. I don't know what that
specifically means, but anyway, it's not sure that if you're
synthetically creating, a crystal can be more pure and therefore
confunction better. That's kind of that's sort of weird, like
(10:31):
anti technology that that's fine. No, no no, no, no, coming
back from it, wouldn't it be so much worse to
get cut in half by a red lightsaber than a
blue lightsaber? I I dread the day when I'm cut
in half with a red lightsaber. It's did you guys
get to see the video where I talked about lightsabers,
I got to wield a blue one. It was awesome.
I was so pleased. All right, So, anyway, there's some
(10:54):
things that lightsabers can't cut through within the lore of
Star Wars. Again, this is in the expanded universe, so essentially,
it's whatever is important to the plot. Is kind of
like Dr Who's sonic screwdriver. Oh no, the sonic screwdriver
can't do that, nothing but that. Yeah, yeah, if only,
if only it didn't have a whatever kind of lock
it is it's just like how the replicator can't recreate
(11:16):
just a few things that latinum. Yeah, so same sort
of deal. The idea that this plasma thing, there's certain
things that just resist it. But anyway, that's how they
work in in the Star Wars universe, however, are at
least according to the Expanding universe, if you were to
just watch the movies, you wouldn't get any of this stuff.
(11:37):
It doesn't look like a plasma blade at all. It
doesn't look like it's plasma. It looks like it's some
sort of laser sword that just ends like three ft
from the end of the hilt. Yeah. And furthermore, I
mean their description of the of the techno science that
that happens in order to make lightsabers function. What they're
describing is is way more like a like a laser
(11:58):
than like a plasma creator. Right right, If you wanted
to create plasma, then you would need to run a
high voltage electrical current and then pass some sort of
gas through that in order to ionize it, right right,
You use an arc and ectric arc and and the
sound that that lightsabers make is indeed an arc wave
noise um. But but it looks more like looks like
(12:21):
a laser. So so what about lasers? I mean they
can cut stuff in real life, we have laser cutters. Yeah,
so why don't we have lightsabers? So the biggest problem
is um figuring out how to make those lightsabers coalesced
into a shape and stay that way. But to understand that,
we've got to talk about the nature of light. Right,
What what is it about light that makes it so
(12:44):
difficult for us to force it into and I don't
mean force in the JETI sense into a specific shape. Well,
I mean one of the things about light is that
in a vacuum at least, light always travels at a
constant speed, which is the speed of light. Right, And
so it's not like a piece of matter that you
can put down on table and put into the shape
you want it. I mean, it's traveling at the speed
(13:07):
of light. Now, that speed varies in different media, like
in a certain gas atmosphere mixture or through glass or
something like that. But even then, it's got a constant
rate of travel and it doesn't want to slow down
except under some very bizarre physical conditions that we can create,
right yeah. Yeah, And basically like like we don't have
a force field material that is air, right, that that
(13:32):
can hold light within it. Yeah. Yeah, that's another big issue.
And also light it's made up of photons, right, that's
the that's the force carrying particle of light, which is,
to all intents and purposes, massless. I mean you can
talk about how it has a relativistic mass, has arrest
zero mass state. So it's it's this particle that doesn't
(13:56):
have mass the way we would think of physical particles
having it. One result of that is that you cannot
clash to two beams of light, two lasers, for example,
together and and have them interact, right, Well, you could,
You can't have a lightsaber duel you would. They would
just pass right through each other when you slam them together. Right,
(14:18):
Photons don't interact with one another under regular conditions. They
will pass directly through them. If we were to have
these laser beams or lights or whatever, you wouldn't see
this interruption. I mean you it might look weird where
the two beams crossed, but they would continue on their
path as if nothing had happened. There's not like some
sort of weird divergence because of them. Speaking of continuing
(14:40):
on their path. That's another problem with trying to make
a real lightsaber with a laser. A laser, you can't
make a laser that's just okay, go three feet out
and then stop right there. Light continues to travel until
it reflects off of something. Yeah, it could be absorbed
by something, reflect off something, but but but your way. Basically,
(15:00):
every time that Luke turns his lightsaber on, it's just
going to like go through the whole of the of
the Millennium falcon, right, and then yeah, the ship implodes
out we all die. It was even written on the handle.
