Name: How Close Are We to Creating a Lightsaber?
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T10:50:47.000Z
Duration: 11 min 4 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

If there’s something most of us can agree on, it’s that lightsabers are awesome.

But this is probably the closest I'll get to holding a real one... or is it?

Now, I don’t actually mean mining kyber crystals or injecting our bloodstreams with

midi-chlorians (because everyone knows midi-cholorians are a cop out) — but instead using real

technology we have today to create something that looks, acts, and feels like the most

So, how close are we to creating a lightsaber?

Now, we realize there are no actual scientific endeavors focused on specifically creating

But if we were going to build our own, the first thing we need to do is look at how the

If you're trapped in a cell, you might be able to use your lightsaber to cut through

the walls to be able to get your way out.

If somebody is giving you trouble in a cantina, you can chop off their arm and let them know

So our lightsaber needs to be a handheld device hot enough to slice through what looks like

Lightsabers are powered by a Diatium power cell.

It's essentially the battery for the lightsaber.

The beam of a lightsaber is contained by the Force powers of the user being channeled through

Definitely don’t have any of those, so we’ll need to find an alternate power source.

Probably the characteristics of a lightsaber that make it the most dramatic and exciting

to watch are one, the glowing beam, but two, the sounds that it makes as you swing it back

Or the crashing sound of two beams coming together.

Those are some of the most iconic aspects of a lightsaber.

Ok, so in total, there are five key functions our lightsaber has to fulfill.

A natural starting place for using real life technology might be with light itself, given

Even George Lucas has previously, and confusingly, referred to the lightsaber as a laser sword.

And although it’s true that lasers can be powerful enough to cut through metal or cauterize

a wound, like current gamma knife technology we use in hospitals, they do present some

other challenges in terms of our five criteria.

So a laser lightsaber essentially is a very high-powered flashlight or a very high-powered

Your standard laser pointers obviously are not going to be able to cut through metal

That would be quite dangerous for all your screens and PowerPoint slides.

But if you’ve ever held a laser pointer, you know it doesn’t look anything like a

lightsaber for two big reasons — one, you can’t really see the beam from the side.

And two, the beams go on infinitely, rather than the roughly 1 meter long lightsaber.

If you want to contain the beam in a finite length, the best or easiest way to do that

with light would be to just have a mirror that can retract or be extended from the hilt

of the lightsaber and then that is able to reflect the light back and forth to create

And it's just not going to have the look of a lightsaber.

It's going to have the look of a flashlight with a mirror on the end, even if that flashlight

Also, if you were to have a lightsaber battle using this method, it would be the metal contraptions

holding your mirrors clunking into each other rather than the actual beams of light, because

the beams of light, spoiler alert, would not actually collide with one another.

One light beam will just pass through another light beam.

Some researchers at Harvard and MIT found that it would be possible to have photons

work together as they move through ultra-cold rubidium atoms and behave much like a molecule

This study was able to show that they could do this for two, three photons, but in principle

if we could do this for millions upon billions of photons we could create a unified beam

of light that would be very much like a lightsaber.

Photonic molecules are very difficult to make.

They can only be generated in very precise experimental conditions.

Turning light into molecules really just opens up a whole new can of space slugs, since it

would need to happen in a supercooled vacuum and a beam wouldn’t actually cut through

It again kind of takes away from the excitement and the awesomeness of a lightsaber.

I think the best method for generating a lightsaber in the real world would be to create a highly

A plasma is one of the four states of nature.

Plasma is, perhaps, like more gas than gas.

What it is, is when you heat up gas so much that you're actually breaking apart the atoms

so that the electrons and the center of the atoms are no longer connected together, and

they kind of move around next to one another.

If you want to see a plasma, go outside and don't look directly at the sun, but know that

if you were to look at the sun, that is a big ball of plasma.

They can cut through metal very impressively.

And these plasma scalpels actually make a more precise cut than an ordinary scalpel.

Now, this is definitely starting to sound more like a lightsaber — plasma checks the

box for being hot enough, but I sense another catch.

It's incredibly difficult to hold a plasma in, and so if you don't have strong magnetic

This is exactly the problem that tokamaks face, the donut shaped devices that produce

The trouble has to do with the fact that plasma is made up of charged particles.

Charged particles moving around make their own magnetic field.

And so, you have the magnetic field of the containment, but then you have the magnetic

field the plasma makes, and the two of them interact, and it's very hard to keep a stable

field with that very, very complicated process.

Right now if we tried to create a plasma lightsaber, it would look nothing like what we'd imagine,

and it would in fact be so large that we would be unable to hold it.

The smallest containers that can contain plasma are still large enough that a human can walk

Ok, so until we can downsize that to a handheld hilt to clip on our belt, do we have other

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How Close Are We to Creating a Lightsaber?

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