Could we make a real lightsaber?

So let's move on. I could have gone a yev nub Oh, I love ye n I'm I'm actually a much bigger fan of you. We got yev nub. Yeah, but you know that there is there's actually a translation of those lyrics available online. I found the sheet music one time. Of course there is. You might guess from the way we're prattling on about Star Wars music that

today is a Star Wars related topic. Yeah. So, of course, the trailer for Star Wars episode seven, The Force Awakens, came out, and um, I don't know about you, guys, I thought it was a very exciting teaser based upon the fact that it gives us no information at all about the story, but it felt Star Wars e to me visually it was very exciting. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I I am cautious about my expectations for this movie, but I have to admit the trailer gave me a thrill.

Especially it was the moment of seeing the storm Troopers in the sort of like dark lighting and loading from some kind of transport. I was like, Wow, this is the Empire again, and I felt excited. X Wings skimming over the water was really exciting. Yeah, it was. It was the soundtrack for me, it's soundtrack that always gets me. And but of course we should get to the most contentious part of the trailer, which is of course the broadsword light saber. Yes, yes, the lightsaber that has a

cross guard on it. Uh, well, not just a cross guard. It is a cross guard made of the lightsaber energy material, whatever you call that. Yeah. So obviously one of those things that was going to be divisive. I mean, anytime you drift away from a design that is considered iconic, people are going to have a lot to say about it. Personally, I'm like, bring it on. I I love to see the different variations of lightsabers. I don't care if you can make it work in the context of the story.

I don't care about that initial Well, that's weird. I can get over that. Yeah, I don't really have a feeling about it one way or another yet. I've just noticed that a lot of times nerds don't like change. Yeah. I've never fought with a sword with a cross guard, so I'm not sure what function they actually play. Yeah,

it's to protect the hand. Um. I fought with a sword with a cross guard, opposite of protecting the hand, so that if the other lightsaber blade were to go down, your blade contexts your hand from getting Yeah, you noticed that a lot of Jedi are missing an arm. That's not a big that's not a big surprise. Um. Yeah, I mean it's the difference between the katana tiny little

cross guard and the broadsword broad cross guard. Let's try to bring this a little bit into the real world and whether it's a lightsaber with a cross guard or without one. Could we ever make something like a lightsaber in the real world and to really understand this. I thought first it would be kind of fun, also kind of silly to talk about how lightsabers work within the Star Wars universe, just to understand what they are in

that fictional world. What's the techno mythology? Right? And uh, well, first we have to say that if you're going by Cannon and canonical Star Wars is merely the stuff that appears in the movies. That's that's the way, and then some Clone Wars stuff too. But but Lucas opposite of heretical Lucas Lucas Head always maintained that the movies were that was Star Wars and that all the expanded universe stuff was interesting, but it didn't didn't impact the mythology

laid out in the film exactly. It wasn't it wasn't meant to be taken as this is actually what happened either before after or at the same time as the stuff that was going on in the movies. The movies are it, and then everything else is just kind of you know, superfluous. Yeah yeah, so he um, you know, he never really got into how lightsabers are constructed. Now, it's definitely part of your training as a Jedi. We

do here that you have constructed your own lightsaber. Your training as a Jedi is complete, So that's considered the I guess the graduation, like this is your thesis is your lightsaber, So we know that much. So what do you what do you use for your lightsaber training while you're in training? Usually I guess he would use a loaner lightsaber. I mean they've got a lightsaber, pool wouldn't

lightsaber that they do in Japanese. You know, Luke used his father's I mean that was Anakin's lightsaber that he used until until he lost it investment um, along with the hand that was holding it. But uh so, the rules for Star Wars in general, this is laid out in the somewhat apocryphal Expanded Universe, are that the lightsabers

have to be made by a Jedi. In order to focus the blade, you have to have the force or yeah, yeah, you at least have to be very strong in the force, because not all people strong in the Force are Jedi. That's true. You have to at least be able to use the force to construct the lightsaber, even if you are incredibly adept with technology. The story is that unless you have the force, you cannot create a lightsaber without

the danger of it exploding in your hand. Yeah yeah, that's because it's driven by a couple of crystals and you have to align them so precisely otherwise yes, exploding times right, So only someone, only someone trained in the worse can get those to be in perfect alignment. Uh so because they have incredible press prosthetics in this past future science region, but they don't have quantum mechanics. That's okay.