I shouldn't have done that. Um yeah, it's it's a problem.
So these are all really difficult issues. That are These
(15:21):
are non trivial problems, right if you wanted to make
your own lightsaber and you want to make it light.
This is why Jonathan does not have one. Yeah, one
of the many reasons I probably wouldn't be allowed to
have one if we could make one, But I certainly
can't have one because of the laws of business. Um.
But I wanted to talk about an experiment that happened
in two thousand thirteen that's really cool. It actually has
(15:45):
photons behaving in a way that's similar to what you
would see in a lightsaber. In fact, that was the
analogy that almost every press release used to talk about
this experiment. They talked about two things. That the light
would behave like atoms in a molecule. They would clump.
The photons would clump together in this experiment already, and
(16:06):
that they could push against each other so that there
could be a physical interaction between photons which normally would
never happen. That's similar to how you can think of
it in one of two ways, how a lightsaber holds
together or how to lightsabers can have this impact. And right,
So here's the experiment. It took place, and this is
(16:27):
the best name for a center I have ever read,
at the Harvard M. I. T. Center for Ultra Cold Atoms. Uh,
that's a very specific center, the KUA. Yeah, so they
excuse me, Yeah, I didn't mean to leave hardh Uh.
(16:51):
That that sounds like that could be an alien race
from Star Wars, the Hammat Kua. At any rate, the
researchers super cooled some gas it out of rubidium atoms,
and they used the laser to do it. Which first,
when I read this, I had heard about laser cooling before,
but I really wanted to know how it worked because
it seems so counterintuitive. Exactly, Usually, photons excite atoms that
(17:15):
they hit and uh and make them move faster and
if anything, heat them up, if if nothing, have no effect,
right exactly, Yeah, you would think of a laser generally
being like something that if it's powerful enough and you
pointed at something that's flammable, that something's gonna catch fire.
You don't think of it as cooling it down. So
what actually is going on here? Well, now we get
(17:37):
into another weird thing about photons. So photons don't really
have mass, but they do have momentum, and momentum means
that they have some energy that they can impart to
other particles. So imagine that you've gone adam moving in
a straight line and in opposite direction, you mount a
laser pointed at that atom and you fire the laser.
(17:58):
The momentum of those photons, we'll start to slow that
atom down. Now, Ultimately, like you were saying, Lauren, heat
is really a tomic movement or a molecular movement. It's
it's the movement of particles. So if you slow a
particle down you are cooling it down. And if you
get it to the point where it's not moving at all,
it's at zero kelvin. Right, That's that's absolute zero, where
there's no molecular movement and it's as cold as it
(18:21):
can get um barring the negative kelvin stories that we've
seen in scientific experiments that are too confusing to go
into right now. But at then your eight um. If
you use lasers in this way, you can actually slow
down atoms. You have to keep hitting them the right
way to cool them and cool them and cool them
until they are ultra cold. So once I figured that
(18:42):
part out, and but I figured that part out, I
mean read about other people who figured this stuff out
long before I ever even knew it existed. I didn't
come up with this obviously. Uh. Once I once I
learned that part, I thought, all right, so what is
going on? Once these rubidium atoms are ultra cold and
you've got gas cloud of ultra cold atoms, Well, at
that point they would introduce a photon into the gas cloud.
(19:05):
Now we're talking about single photon in this case. The
photon would enter the gas cloud, transfer some of its energy,
the momentum that it has to some of the rubidium
atoms and the light would slow down. This is what
you were talking about, Joe, how light travels at different
speeds through different media. So it's technically going slower than
the speed of light because we tend to mean the
(19:26):
speed of light as the speed of light through a vacuum,
so it goes a little slower than that. But once
it escapes out the other side of the gas cloud,
that energy rejoins with the photon, so it now is traveling.
It doesn't continue to travel at that slower speed. It's
now moving through the normal speed it would through whatever
medium it's going through at this point. So everything in
(19:47):
the balance, right, you don't have an imbalance of the universe.
