Real Life Lightsabers Topic

[CraigD]

Moved to the watercooler.

6000000 C, element-transmuting burning inflated rubber, projected force-fields, and cosmic string-plucking nanobots are fun stuff to be sure, but not what one would call engineering or applied science.

Have fun in the watercooler!

[Moontanman]

Originally Posted by CraigD

Moved to the watercooler.

6000000 C, element-transmuting burning inflated rubber, projected force-fields, and cosmic string-plucking nanobots are fun stuff to be sure, but not what one would call engineering or applied science.

Have fun in the watercooler!

Hey, don't denigrate the water cooler, some of my favorite threads are under cool water!

[Moontanman]

Originally Posted by Gardamorg

Except if they do prove string theoryPhysicists Develop Test for 'String Theory', than maybe the nanobots could maybe somehow harness STRINGS, and then just pluck the strings until we get anti-particles!

My only question is what would the nano bots be made of?

[Donk]

Originally Posted by CraigD

Moved to the watercooler.

6000000 C, element-transmuting burning inflated rubber, projected force-fields, and cosmic string-plucking nanobots are fun stuff to be sure, but not what one would call engineering or applied science.

You're quite right. Until scientists have figured out the details and made a working prototype, there's nothing for engineers and technologists to do.

But all science starts with somebody thinking "how did that happen?" Newton with his fabled apple, Curie with the fogged photographic plate, Fleming and his mouldy petri dish... and please don't forget all those unsung heroes of science, the ones who guessed wrong! How many ideas have died early because the people who thought them up didn't want to sound ridiculous?

Observation. Deduction. Intuition. Gardamorg's cry for help aroused my curiosity. I came up with a possible "how did that happen?" solution. Not testable unfortunately, but I was quite pleased with the way the solution fitted the observations.

The only part I can't get my head around is the sound. Why would hapless quarks being tortured to death make a sort of whummmm sound? How does turning the force field on and off go schlupp! ? If some gifted sound-generation expert can explain these points, I'll happily give him or her co-authorship rights. The Donk-Whoever Light Sabre Hypothesis - any takers?

[CraigD]

If its wikipedia article is an indication of some sort of fan consensus, that consensus is that the business end of a lightsaber is plasma, held in shape by a field of some kind, perhaps magnetic. That makes it something like a very miniaturized (by a factor of about 100,000,000) solar coronal loop. The plasma, which is charged, follows the flux tube, flowing out from its source – in the case of a sun, its convection zone, in the case of the lightsaber, the business end of its handle. Presumably, over thousands of Star Wars-universe years, the shape of the plasma tube was squeezed and stretched so that it no longer looked like a big, sloppy loop, but a straight blade.

Another commonplace example of a plasma tube – though not a looping one – is lightning.

This explanation does a good job of explaining a couple of the features seen in the Star Wars movies:

• When the lightsaber is switched on (“ignited” is what most writers call it), it appears to start short, then expand to its full length, because the loop must be started short, then extended.
• When it’s switched off, the blade takes a little time to “retract” into the handle, because the loop must be smoothly shortened to avoid releasing its plasma in an inelegant, blaster-like burst.
• Though it would be damn convenient to flip a control and extend the “blade” to a few – or a few hundred – meters, this isn’t possible in the Star Wars universe, because the field emitters can’t maintain a stable plasma tube of that length
• In the real word, plasma tubes in an atmosphere – a commonplace example is lightning – ionize the air and also rarify it, producing both a crackling sound and thunderclaps. With a lighsaber’s sophisticated field shape, this “raw” sound becomes it’s “whoom” and crackle.
• Real world plasma tubes get their color from not-quite ionized gas on their fringes. To have a particular color, a lightsaber would need to spray a bit of gas of a particular composition near the blade – otherwise, it’s color would vary with the gasses in the local atmosphere, and mostly be the glaring white of lightning. A real-world example of plasma being made to have nice colors by controlling the gasses around it is a plasma globe.
• Lightsabers blades can push against one another because their plasma tube-forming fields interact, like two magnets held near one another. Why this doesn’t result in them twisting hard when in contact with one another will take greater powers of explanation than my own.

All this explaining aside, it’s important, IMHO, to remember that lightsabers were shown in the Star Wars movies not as an attempt at serious science fiction, but because they looked cool, and allowed Jedi to act more-or-less like samurai, but without old-fashion-looking swords and scabbards. Even if one could make a real device that performed exactly like the movie lightsabers, it wouldn’t necessarily be a very good weapon – to do the nifty defensive tricks like deflecting blaster bolts, you’ve got to have superhuman Jedi speed and coordination. Unlike the blaster bolts shown in the movies, modern real world projectiles - bullets – are much too fast for a human being to see and react to, regardless of what kind of sword-like weapon one has to swat them. As the saying goes, for real humans, it’s a very bad idea to bring a knife - or a sword, or a lightsaber - to a gunfight.

A final peeve I have with lightsabers as their shown in Star Wars, is that, for one glaring reason, they’re really crappy swords: they lack any sort of quillions or other sort of hilt guard. If you’ve every tried fencing in anything but a very careful and friendly way with a lightsaber-sized rattan stick without any sort of guard, this lack will practically make your fingers, thumbs and wrists hurt just thinking about it. A real light saber would need some sort of guard shaped into its blade-generating field, or it would be worthless even fighting another lightsaber.

Of course, just because some fan consensus is that lightsabers involve field-contained plasma, doesn’t make this explanation any more plausible than others. I rather like the idea that they actually are some sort of boson beam, tweaked into exotic behavior though mind-bogglingly advanced technology, even though it’s more difficult to build an explanation around this idea.