You know, in the original Star Wars, before the prequels came out, it was all mysticism, and mysticism doesn't need to follow the rules of science. It's only when we get into the prequels with medicicloreans that we okay, I'm not gonna go we no bleep that out. Oh yeah, that that is a bliepable word. So at any rate, Uh, they are The blades themselves are of pure plasma that's contained within a force field. So the force field is

meant to do two things. It's meant to keep the plasma in the right shape, which is the shape of a blade. Uh. And it's also meant to contain that intense heat to the blade itself so that the person wielding the blade doesn't get burned in the process. Uh. Two very important things now plasma, for those of you who are not familiar, that's an anized gas. It is the most plentiful form of matter in the universe. It's

what stars are made of. Not so much here on Earth. Yeah, I mean we've got some, but it's not you know, we're used to solid or liquid or gas. But plasma is in fact the most the most plentiful version, and it is an ionized gas. Right. So that means that the atomic nuclei, the protons and neutrons at the middle of the atom, have become separated from their electrons or they've gained more because technically you could have a plasma where you have more electrons. But either way they are

they are conductive, electrically conductive. So that's and that's the cool thing about plasma is that because they're electrically conductive, we can do some neat stuff with it. Uh. Some of the things we do with plasma tend to be pretty intense, like creating plasma cutters that can cut through sheet metal with like very little effort, which is awesome.

And we've also talked on this show about the potential for plasma waste converters that would use the intense heat of plasma to break down the molecular bonds in trash so that it either turns into a gas form that you can then turn into sin gas, which can use as fuel, or it turns into slag liquid slag that you can drain off and then it kind of drives into what looks like volcanic rock. Also, on a much smaller level, the fluorescent lights that exist are are all

filled with basically plasma. Once you turn them on, it ionizes gas inside of the inside of the tube, and that is how the light has created a few steps down the road, right exactly, you've got some other stuff that fluoresces once it's impacted by that light. You are exactly right. So these are all things that we use plasma for. But getting back to Star Wars, you've got these crystals that Lauren was talking about. You have the

primary crystal. This is the thing that forms the blade um. Also, depending upon the version that you're reading or playing or whatever, it's what determines the color of the blade. And then you've got the focusing crystal that creates the proper blade shape within that force field um. Within the lore of the Jedi, the Jedi tend to harvest their crystals from natural formations. You have to go on some kind of

like vision quest to find their crystal or something. Yeah, the specific planet they have to go there is a planet that has like giant caverns filled with crystals, and the two most common types are blue and green, although there are other versions that are found throughout the Star Wars universe as well. Of course, you've got mace windows purple lightsaber, which as far as I know is the only,

uh time that you ever see one like that. The original story that George Lucas had, they were just gonna be silver, but then he found that different colors showed up better against the backgrounds, and so it was a purely practical decision to make them different colors. Now and they look they look great. I'm very glad they were

not just plain silver me too, although it doesn't versus orange. Yeah, I think it's pretty funny that that people had to invent reasons for the different color other than the fact that it was a practical film effect. Yeah. Yeah. Another the fact that, like for example, Samuel L. Jackson really wanted a purple light right right, and the Sith they use red ones because those crystals are uh, synthetic. They grow those crystals, they manufacture them, and it's meant to

make the blade more aggressive. I don't know what that specifically means, but anyway, it's not sure that if you're synthetically creating, a crystal can be more pure and therefore confunction better. That's kind of that's sort of weird, like anti technology that that's fine. No, no no, no, no, coming back from it, wouldn't it be so much worse to get cut in half by a red lightsaber than a blue lightsaber? I I dread the day when I'm cut

in half with a red lightsaber. It's did you guys get to see the video where I talked about lightsabers, I got to wield a blue one. It was awesome. I was so pleased. All right, So, anyway, there's some things that lightsabers can't cut through within the lore of Star Wars. Again, this is in the expanded universe, so essentially, it's whatever is important to the plot. Is kind of like Dr Who's sonic screwdriver. Oh no, the sonic screwdriver

can't do that, nothing but that. Yeah, yeah, if only, if only it didn't have a whatever kind of lock it is it's just like how the replicator can't recreate just a few things that latinum. Yeah, so same sort of deal. The idea that this plasma thing, there's certain things that just resist it. But anyway, that's how they work in in the Star Wars universe, however, are at least according to the Expanding universe, if you were to just watch the movies, you wouldn't get any of this stuff.

