Real life lightsabers


I bet everyone has at least heard of „Star Wars”, and the scientific concepts it brings, lite starships traveling in hyperspace, lightsabers, or even more starships (death star). Today I’m writing about those shining, extremely dangerous toys used by Jedi - Lightsabers.
Not so long ago, I found myself thinking - „Is it really just science fiction? Can’t we have it for real?” It intrigued me, so I started digging. I read quite a few articles, and it turned out the answer was a little disappointing. You can’t build a lightsaber just. like in Star Wars, because of few reasons. First of all, you can’t possibly stop the laser from going further than some point in space. The Einstein Laws exclude this. Also, if if was just made of light, how could you possibly have those epic lightsaber duels? The streaks would just pass through one another and all the effect - gone!
So as you can see, the concept is impossible to craft, and is just a matter of science fantasy, but…

There always must be some „but”, right? I only said you can’t build a lightsaber exactly like the ones in Star Wars. But what If you just created something that has its all most important qualities - portability, ability to cut through basically anything, and while allowing them to clash, so that you could have all those epic duels? That’s exactly what a theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku intends to do. As a part of this „Physics of the impossible” cycle, he studied the subject, how could you possibly build a real-life lightsaber using today’s modern technology. During the study, he came up with a great concept of doing so - As I mentioned earlier, you can’t stop the light from moving, so what he substituted it with? Plasma! A super-hot gas, that melts everything on its way. Okay, so that’s how we’ve got the melting ability. What next? Duels. Okay, so in order to have the lightsabers clashing, you need them to have something that would both hold up the plasma, and be both het-proof and solid, to make up a construction of the blade. It turns out ceramic tubes with a coil would do this perfectly! Third, and last thing is the power source. In Star Wars George Lucas took the easy way out by powering the lightsabers with „mystical power crystals”, but in reality you can’t use them, so what to take? A nanotube battery! Its capacity is 200.000 times bigger than capacity of a normal battery of the same size. You could with the equivalent of energy supply for a small city within a palm-sized battery. Sounds amazing, right? Unfortunately, that technology is still in its early days, so we need to wait for it to be fully studied, and then, voilà! We will have modern knights running around with shining lightsabers. Anyway, according to Dr.Kaku, it’s just the impossibility of Ist kind, meaning that probably needed technological advancements will occur within next 50 years. With that in mind, it’s hard to look at the lightsabers the same way again, isn’t it?

Darth Vader with a lightsaber lit
Michio Kaku's real life's lightsaber design

That's it for this week, thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it. What are your thoughts on the topic? I can't wait to see, so feel free to comment ;) 


The video on which I based my article:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd46_b4tsFQ
Michio Kaku <3

Photos sources:
http://starwarswallpaperhd.com/web/wallpapers/obi-wan-darth-vader-lightsaber-duel-artwork/1920x1080.jpg
http://www.wallpapers13.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Star-Wars-Darth-Vader-Sith-lava-lightsabers-Wallpaper-HD-915x515.jpg
https://matthewlovesstarwars.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/coil.png

Komentarze

  1. englishdiary5 grudnia 2017 12:08

    As I remember, lightsabres had one more feature - the blade was retractable so it was short, safe and innocent-looking when it wasn't in use. Has Dr. Kaku thought about that too?

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    1. Kacper Cybiński6 grudnia 2017 13:06

      Yes, I forgot to add that - the ceramic tube he took is thought to be telescopic, so that it can be hidden inside the handle while not used.

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