The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Lasers

It's quite possible that I should have put this post under "E" for "energy weapons," but, see, I really love the idea of the exo-suit, so I couldn't leave that out, and it's lasers that most people associate with energy weapons, so I figured I may as well stick with it. This one is going to be a bit more convoluted than the others, though, so try to keep up. This way, please...

Let's first step back to 1898. Martians were invading the Earth. Well, at least, they were in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. The Martian's tripods were equipped with heat rays that they used to destroy, well, everything. This is the most significant early example of the raygun. It may not have been the first (I don't actually know, but I couldn't find anything earlier), but anything that was earlier has been mostly forgotten.

Rayguns in fiction became increasingly popular through the early 20th century. In fact, they sort of became standard fare in pulp science fiction including Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and others. They also became pretty standard in comic books.

1930s edition Buck Rogers raygun

Then, Einstein happened...

Well, let's re-examine that. In 1917, Einstein put forth the Quantum Theory of Radiation which established the theoretic foundation for irradiating light waves. It's this theory that would later lead to lasers. But, in the meantime, rayguns flourished in fiction.

And, now, we're to the part where, maybe, this entry should have been placed under the letter R. Prior to World War II, there was research going on to develop rayguns (in the United States, at any rate, and, possibly, in Germany (actually, probably, everywhere, but I don't have that information)). That research coupled with some of Tesla's ideas (also from 1917) lead to the development of radar.

But we still didn't have any rayguns.

Finally, in the '50s, the first significant breakthroughs in laser technology began to happen, and, in 1959, Gordon Gould published the term L.A.S.E.R. (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). The first operating laser followed in 1960. Science fiction went crazy, dropping rayguns for laser guns. But only for a moment...

One interesting factoid about that:

The original Star Trek had two pilot episodes. I bet some of you even knew that. The first pilot episode, "The Cage," was produced in 1964 (and remained unreleased until 1988) and included lasers. The first pilot didn't convince the studio that the concept would work, but they were still intrigued by the idea, so they made the odd request for a second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before." The interesting bit? It had already become apparent by the time of the 1966 production of the new pilot that lasers were not going to be practical as guns or weapons, so they changed the name of the devices in Star Trek to "phasers."

But the military really wanted laser weapons, and science fiction continued to be full of laser type weapons even if they didn't call them lasers. Star Wars got blasters, Doctor Who had stasers and all sorts of other things, and Starblazers got a wave motion gun just to name a few. And the military... well, they made this big laser and mounted it on the top of an airplane and sent it up to shoot down drones or something. But it was a cloudy day, and the clouds totally dissipated the lasers, and the project was mostly dropped (and, no, I can't tell you where I got that information (yes, if I did, I would have to kill you)).

This, of course, did not stop Reagan from creating the Star Wars program in the '80s. That almost did work; they just couldn't get enough range out of the lasers for them to actually be effective. But it did lead to one of my favorite movies of all time

Real Genius!

So... here we are in 2012, and we still don't have laser guns or flying cars. Or laser guns on flying cars. I do expect the flying cars soon, but it looks like the closest we're going to have to laser guns for a while is laser sighting. Sure, you can put someone's eye out with it if they agree not to look away, and we can cut things with really big lasers, but they're not really portable at that level and need huge amounts of energy.

But let's go back to rayguns... actually, let's go back to that very first one: H.G. Wells' heat ray. The military rolled out the first example of the non-lethal Active Denial System in 2010.

What we have here is, basically, the realized form of Wells' heat ray. It works by directing microwave energy at the victim causing the skin to attain a burning sensation. Most test subjects reach their pain threshold within 3 seconds, and no one has gone beyond 5 seconds. At the moment, it's being used as a non-lethal weapon, but there's nothing to keep it from being used in more lethal ways if the government wanted the development to go in those directions. The one mounted on the humvee above is for crowd control, but they are working on portable devices.

There you have your fiction to reality, just not with lasers. But lasers still power the imagination, and militaries around the world are still working on laser-based weapons. There have been claims of ground-based lasers that are capable of taking down aircraft, but they require enormous power sources. Interestingly enough, other uses of lasers have stayed pretty confined to science, not science fiction; however, if we ever do make it out into space, I would expect the weaponized use of lasers to reach science fiction proportions almost immediately since there are no atmospheric conditions to deal with.