And suddenly there's a black hole in the m I
T is like whoops, so um, so what happens if
you put to photons in this? And this is where
we get into another really odd physics. The experimenters were
expecting this at all. It's certainly something that that had
been theorized before but never directly observed. And the idea
(20:11):
is called the read Berg blockade, which is sounds like
some sounds like something from Star Wars, right. The read
blockade runner. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what caused the
prequels to happen, right, there was the whole red bird
blockade around the boo um. You know what the reaper
blockade is in physics is this concept that let's say
you've got uh several atoms together, uh at like in
(20:34):
a gas of let's say ultracoled rubidium, for example, if
you were to excite one of those atoms, you could
not excite the neighboring atoms to that same degree. You
could not add as much energy as you did to
that first atom to the surrounding atoms. So it's it's
almost like there's a saturation there. So when two photons
(20:54):
would enter this gas cloud, there would be this kind
of push poll relationship between the photo atons that was
limited by the fact that once one photon passed on
energy to a rubidium atom, the other one couldn't do
the same with the other nearby rubidium atoms. Right. It's
like that that second photon needs the first photon to
move out of the way to go ahead and move
(21:15):
forward before the second one can go on and affect
the particles to to lose that energy into the particles
around it, right, Um, so it winds up being the
sort of like like leap frog sort of action where
where each one is pushing and pulling the other until
they both exit the cloud as a single mushy photon unit. Yeah,
(21:35):
it's kind of kind of crazy, like a photon molecule.
This is so nuts, is Bunkers. Now. They referred to
it specifically as a photonic interaction that's mediated by the
atomic interaction, meaning that normally, under regular circumstances, these two
photons wouldn't even have any interaction with one another. It's
only because of this particular effect, the red bird blockade,
(21:58):
that this is happening at all. It's are like two
people talking to each other at a party who otherwise
would never have anything to do with one happen. It's
exactly like that. That's but only because after the first
person started talking, everybody around him or her got so
bored that they couldn't listen to a second person. Right,
this is starting to sound eerily like every party experience
(22:19):
I've been in, all right, at any rate? Uh So,
the question is, now, we've got this idea, this this
particular situation, this this particular implementation, if you will. Where
we've got light seemingly pushing against itself, we've got this
ability for light to actually exert some sort of physical
force on itself. Photons are interacting. So does that mean
(22:42):
we can finally build real lightsabers? No? No, not at all.
So disappointed in that. In the video, My favorite part
of the video is this is the point where I
my lightsaber turns on right, I've got the lightsaber, like, so,
could we make a real lightsaber? And they say no,
And I look sad and the lightsaber slow really goes down.
I had come up with that gag when we were
(23:03):
when we were getting ready to shoot, and they laughed
so hard they said, all right, well that's what we
have to do now. So uh so I was glad
that I got one got to wheel the lightsaber, and
two got to make it the subject of a site gag.
Uh that was a little behind the gag for think. Yeah, well,
you know, once in a while, I'm so proud of
a dumb joke I make, I have to talk about it.
(23:24):
If you haven't seen the video, you should go check
it out. It Actually it came out really well. But
there are some things that this might help us do
down the road. Again, this would require a lot more
development and experimentation to make sure that we could in
fact use light to do these sort of things. But
one of the things that was suggested was that we
(23:45):
could end up with using a lights actually interacting with
the photons interacting with each other. We could use as
the basis for some some quantum computing computations. So one
of the issues with quantum computing is figuring out how
to create this quantum state that's as stable as you
can possibly make it um, which is difficult, right, I mean,
(24:06):
any disturbance of a quantum state and it you lose coherence. Yeah,
so they have talked about using photonic interactions, but how
do you get the photons to interact? And this maybe
an in road to that. We're still yeah, we're still
way in the early stages, but it's a possibility. And
(24:27):
another one that the project leader had apparently mentioned that
I think is bizarre is the idea that eventually we
might get to a point where you can make three
dimensional objects out of light, including crystals. That is so
bizarre to me because I'm trying to picture Let's say
you could create a stationary three D object out of light?