It doesn't look like a plasma blade at all. It doesn't look like it's plasma. It looks like it's some sort of laser sword that just ends like three ft from the end of the hilt. Yeah. And furthermore, I mean their description of the of the techno science that that happens in order to make lightsabers function. What they're describing is is way more like a like a laser

than like a plasma creator. Right right, If you wanted to create plasma, then you would need to run a high voltage electrical current and then pass some sort of gas through that in order to ionize it, right right, You use an arc and ectric arc and and the sound that that lightsabers make is indeed an arc wave noise um. But but it looks more like looks like a laser. So so what about lasers? I mean they can cut stuff in real life, we have laser cutters. Yeah,

so why don't we have lightsabers? So the biggest problem is um figuring out how to make those lightsabers coalesced into a shape and stay that way. But to understand that, we've got to talk about the nature of light. Right, What what is it about light that makes it so difficult for us to force it into and I don't mean force in the JETI sense into a specific shape. Well, I mean one of the things about light is that in a vacuum at least, light always travels at a

constant speed, which is the speed of light. Right, And so it's not like a piece of matter that you can put down on table and put into the shape you want it. I mean, it's traveling at the speed of light. Now, that speed varies in different media, like in a certain gas atmosphere mixture or through glass or something like that. But even then, it's got a constant rate of travel and it doesn't want to slow down except under some very bizarre physical conditions that we can create,

right yeah. Yeah, And basically like like we don't have a force field material that is air, right, that that can hold light within it. Yeah. Yeah, that's another big issue. And also light it's made up of photons, right, that's the that's the force carrying particle of light, which is, to all intents and purposes, massless. I mean you can talk about how it has a relativistic mass, has arrest

zero mass state. So it's it's this particle that doesn't have mass the way we would think of physical particles having it. One result of that is that you cannot clash to two beams of light, two lasers, for example, together and and have them interact, right, Well, you could, You can't have a lightsaber duel you would. They would just pass right through each other when you slam them together. Right, Photons don't interact with one another under regular conditions. They

will pass directly through them. If we were to have these laser beams or lights or whatever, you wouldn't see this interruption. I mean you it might look weird where the two beams crossed, but they would continue on their path as if nothing had happened. There's not like some sort of weird divergence because of them. Speaking of continuing on their path. That's another problem with trying to make a real lightsaber with a laser. A laser, you can't make a laser that's just okay, go three feet out

and then stop right there. Light continues to travel until it reflects off of something. Yeah, it could be absorbed by something, reflect off something, but but but your way. Basically, every time that Luke turns his lightsaber on, it's just going to like go through the whole of the of the Millennium falcon, right, and then yeah, the ship implodes out we all die. It was even written on the handle. I shouldn't have done that. Um yeah, it's it's a problem.

So these are all really difficult issues. That are These are non trivial problems, right if you wanted to make your own lightsaber and you want to make it light. This is why Jonathan does not have one. Yeah, one of the many reasons I probably wouldn't be allowed to have one if we could make one, But I certainly can't have one because of the laws of business. Um. But I wanted to talk about an experiment that happened

in two thousand thirteen that's really cool. It actually has photons behaving in a way that's similar to what you would see in a lightsaber. In fact, that was the analogy that almost every press release used to talk about this experiment. They talked about two things. That the light would behave like atoms in a molecule. They would clump.