[Gardamorg]

Originally Posted by CraigD

If its wikipedia article is an indication of some sort of fan consensus, that consensus is that the business end of a lightsaber is plasma, held in shape by a field of some kind, perhaps magnetic. That makes it something like a very miniaturized (by a factor of about 100,000,000) solar coronal loop. The plasma, which is charged, follows the flux tube, flowing out from its source – in the case of a sun, its convection zone, in the case of the lightsaber, the business end of its handle. Presumably, over thousands of Star Wars-universe years, the shape of the plasma tube was squeezed and stretched so that it no longer looked like a big, sloppy loop, but a straight blade.

Another commonplace example of a plasma tube – though not a looping one – is lightning.

This explanation does a good job of explaining a couple of the features seen in the Star Wars movies:

• When the lightsaber is switched on (“ignited” is what most writers call it), it appears to start short, then expand to its full length, because the loop must be started short, then extended.
• When it’s switched off, the blade takes a little time to “retract” into the handle, because the loop must be smoothly shortened to avoid releasing its plasma in an inelegant, blaster-like burst.
• Though it would be damn convenient to flip a control and extend the “blade” to a few – or a few hundred – meters, this isn’t possible in the Star Wars universe, because the field emitters can’t maintain a stable plasma tube of that length
• In the real word, plasma tubes in an atmosphere – a commonplace example is lightning – ionize the air and also rarify it, producing both a crackling sound and thunderclaps. With a lighsaber’s sophisticated field shape, this “raw” sound becomes it’s “whoom” and crackle.
• Real world plasma tubes get their color from not-quite ionized gas on their fringes. To have a particular color, a lightsaber would need to spray a bit of gas of a particular composition near the blade – otherwise, it’s color would vary with the gasses in the local atmosphere, and mostly be the glaring white of lightning. A real-world example of plasma being made to have nice colors by controlling the gasses around it is a plasma globe.
• Lightsabers blades can push against one another because their plasma tube-forming fields interact, like two magnets held near one another. Why this doesn’t result in them twisting hard when in contact with one another will take greater powers of explanation than my own.

All this explaining aside, it’s important, IMHO, to remember that lightsabers were shown in the Star Wars movies not as an attempt at serious science fiction, but because they looked cool, and allowed Jedi to act more-or-less like samurai, but without old-fashion-looking swords and scabbards. Even if one could make a real device that performed exactly like the movie lightsabers, it wouldn’t necessarily be a very good weapon – to do the nifty defensive tricks like deflecting blaster bolts, you’ve got to have superhuman Jedi speed and coordination. Unlike the blaster bolts shown in the movies, modern real world projectiles - bullets – are much too fast for a human being to see and react to, regardless of what kind of sword-like weapon one has to swat them. As the saying goes, for real humans, it’s a very bad idea to bring a knife - or a sword, or a lightsaber - to a gunfight.

A final peeve I have with lightsabers as their shown in Star Wars, is that, for one glaring reason, they’re really crappy swords: they lack any sort of quillions or other sort of hilt guard. If you’ve every tried fencing in anything but a very careful and friendly way with a lightsaber-sized rattan stick without any sort of guard, this lack will practically make your fingers, thumbs and wrists hurt just thinking about it. A real light saber would need some sort of guard shaped into its blade-generating field, or it would be worthless even fighting another lightsaber.

Of course, just because some fan consensus is that lightsabers involve field-contained plasma, doesn’t make this explanation any more plausible than others. I rather like the idea that they actually are some sort of boson beam, tweaked into exotic behavior though mind-bogglingly advanced technology, even though it’s more difficult to build an explanation around this idea.

If the plasma has a powerful magnetic field around it, how can it cut through anything?

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Gardamorg

If the plasma has a powerful magnetic field around it, how can it cut through anything?

You’d really need to ask a die-hard SWars fan for a committed defense of the “lightsaber is field-contained plasma” explanation, but I’ll give it my best shot.

Presumably the very high-temperature plasma in a lightsaber blade burns/melts anything it comes in contact with. Present day plasma cutters can not cut as deeply as, say, shown early in Episode 1, but they can cut nearly anything. Plasma cutters don’t use any sort of field to contain their plasma, they’re just held close to what they should cut, and shoot the plasma there with a gas jet.

Why light sabers don’t knock any vaguely magnetic thing they approach out of the way of their hot, glowing, cutting part is a question for a fan expert. Scientifically, it doesn’t make sense.

Of course, lightsaber blades are never shown in the movies cutting other lightsaber blades, presumably due to the interaction of their plasma-containing fields. Presumably this means that other magnetic “shielding” can block a lightsaber. Perhaps the “ray-shielded” trash masher in Episode 4 is not only blaster-proof, but lightsaber-proof, too.

Of course, lightsaber blades can defect blaster bolts, presumably because they’re charged plasma similar to the kind contained in a lightsaber blade.

Why the designers of that worthless white stormtrooper armor didn’t think to build in "ray-shielding", making the stuffblaster and light-saber proof, I’ll leave to a true fan expert.

Another mystery is why lightsabers never seem to start fires. One would think that the slightest touch of them to flammable cloths, furnature, fuel, etc. would set it all ablaze, but except of an occasional ember or burn mark when someone gets a limb lopped off, you never see much ignition. Perhaps they have built-in fire extinguisher systems?

Ultimately, I think, it’s best not to take lightsabers too seriously. They are, after all, make-believe. Lucas wasn’t really trying for any scientific realism in Episode 4, just a cool-looking special effect that showed Jedi to be dashing, swash-buckling, dangerous beings with exotic, “elegant”, deadly weapons that lesser beings lacked.

[buddyzen]

but you never know they might come out with the first 500 pound hand held lightsaber in like 50 years...