(24:51):
What would that look like? I mean, considering the fact
that how something looks is the light coming from it
reaching your eyes, right, and if the light is not
leaving the object but remaining as part of it, this
entire thing is breaking my brain. I'm not sure. I
the closest I can guess is that it's some kind
(25:12):
of hologram looking thing. Yeah, I mean, would other light
reflect photons bounce off of those photons right? Well? Because yeah,
if you're talking about if it's acting otherwise the way lightwood,
then you wouldn't have photonic interactions in the first place.
Would it be invisible? I don't know. The thing about
(25:32):
it is that this is all coming from Uh, this
is sorcery, Jonathan's witchcraft. I don't want to hear anymore. Look,
hokey religions have no place in this podcast. Now. This
this is all coming from hard the Harvard Gazette. The
Harvard Gazette reported on this, and it was the project
I believe you. I'm not saying you got your story
from the National Enquiry, No, I just wanted to explain
(25:55):
to our listeners it came from the Harvard Gazette, which
did not go into detail. The researcher, the lead researcher, Lucan,
didn't Lucan, that's great, isn't It did not go into detail,
or at least the story didn't about what how this
would happen, or what it would mean, or what it
would look like. It's literally a sentence which kind of
(26:17):
throwaway line way at the end of the article. Yeah,
in fact, I can read it right now, says Lucan.
Also suggested that the system might one day even be
used to create complex three D structures, such as crystals
wholly out of light. Now, granted, that may not be
a physical structure. It may simply be a three D structure,
which would be closer to a hologram. So then we
might say it's a three dimensional structure made of light,
(26:38):
but it is not itself physical. You couldn't touch it.
Light is physical, You mean it wouldn't be substantial, right, Well,
when I say a physical object, that's what I mean,
as opposed to an ethereal check. I think we should
we should email this person and try to figure out
what the heck that means. That would be fantastic. I
would love to hear back from some photon crystals right now,
(26:59):
and and if it's and if it is a hologram,
then we can update our Holograms episode. So no matter what,
we win, Okay, Well, I think we should go down
another road because obviously that's really interesting on its own,
but it's really not a path to lightsabers. No, And
I think that really they talked about it in in
terms of lightsabers because that's a kitchy, fun way to
(27:20):
to get people interested in your research. I agree you
mentioned Star Wars. People are gonna be like, oh, I
want to read that article so well. I mean, if
it helps with quantum computing and stuff like that, this
is probably actually more useful than a real lightsaber would be, right,
what's the point of a real lightsaber other than that
it's cool? Yeah, I think the cool factor is pretty
much the only reason you would want a lightsaber box
on my tongue, sir, I mean, lightsabers are infinitely okay,
(27:44):
I'm sorry, cut and toast your bagel at the same time.
Great point, I take it all back. Lightsabers are more
important than curing any disease, than solving any problem on Earth,
number one number one problem. Okay, So how else could
we make one well, earlier we talked about plasma. I
think we we may have decided that lasers are just
(28:06):
there's just it's nothing doing. You can't make a lightsaber
out of lasers as far as we know. It's impractical
for at least three or four reasons. But what about plasma.
So again, plasma, it's it's ionized superheated gas. You know,
it's like cloud of incredibly hot stuff. It sounds like
(28:28):
kind of like a lightsaber blade to me. We mentioned
earlier that the Star Wars Expanded Universe specifically said that
lightsaber blades were made of plasma, and I think that's
actually a good place to look. Actually, on his Science
Channel show, Michio Kaku thought the same thing about maybe
we need to look less at a laser and more
(28:49):
at something like a plasma torch as the basis for
a real life lightsaber, like really big plasma torch. Yeah,
so what is a plasma torch. It's it's a thing
you use for what's called plasma cutting, where you would
be cutting really really tough materials, say like sheets of steel,
(29:10):
even ones that are several inches thick, And a plasma
torch works by creating a flow of pressurized gas like
and it could just be oxygen from the air. It
doesn't really matter too much what the gas is. You
can use different kinds of gas. And then it ignites
an electrical arc that causes the gas to ionize and
turn into plasma. So the atomic nuclei lose the electrons
(29:33):
and the gas becomes so hot. Right now, the jet
of ridiculously hot plasma shoots at the tip of the
torch and it becomes kind of a super blade and
cut through steel iron. It's just killer. Obviously, this sounds
like what a lightsaber is, but it's just a little
(29:54):
kind of It's more like a light stub. It doesn't
it's not like something yeah, you could really duel with.