The photons would clump together in this experiment already, and that they could push against each other so that there could be a physical interaction between photons which normally would never happen. That's similar to how you can think of it in one of two ways, how a lightsaber holds together or how to lightsabers can have this impact. And right, So here's the experiment. It took place, and this is the best name for a center I have ever read,

at the Harvard M. I. T. Center for Ultra Cold Atoms. Uh, that's a very specific center, the KUA. Yeah, so they excuse me, Yeah, I didn't mean to leave hardh Uh. That that sounds like that could be an alien race from Star Wars, the Hammat Kua. At any rate, the researchers super cooled some gas it out of rubidium atoms, and they used the laser to do it. Which first, when I read this, I had heard about laser cooling before, but I really wanted to know how it worked because

it seems so counterintuitive. Exactly, Usually, photons excite atoms that they hit and uh and make them move faster and if anything, heat them up, if if nothing, have no effect, right exactly, Yeah, you would think of a laser generally being like something that if it's powerful enough and you pointed at something that's flammable, that something's gonna catch fire. You don't think of it as cooling it down. So what actually is going on here? Well, now we get

into another weird thing about photons. So photons don't really have mass, but they do have momentum, and momentum means that they have some energy that they can impart to other particles. So imagine that you've gone adam moving in a straight line and in opposite direction, you mount a laser pointed at that atom and you fire the laser. The momentum of those photons, we'll start to slow that atom down. Now, Ultimately, like you were saying, Lauren, heat

is really a tomic movement or a molecular movement. It's it's the movement of particles. So if you slow a particle down you are cooling it down. And if you get it to the point where it's not moving at all, it's at zero kelvin. Right, That's that's absolute zero, where there's no molecular movement and it's as cold as it can get um barring the negative kelvin stories that we've seen in scientific experiments that are too confusing to go

into right now. But at then your eight um. If you use lasers in this way, you can actually slow down atoms. You have to keep hitting them the right way to cool them and cool them and cool them until they are ultra cold. So once I figured that part out, and but I figured that part out, I mean read about other people who figured this stuff out long before I ever even knew it existed. I didn't come up with this obviously. Uh. Once I once I learned that part, I thought, all right, so what is

going on? Once these rubidium atoms are ultra cold and you've got gas cloud of ultra cold atoms, Well, at that point they would introduce a photon into the gas cloud. Now we're talking about single photon in this case. The photon would enter the gas cloud, transfer some of its energy, the momentum that it has to some of the rubidium atoms and the light would slow down. This is what you were talking about, Joe, how light travels at different

speeds through different media. So it's technically going slower than the speed of light because we tend to mean the speed of light as the speed of light through a vacuum, so it goes a little slower than that. But once it escapes out the other side of the gas cloud, that energy rejoins with the photon, so it now is traveling. It doesn't continue to travel at that slower speed. It's now moving through the normal speed it would through whatever

medium it's going through at this point. So everything in the balance, right, you don't have an imbalance of the universe. And suddenly there's a black hole in the m I T is like whoops, so um, so what happens if you put to photons in this? And this is where we get into another really odd physics. The experimenters were expecting this at all. It's certainly something that that had

been theorized before but never directly observed. And the idea is called the read Berg blockade, which is sounds like some sounds like something from Star Wars, right. The read blockade runner. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what caused the prequels to happen, right, there was the whole red bird

blockade around the boo um. You know what the reaper blockade is in physics is this concept that let's say you've got uh several atoms together, uh at like in a gas of let's say ultracoled rubidium, for example, if you were to excite one of those atoms, you could not excite the neighboring atoms to that same degree. You could not add as much energy as you did to that first atom to the surrounding atoms. So it's it's

almost like there's a saturation there. So when two photons would enter this gas cloud, there would be this kind of push poll relationship between the photo atons that was limited by the fact that once one photon passed on energy to a rubidium atom, the other one couldn't do

the same with the other nearby rubidium atoms. Right. It's like that that second photon needs the first photon to move out of the way to go ahead and move forward before the second one can go on and affect the particles to to lose that energy into the particles around it, right, Um, so it winds up being the sort of like like leap frog sort of action where where each one is pushing and pulling the other until

they both exit the cloud as a single mushy photon unit. Yeah, it's kind of kind of crazy, like a photon molecule. This is so nuts, is Bunkers. Now. They referred to it specifically as a photonic interaction that's mediated by the atomic interaction, meaning that normally, under regular circumstances, these two photons wouldn't even have any interaction with one another. It's only because of this particular effect, the red bird blockade,