Let's go for a walk... Part 5: The Quantum Mechanics of Children

My two younger kids were out of school last week. For this post, the importance of that is that they "got" to go on the noonish dog walk with me. "Got" being a relative term. But let me digress for a moment.

Quantum mechanics is a... difficult... field of study. One of the fundamental principles of quantum theory is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It is so difficult to understand that many quantum physicists don't fully understand it. In fact, when Heisenberg originated his principle, it was largely intuitive, because they didn't really have the instrumentaion to actually demonstrate what Heisenberg was really saying. At any rate, it was a demonstration of vast intelligence and understanding.

A simple way of stating the uncertainty principle is this:
Oh, wait, there is no simple way. Okay, well, without getting into the actual physics of it, the best way to say it is that the act of observing something changes its behavior. Yeah, I could explain how this pertains to subatomic particles, but it works just as well as I've said it for my purposes here.

The interesting thing is that this doesn't just apply to physics. Think back to the last time you were alone, there was a song playing that you really like, you were belting it out at the top of your lungs, only... Only you weren't alone. You didn't realize, though, until halfway through the song that you were being observed. Your face turned red. Your voice constricted. The sound choked off. The observer probably smiled and told you to carry on, but you couldn't. Not now. You were being watched.

At least, that's the typical response. The alternate response is to sing even louder in an effort not to have the typical response.

Try watching kids play. As long as they don't know you're watching, everything is good. My favorite, though, is when a young child, around 5, falls and gets a scrape. If they think no one is watching, they pretty much shake it off and go about their business. If they know an adult saw, or, sometimes, even another kid, it's time for hysterics and water works.

But how does all of this pertain to my kids being out of school and walking the dog? Well, I'll tell you. And you may get a bit more of the physics with this, too.

Walking with my kids and the dog is rather like being an atom. I suppose that makes me a proton while the kids and the dog are electrons. They really don't orbit like planets do they way they teach you in high school. No, electrons orbit in electron clouds layered around the nucleus of the atom. And that's what it feels like to be walking with my kids. I mean, here I am, a proton, trying to mind my own feet and walk down the path, and I have these electrons bouncing all around me. And it doesn't matter how much I watch them, analyze their movements, as soon as I think I know where one of them is going, BOOM!, their position suddenly changes! As soon as I think I know where one of them is, BAM!, their direction changes!

I don't suggest trying to walk that way, especially when one of the three electrons is physically tethered to your arm. I think I must have looked like a drunk proton, because I certainly couldn't follow a straight line.

So, yeah, these are the thoughts I have when walking with my kids... I had a whole walk dwelling on the uncertainty principle just because I could never figure out which way they were going.

But, wait! There's more!

It also occured to me that writing should be sort of like this. At least, it should look like this from the point of view of the observer. Um, I mean the reader.

Here's the thing, when writing is like the planets, i.e. predictable, it's boring. The reader knows where everything is going, and, after a while, doesn't even need to pay attention anymore. It becomes like watching a clock. Tick tick tick. No one likes sitting and watching a clock. Because the act of observing a clock makes it stop altogether. Right?

However, when we write on a more quantum level, the reader can never quite figure everything out. They can't quite tell what direction one thing is going in or they can't quite figure out what's happening in this other place. It keeps the reader interested and keeps them observing longer.

Now, this doesn't mean be completely crazy. After all, electrons tend to stay with their nuclei. Well, unless some outside force acts upon them. At any rate, the reader wants to be able to get some idea of what is going on; that's why they're watching (reading) in the first place, so it can't be too unpredicatble. I mean, you don't want to be studying a carbon atom and find out that it's spontaneously become an oxygen atom. That would just be weird. Although, if you could duplicate it, you'd probably get a Nobel Prize for it.

So, I guess, I don't mind too much that my kids bounce around so much and the dog takes such sudden tangents. It does help me to work some quantum mechanics into what might be purely classical mechanics writing. And we wouldn't want that.
I urge you to do the same... Let's get quantum!