So Kiku looked at that and he was like, well,
we could modify this in several ways to make it
more like the lightsabers in the movie. And so he
had a few stipulations for the real approximation of a lightsaber.
(30:15):
He said it had to be it had to reach
temperatures of twelve thousand degrees. I assume he meant fahrenheit.
I don't think he said though, but fahrenheit. Yeah, so
he could quote slice through steel like butter. Why is
it always like butter? There are so many other things
that are easy to slice through well, butter is one
of those most common ones. I mean, I guess you
could say, like marshmallow fluff, but that's not as common
(30:39):
as butter. Why not like jello could slice through steel?
Like jello, jello is proprietary. Oh that's a good point anyway.
He also dessert treats. Oh, no, we're gonna get sued now.
He stipulated that it actually had to function in a
(30:59):
do well so you can clash swords, so to speak.
And uh, and also has to be basically lightsaber sized. Yeah,
if you're gonna make a lightsaber, needs to be lightsaber sized. Okay,
So he designed this proposal where it would be something
like a lightsaber handle. It's a little uh, it's a
little cylinder that you can fit in your hand. At
(31:21):
the bottom of the cylinder is a titanium fan that
sucks in a bunch of air, and then the air
is ionized and heated to twelve thousand degrees again I
assume he means fahrenheit. And the blade part is a
telescoping rod of ceramic tubes that extend out from the handle,
so you've got a solid founta core for your blade,
(31:42):
right the blade. So it would be like one of
those toy lightsabers where you whip it out and it
telescopes out in little pieces of cylindrical material. I'm familiar
with them. Yes, I had one as a child. I
have one now. Nice. But of course, and it would
have to be ceramics, because they'd be the only thing
that could withstand. And so he proposed you drill a
(32:03):
bunch of holes in them, and then this sort of
becomes the conduit through which the plasma outflow is directed.
So the plasma goes out through the handle up through
this tube that telescopes outward and then escapes through all
these little holes, creating a bad an that yeah, like
a cloud of superheated plasma around this tube. You can
(32:25):
think of it as kind of like each of those
holes becomes its own little plasma cutter. Yeah, and if
you've got enough of them close enough together, then you've
just got a big plasma cutter field right dangerous his head.
Oh yeah. He also proposed you have an electromagnetic coil
inside the blade assembly, and that keeps the plasma sort
(32:46):
of tight against the surface, right, because you can control
plasma with electromagnetic fields. Right, because it's charged, right, you
can use a magnet to control where it goes. And
that would be important because otherwise, if it's talking about
creating an ionized gas and you have no way of
controlling it, then you rapidly turn into a self melting mechanism.
(33:07):
You turn it on. It's actually really a Jedi eliminator. Yeah,
you just this was a terrible idea. So the other
big question is what about power? So to create something
as hot as a lightsaber blade, you need way more
power than you could fit in something like a lightsaber
handle with conventional batteries. So he proposes this array of
(33:28):
trillions of nano batteries based on carbon nanotubes, and I
love I love that whenever you need to do something
with future technology, you just put nano in front of it.
And it's like, oh, yeah, but they are they are
the force of real sign Where can I where can
I pick some of these up? Because I am tired
of changing out batteries and everything. This sounds amazing. They don't, yeah,
(33:52):
they don't really exist yet. What they would sympathetically deliver
the power necessary to fit inside the handle. So the
stuff that doesn't exist could help power this other thing
that doesn't exist. Yeah, he sort of implies this might
be doable within fifty years. Okay, I suppose an alternative
would be would be to power it with a cord,
(34:12):
just plug it on in. So I don't know you,
I don't know what the voltage requirements on that would be,
but it might require a pretty heavy duty cord. I
I think that we should go back to our often
referenced energy backpack, like a little engine backpack that you
can write everywhere. I think that that would be real
good for this, for this particular thing. We should make
you a little less agile. You can't do all those
(34:33):
flips and stuff. Well, you just have to train harder.