that this is happening at all. It's are like two people talking to each other at a party who otherwise would never have anything to do with one happen. It's exactly like that. That's but only because after the first person started talking, everybody around him or her got so bored that they couldn't listen to a second person. Right, this is starting to sound eerily like every party experience I've been in, all right, at any rate? Uh So, the question is, now, we've got this idea, this this

particular situation, this this particular implementation, if you will. Where we've got light seemingly pushing against itself, we've got this ability for light to actually exert some sort of physical force on itself. Photons are interacting. So does that mean we can finally build real lightsabers? No? No, not at all. So disappointed in that. In the video, My favorite part of the video is this is the point where I my lightsaber turns on right, I've got the lightsaber, like, so,

could we make a real lightsaber? And they say no, And I look sad and the lightsaber slow really goes down. I had come up with that gag when we were when we were getting ready to shoot, and they laughed so hard they said, all right, well that's what we have to do now. So uh so I was glad that I got one got to wheel the lightsaber, and two got to make it the subject of a site gag.

Uh that was a little behind the gag for think. Yeah, well, you know, once in a while, I'm so proud of a dumb joke I make, I have to talk about it. If you haven't seen the video, you should go check it out. It Actually it came out really well. But there are some things that this might help us do down the road. Again, this would require a lot more development and experimentation to make sure that we could in

fact use light to do these sort of things. But one of the things that was suggested was that we could end up with using a lights actually interacting with the photons interacting with each other. We could use as the basis for some some quantum computing computations. So one of the issues with quantum computing is figuring out how to create this quantum state that's as stable as you can possibly make it um, which is difficult, right, I mean,

any disturbance of a quantum state and it you lose coherence. Yeah, so they have talked about using photonic interactions, but how do you get the photons to interact? And this maybe an in road to that. We're still yeah, we're still way in the early stages, but it's a possibility. And another one that the project leader had apparently mentioned that I think is bizarre is the idea that eventually we might get to a point where you can make three

dimensional objects out of light, including crystals. That is so bizarre to me because I'm trying to picture Let's say you could create a stationary three D object out of light? What would that look like? I mean, considering the fact that how something looks is the light coming from it reaching your eyes, right, and if the light is not leaving the object but remaining as part of it, this entire thing is breaking my brain. I'm not sure. I the closest I can guess is that it's some kind

of hologram looking thing. Yeah, I mean, would other light reflect photons bounce off of those photons right? Well? Because yeah, if you're talking about if it's acting otherwise the way lightwood, then you wouldn't have photonic interactions in the first place. Would it be invisible? I don't know. The thing about it is that this is all coming from Uh, this is sorcery, Jonathan's witchcraft. I don't want to hear anymore. Look, hokey religions have no place in this podcast. Now. This

this is all coming from hard the Harvard Gazette. The Harvard Gazette reported on this, and it was the project I believe you. I'm not saying you got your story from the National Enquiry, No, I just wanted to explain to our listeners it came from the Harvard Gazette, which did not go into detail. The researcher, the lead researcher, Lucan, didn't Lucan, that's great, isn't It did not go into detail, or at least the story didn't about what how this would happen, or what it would mean, or what it

would look like. It's literally a sentence which kind of throwaway line way at the end of the article. Yeah, in fact, I can read it right now, says Lucan. Also suggested that the system might one day even be used to create complex three D structures, such as crystals wholly out of light. Now, granted, that may not be a physical structure. It may simply be a three D structure, which would be closer to a hologram. So then we might say it's a three dimensional structure made of light,

but it is not itself physical. You couldn't touch it. Light is physical, You mean it wouldn't be substantial, right, Well, when I say a physical object, that's what I mean, as opposed to an ethereal check. I think we should we should email this person and try to figure out what the heck that means. That would be fantastic. I would love to hear back from some photon crystals right now, and and if it's and if it is a hologram,

then we can update our Holograms episode. So no matter what, we win, Okay, Well, I think we should go down another road because obviously that's really interesting on its own, but it's really not a path to lightsabers. No, And I think that really they talked about it in in terms of lightsabers because that's a kitchy, fun way to to get people interested in your research. I agree you mentioned Star Wars. People are gonna be like, oh, I

want to read that article so well. I mean, if it helps with quantum computing and stuff like that, this is probably actually more useful than a real lightsaber would be, right, what's the point of a real lightsaber other than that it's cool? Yeah, I think the cool factor is pretty much the only reason you would want a lightsaber box on my tongue, sir, I mean, lightsabers are infinitely okay, I'm sorry, cut and toast your bagel at the same time.

