Category: weapons
Wow, first they create a real hoverboard, and now they’re on the road to creating a real lightsaber? Joy! wink
Killjoy physicists have long pointed out the sheer unlikelihood of building a working light saber. But now, they’ve taken a small step toward realizing the dream of Star Wars fans worldwide, by figuring out how to get photons to stick together like molecules in a super-chilled gas.
This latest work builds on prior experiments from 2013, when Harvard physicists first announced a new state of matter.
Photons don’t have mass and zip along at the speed of light, with no time to hang around in clumps. They also aren’t charged particles and thus don’t interact with each other much at all. They love to hang out with charged electrons, though. And that’s what’s going on here: the Harvard experiment created a special kind of medium in which photons act like charged particles with mass, enabling them to form molecules.