Two things. One, the Death Star was infamous for having
really inconvenient power outlets, So lightsaber battles would be like,
get over here, but thirty feet away, I can't get
any closer. The cord only reaches so far. Yeah, all
(34:54):
the lights go down, the life support is gone. It's terrible.
But the other thing, the other thing that what that
was a total joke, obviously, But the other thing, which
is not a total joke, is that within the Expanded Universe,
the predecessors to the light sabers that we see in
the movies. According to some of the Expanded Universe actually
did have a connection of physical cord that went back
(35:17):
to a power pack that was worn on the back.
So you actually did have the predecessors to Jedi and
Sithe wielding these these plasma blades that were powered by
this enormous pack. At that point, it's essentially a proton pack. Yeah,
it kind of is. Yeah. Yeah, So when I went
into watching this episode he did on it, I I
(35:39):
sort of had my BS detector already. I was like, Okay,
I'm a little skeptical about this, But then I was like, well,
you know, that's not a bad way of approaching it.
That that actually seems pretty smart to me, especially because
he just conceded you're going to have to have some
material telescoping rod at the center of it, right, that
seems like the only reasonable way to do this, Right.
(36:00):
We can't create some sort of electro magnetic force field
that's in the shape of a hollow tube with a
cap at the end through which plasma could inhabit. We
can't do that, And that's even other fictional forms of lightsabers,
like the like the Energy Sword in Halo is constructed
in a similar manner with with the force field and
some kind of ionized gas and then you electrify it
(36:23):
and and it's warm and cutty. But yeah, I had
a couple of questions about a design like this though,
and one of them would be would you have to
wear eye protection to duel with one of these things? Yeah?
I mean that would be such a bummer if you
had to wear a mask steampunk, it would just all
be steampunk. Actually, lightsaber that might be kind of cool wielders.
(36:45):
First of all, Darth Vader did it all the time,
and he was he was pretty awesome. Maybe that's what
that blast shield that Luke's wearing shield down. I can't
see anything. How am I expected to fight? Maybe the
same is true of the Elder's mask. Well anyway, so
I should back up. People who do plasma cutting need
to wear eye protection to avoid a condition called welder
(37:07):
splash or arc. I uh, the corny it can get
damaged by exposure to UV light, just kind of the
same way your corny it can get damaged if you
stare at the sun and the arc that turns the
rushing gas into hot plasma can give off that UV light.
So staring at a plasma torch arc is a bad idea.
It's kind of like staring at the sun. Uh, and
(37:29):
you you need to wear eye protection. But perhaps in
this set up, the UV producing elements are actually hidden
from view, since the arc itself seems to be inside
the handle that I don't know for sure if you
were to actually try to make something like this, but
that's one possibility. The UV radiation has to go somewhere, right,
It can't just continuously dissipate inside the handle. It would
(37:52):
eventually make its way out. So essentially what we're saying
is that Jedi would have to wear shades. It just
makes them cooler. Well, the other thing is you mentioned
that energy has to go somewhere at I'm not sure
exactly how the UV would work. Maybe it wouldn't actually
be a U V I risk, but you would have
a lot of energy in this thing in your Yeah,
(38:15):
I mean, this is a highly highly energetic object and
I don't know, like, I don't know would you be
able to hold it well. Even if you were able
to direct the flows such that you didn't have to
worry about heat building up in the actual handle. The
blade itself would be incredibly hot. Now, air is not
(38:35):
a good conductor of heat. Um. You know it, it
will get warmer and warmer. I mean that's like if
you're standing near a source of heat, like a fire,
you're gonna feel the heat increase as you get closer
to it. So imagine holding a long blade that's at
twelve thousand degrees fahrenheit. That's gonna get a little toasty
after a while, even considering the fact that air is
(38:57):
a poor conductor of heat. Um. And if you're swinging
around all over the place, well, two things. One, you've
cut this plasma trail going everywhere because we don't have
any way of keeping it truly locked to the blade shape.