Great point, I take it all back. Lightsabers are more important than curing any disease, than solving any problem on Earth, number one number one problem. Okay, So how else could we make one well, earlier we talked about plasma. I think we we may have decided that lasers are just there's just it's nothing doing. You can't make a lightsaber out of lasers as far as we know. It's impractical for at least three or four reasons. But what about plasma.

So again, plasma, it's it's ionized superheated gas. You know, it's like cloud of incredibly hot stuff. It sounds like kind of like a lightsaber blade to me. We mentioned earlier that the Star Wars Expanded Universe specifically said that lightsaber blades were made of plasma, and I think that's

actually a good place to look. Actually, on his Science Channel show, Michio Kaku thought the same thing about maybe we need to look less at a laser and more at something like a plasma torch as the basis for a real life lightsaber, like really big plasma torch. Yeah,

so what is a plasma torch. It's it's a thing you use for what's called plasma cutting, where you would be cutting really really tough materials, say like sheets of steel, even ones that are several inches thick, And a plasma torch works by creating a flow of pressurized gas like and it could just be oxygen from the air. It doesn't really matter too much what the gas is. You can use different kinds of gas. And then it ignites an electrical arc that causes the gas to ionize and

turn into plasma. So the atomic nuclei lose the electrons and the gas becomes so hot. Right now, the jet of ridiculously hot plasma shoots at the tip of the torch and it becomes kind of a super blade and cut through steel iron. It's just killer. Obviously, this sounds like what a lightsaber is, but it's just a little kind of It's more like a light stub. It doesn't it's not like something yeah, you could really duel with.

So Kiku looked at that and he was like, well, we could modify this in several ways to make it more like the lightsabers in the movie. And so he had a few stipulations for the real approximation of a lightsaber. He said it had to be it had to reach temperatures of twelve thousand degrees. I assume he meant fahrenheit. I don't think he said though, but fahrenheit. Yeah, so he could quote slice through steel like butter. Why is

it always like butter? There are so many other things that are easy to slice through well, butter is one of those most common ones. I mean, I guess you could say, like marshmallow fluff, but that's not as common as butter. Why not like jello could slice through steel? Like jello, jello is proprietary. Oh that's a good point anyway. He also dessert treats. Oh, no, we're gonna get sued now. He stipulated that it actually had to function in a do well so you can clash swords, so to speak.

And uh, and also has to be basically lightsaber sized. Yeah, if you're gonna make a lightsaber, needs to be lightsaber sized. Okay, So he designed this proposal where it would be something like a lightsaber handle. It's a little uh, it's a little cylinder that you can fit in your hand. At the bottom of the cylinder is a titanium fan that sucks in a bunch of air, and then the air is ionized and heated to twelve thousand degrees again I

assume he means fahrenheit. And the blade part is a telescoping rod of ceramic tubes that extend out from the handle, so you've got a solid founta core for your blade, right the blade. So it would be like one of those toy lightsabers where you whip it out and it telescopes out in little pieces of cylindrical material. I'm familiar with them. Yes, I had one as a child. I have one now. Nice. But of course, and it would have to be ceramics, because they'd be the only thing

that could withstand. And so he proposed you drill a bunch of holes in them, and then this sort of becomes the conduit through which the plasma outflow is directed. So the plasma goes out through the handle up through this tube that telescopes outward and then escapes through all these little holes, creating a bad an that yeah, like a cloud of superheated plasma around this tube. You can think of it as kind of like each of those

holes becomes its own little plasma cutter. Yeah, and if you've got enough of them close enough together, then you've just got a big plasma cutter field right dangerous his head. Oh yeah. He also proposed you have an electromagnetic coil inside the blade assembly, and that keeps the plasma sort of tight against the surface, right, because you can control plasma with electromagnetic fields. Right, because it's charged, right, you

