Process
The Laser — Our Modern Lightsaber
T
he visionary gadgets used in Gene Roddenberry’s creation Star Trek have had many fans suggest a foreshadowing of great technology advances – one such advance being the original cell phone with a flip top, that uncannily resembled the “communicator” used by Captain Kirk and crew in almost every episode of Star Trek, as well as in the subsequent movies. Not to be outdone, the Star Wars franchise (yes Sheldon, I used both of them in a single paragraph), brought to life by the imagination of George Lucas also featured a recognizable technology element that was leveraged as the defensive weapon of the Jedi Knights. The keepers of the universe used lightsabers to do everything from deflecting lasers fired from blasters, to Force impacting hand to hand combat, to lighting pathways, to piercing metal “blaster doors.” The color of the lightsaber had meaning too, especially in the earliest releases, as the characters wielding red lightsabers were widely viewed as followers of the Dark Side, while our heroes and heroines that used blue lightsabers were representative of truth, integrity, hope, and all the good in The Force. In Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon Jinn is dispatched to settle a Trade Dispute and in
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the early parts of the movie he uses his lightsaber to turn thick doors into molten metal – as the thickness of the metal is increased by different layers being added, Qui-Gon must slow down his rate of cutting and double the focus on his lightsaber capabilities. Audiences loved the special effects – and may not even realize that in today’s industrial manufacturing environment, the use of light energy to cut metal is a very widespread reality. This light energy is from lasers – which itself is an acronym that stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. First showing up on the cultural scene in a movie from the 1960s, as a weapon used against secret agent 007 James Bond by one of his adversaries in the movie Goldfinger, laser technology is being used today in automated cutting, engraving, measuring, and welding. And as amazing as it sounds, the color of the laser does indeed have meaning to the power that it yields and whether it can work with various metals. Most notably, improvements in blue laser technology are changing the game in welding capabilities for thin film highly reflective metals. We went to www.explainthatstuff.com/lasers.html (Woodford, Chris. (2006/2019) Lasers. Retrieved from