And to uh, it's the convection that you're causing by
the air molecules moving around means that air around you
is going to get hotter faster. So really what we're
(39:18):
talking about is that we need to have super advanced
air conditioning systems UM. And also, all jedis where it
is it singular or plural? Jedi? Okay? Cool? So all
Jedi wear wicking undergarments, packs, in the ice packs in
the road. Sure, well, you know, I was just trying
(39:39):
to think of an analogy. I don't know exactly how
hot the heating element inside your oven gets. Surely it's
not twelve degrees and so I mean, since the inside
of an oven tops out usually around five to six
hundred degrees fahrenheit, I'm going to say less than twelve thousand. Yeah. Yeah,
so if that heating element, that little thing can heat
(40:02):
your kitchen up, because if you turn your oven on high,
your kitchen typically will get warm. Um. If that will
heat up your kitchen that fast and it's not even
close to twelve degrees and you've got the door shut,
I don't know. It seems to me like a room
could get pretty sweaty and nasty if it's got a
lightsaber deal going on in it. Yeah, and if you
if you're sweating too hard to to hold onto your lightsaber,
(40:24):
that's just bad news. Also, yeah, that's a good point.
Imagine what would happen if you Joe and you Lauren
each had one of these ceramic core plasma blades and
then you swung them so that they hit together. I
can't imagine that anything that came out of that would
(40:45):
be good that I wouldn't sign up to try that.
No that Yeah, no, we'd have to. We have to
build some sort of lightsaber swinging robot and have no
emotional attachment to it whatsoever. We have to make it
real ugly. Yeah, I I mean, I'm kind of I'm
kind of a lizard like, I'm sort of cold blooded.
I really like warm things, but that sounds too warm. Yeah. So,
(41:08):
so ultimately, I think we have to come down on
the side of lightsabers are are really cool fantasy slash
science fiction idea, we can just stop it at fantasy.
Fantasy is that well the well they expanded Universe tries
to explain how it works, so it kind of falls
into science I think of Star Wars is fantasy more
(41:31):
than science fiction. But again, the Expanded Universe attempts to
explain the more mystical things that were just considered to
be true in the in the movies. Um so yeah,
I don't think this is possible. I don't think we're
ever going to have something that's truly analogous to a
lightsaber in reality. And and like you said, Joe and
(41:52):
really bagel slicing aside, there the uses of a lightsaber
would be really limited. There are other ways that we
could uh either cut things or fight off people of
it probably are going to be distance oriented. We have
actual plasma torches. We don't need lightsabers in our machining
you know workshops. Yeah, so I don't think this is
(42:15):
ever gonna become possible. The next question is that we'll
have to tackle in a future episode. Will blasters ever
be possible? Because blasters don't fire lasers because the projectiles
move slower than the speed of light. They move slower
than bullets do. So one wonders if we could actually
make something that would be some sort of energy based
(42:37):
cohesive unit of whatever that could fly through the air
slower than the speed of light and impact something. Yeah,
they also fire plasma too, don't they. Again, I think
it depends. You would have to look at the expanded universe,
looked into it. One more question, Okay, why why does
the Stormtroopers armor not protect them from blasters at all?
(42:58):
You know what? What this is? The Stormtroopers armor serve.
Considering that it doesn't help against blasters, it doesn't help
against it doesn't help against e walks, and it's clunky
slows you down, and and and it is a problem
like it it's an inhibitor of your vision, like I
don't under the Emperor really hates Stormtroopers, actually just really
(43:23):
hated Djengo Fet a lot and wanted to kill him.
As many times sposible, the entire series is just actually
a story about how much it's the untold but implied
tale of Star Wars. Well, I'm glad that we've unraveled
a mystery in this episode. We've done good work today,
(43:44):
I think so, I think so. I think by deconstructing
a beloved franchise, we have done our duty. Now, guys,
you out there who have been listening to the show,
what do you want us to cover in the future.
Is there a science fiction type idea that you would
like us to however, or just an interesting science story,
technology story, something else that's future oriented. You've always wondered
(44:06):
what blank will be like in the future. Please write
us let us know. We'll be happy to take a
look at that topic. Our address is FW Thinking at
how Stuff Works dot com. Or drop us a line
on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. At Twitter and Google Plus,
we are FW thinking. Just search for FW thinking and
Facebook we'll pop right up. You can let us know
(44:26):
that way, and you'll hear from us again really soon.
For more on this topic in the future of technology,
visit forward Thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota.
(44:50):
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Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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