can use a magnet to control where it goes. And that would be important because otherwise, if it's talking about creating an ionized gas and you have no way of controlling it, then you rapidly turn into a self melting mechanism. You turn it on. It's actually really a Jedi eliminator. Yeah, you just this was a terrible idea. So the other big question is what about power? So to create something as hot as a lightsaber blade, you need way more power than you could fit in something like a lightsaber

handle with conventional batteries. So he proposes this array of trillions of nano batteries based on carbon nanotubes, and I love I love that whenever you need to do something with future technology, you just put nano in front of it. And it's like, oh, yeah, but they are they are the force of real sign Where can I where can I pick some of these up? Because I am tired of changing out batteries and everything. This sounds amazing. They don't, yeah,

they don't really exist yet. What they would sympathetically deliver the power necessary to fit inside the handle. So the stuff that doesn't exist could help power this other thing that doesn't exist. Yeah, he sort of implies this might be doable within fifty years. Okay, I suppose an alternative would be would be to power it with a cord, just plug it on in. So I don't know you, I don't know what the voltage requirements on that would be,

but it might require a pretty heavy duty cord. I I think that we should go back to our often referenced energy backpack, like a little engine backpack that you can write everywhere. I think that that would be real good for this, for this particular thing. We should make you a little less agile. You can't do all those flips and stuff. Well, you just have to train harder.

Two things. One, the Death Star was infamous for having really inconvenient power outlets, So lightsaber battles would be like, get over here, but thirty feet away, I can't get any closer. The cord only reaches so far. Yeah, all the lights go down, the life support is gone. It's terrible.

But the other thing, the other thing that what that was a total joke, obviously, But the other thing, which is not a total joke, is that within the Expanded Universe, the predecessors to the light sabers that we see in the movies. According to some of the Expanded Universe actually did have a connection of physical cord that went back to a power pack that was worn on the back. So you actually did have the predecessors to Jedi and Sithe wielding these these plasma blades that were powered by

this enormous pack. At that point, it's essentially a proton pack. Yeah, it kind of is. Yeah. Yeah, So when I went into watching this episode he did on it, I I sort of had my BS detector already. I was like, Okay, I'm a little skeptical about this, But then I was like, well, you know, that's not a bad way of approaching it.

That that actually seems pretty smart to me, especially because he just conceded you're going to have to have some material telescoping rod at the center of it, right, that seems like the only reasonable way to do this, Right. We can't create some sort of electro magnetic force field that's in the shape of a hollow tube with a

cap at the end through which plasma could inhabit. We can't do that, And that's even other fictional forms of lightsabers, like the like the Energy Sword in Halo is constructed in a similar manner with with the force field and some kind of ionized gas and then you electrify it and and it's warm and cutty. But yeah, I had a couple of questions about a design like this though, and one of them would be would you have to wear eye protection to duel with one of these things? Yeah?

I mean that would be such a bummer if you had to wear a mask steampunk, it would just all be steampunk. Actually, lightsaber that might be kind of cool wielders. First of all, Darth Vader did it all the time, and he was he was pretty awesome. Maybe that's what that blast shield that Luke's wearing shield down. I can't see anything. How am I expected to fight? Maybe the same is true of the Elder's mask. Well anyway, so

I should back up. People who do plasma cutting need to wear eye protection to avoid a condition called welder splash or arc. I uh, the corny it can get damaged by exposure to UV light, just kind of the same way your corny it can get damaged if you stare at the sun and the arc that turns the rushing gas into hot plasma can give off that UV light. So staring at a plasma torch arc is a bad idea. It's kind of like staring at the sun. Uh, and

you you need to wear eye protection. But perhaps in this set up, the UV producing elements are actually hidden from view, since the arc itself seems to be inside the handle that I don't know for sure if you were to actually try to make something like this, but that's one possibility. The UV radiation has to go somewhere, right, It can't just continuously dissipate inside the handle. It would eventually make its way out. So essentially what we're saying

is that Jedi would have to wear shades. It just makes them cooler. Well, the other thing is you mentioned that energy has to go somewhere at I'm not sure exactly how the UV would work. Maybe it wouldn't actually be a U V I risk, but you would have a lot of energy in this thing in your Yeah, I mean, this is a highly highly energetic object and I don't know, like, I don't know would you be able to hold it well. Even if you were able to direct the flows such that you didn't have to

worry about heat building up in the actual handle. The blade itself would be incredibly hot. Now, air is not a good conductor of heat. Um. You know it, it will get warmer and warmer. I mean that's like if you're standing near a source of heat, like a fire, you're gonna feel the heat increase as you get closer to it. So imagine holding a long blade that's at twelve thousand degrees fahrenheit. That's gonna get a little toasty after a while, even considering the fact that air is

a poor conductor of heat. Um. And if you're swinging around all over the place, well, two things. One, you've cut this plasma trail going everywhere because we don't have any way of keeping it truly locked to the blade shape. And to uh, it's the convection that you're causing by the air molecules moving around means that air around you is going to get hotter faster. So really what we're talking about is that we need to have super advanced air conditioning systems UM. And also, all jedis where it

is it singular or plural? Jedi? Okay? Cool? So all Jedi wear wicking undergarments, packs, in the ice packs in the road. Sure, well, you know, I was just trying to think of an analogy. I don't know exactly how hot the heating element inside your oven gets. Surely it's not twelve degrees and so I mean, since the inside of an oven tops out usually around five to six

hundred degrees fahrenheit, I'm going to say less than twelve thousand. Yeah. Yeah, so if that heating element, that little thing can heat your kitchen up, because if you turn your oven on high, your kitchen typically will get warm. Um. If that will heat up your kitchen that fast and it's not even close to twelve degrees and you've got the door shut, I don't know. It seems to me like a room could get pretty sweaty and nasty if it's got a

lightsaber deal going on in it. Yeah, and if you if you're sweating too hard to to hold onto your lightsaber, that's just bad news. Also, yeah, that's a good point. Imagine what would happen if you Joe and you Lauren each had one of these ceramic core plasma blades and then you swung them so that they hit together. I can't imagine that anything that came out of that would be good that I wouldn't sign up to try that.

No that Yeah, no, we'd have to. We have to build some sort of lightsaber swinging robot and have no emotional attachment to it whatsoever. We have to make it real ugly. Yeah, I I mean, I'm kind of I'm kind of a lizard like, I'm sort of cold blooded. I really like warm things, but that sounds too warm. Yeah. So, so ultimately, I think we have to come down on the side of lightsabers are are really cool fantasy slash science fiction idea, we can just stop it at fantasy.

Fantasy is that well the well they expanded Universe tries to explain how it works, so it kind of falls into science I think of Star Wars is fantasy more than science fiction. But again, the Expanded Universe attempts to explain the more mystical things that were just considered to be true in the in the movies. Um so yeah, I don't think this is possible. I don't think we're ever going to have something that's truly analogous to a

lightsaber in reality. And and like you said, Joe and really bagel slicing aside, there the uses of a lightsaber would be really limited. There are other ways that we could uh either cut things or fight off people of it probably are going to be distance oriented. We have actual plasma torches. We don't need lightsabers in our machining you know workshops. Yeah, so I don't think this is ever gonna become possible. The next question is that we'll

have to tackle in a future episode. Will blasters ever be possible? Because blasters don't fire lasers because the projectiles move slower than the speed of light. They move slower than bullets do. So one wonders if we could actually make something that would be some sort of energy based cohesive unit of whatever that could fly through the air slower than the speed of light and impact something. Yeah, they also fire plasma too, don't they. Again, I think

it depends. You would have to look at the expanded universe, looked into it. One more question, Okay, why why does the Stormtroopers armor not protect them from blasters at all? You know what? What this is? The Stormtroopers armor serve.

Considering that it doesn't help against blasters, it doesn't help against it doesn't help against e walks, and it's clunky slows you down, and and and it is a problem like it it's an inhibitor of your vision, like I don't under the Emperor really hates Stormtroopers, actually just really hated Djengo Fet a lot and wanted to kill him. As many times sposible, the entire series is just actually a story about how much it's the untold but implied

tale of Star Wars. Well, I'm glad that we've unraveled a mystery in this episode. We've done good work today, I think so, I think so. I think by deconstructing a beloved franchise, we have done our duty. Now, guys, you out there who have been listening to the show, what do you want us to cover in the future. Is there a science fiction type idea that you would like us to however, or just an interesting science story, technology story, something else that's future oriented. You've always wondered

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