Pew! Pew! Laser!

That's right. He's Professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He's only just now retiring, so he's actually closing down his office this summer. However, he has said that he plans to visit their Space Sciences Laboratory daily. Years old. Yes, and he he is credited as the inventor of the laser, although he did not build the

first one. So to really we want to talk about lasers today, but we thought it'd be kind of cool to get first start with like a retrospective on the invention of the laser. So let us go into the future of the past. Yes, So onward into the past. First of all, here's his philosophy, Mr. Towns, Professor Towns is philosophy. Uh, I have a good time doing physics. It's not work, it's just fun, which is kind of awesome. I like that. I like that fun. Yes, physics, it's

it's physical fun. No, it's physics fun. So anyway, the invention of lasers, So the story goes that Towns was sitting on a park bench way back in nineteen fifty one, and he was thinking about light, high frequency light, and how you might want to concentrate light into a beam

that would be useful for multiple applications. And uh, he was thirty five years old at this time and a professor at Columbia University and a consultant for Bell tele Telephone Laboratories, one of the leading research and development institutions at the time. Obviously, lots of stuff came out of Bell Labs, including things like the transistor, you know, so

lots of stuff going on at that time. He would had been using light to study the energy states of molecules um spectroscopy, so you know how we talk all about the relationship between atoms and photons that if you excite atoms, electrons move into an excited state, and when they come back to the ground state, they have to release that energy that they had taken on, and they do that in the form of a photon. So he knew that stimulating atoms with the right wavelength of light

could make them admit that same wavelength. Actually, really we're telling wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, because when he first started working with this, he was working with microwaves, which have a longer wavelength than visible light, right, so he was looking at this. This was all based off a theory that had been um proposed by some physicist named Einstein

something like that. Yeah, yeah, just just just Albert Albert good old Albert Einstein back in nineteen seventeen had said that you should be able to to uh, to see this in action if you were able to build the right set up. And so he had been thinking Towns had been thinking about how to actually make this physical reality.

And the trick was that if you were to excite atoms of a gas, they tended to rush off in all different directions, and then you you lose the atoms that you're trying to excite to try and create more of whatever wavelength you're you're shooting at them. So if you were to shoot atoms of a gas with microwaves, they might omit microwaves, but at the same time they're all dashing off into other directions. You don't really amplify anything, right, So you want to find some kind of way to

focus your energy exactly. So uh. He decided that the way to do this would to be to build a resonant chamber, essentially a kind of a little a little enclosed space that would hold onto this gas and allow the gas to continuously emit these different wavelengths and amplify

whatever signal you were sending in. So you could pump the gas with an energy source like a microwave, stimulate the atoms, which would then start to emit their own microwaves, and have a very concentrated beam microwaves as a result, and it would be a very coherent burst. He called it microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation or MAZER,

so acronym action there. Yeah. Uh. And in night he thought of a way that he might be able to achieve the same sort of outcome, but by using light instead of microwaves. So in this case it would be a laser, not a mazer, so it would be pretty much the same principle, but it would be shorter wavelengths. Shorter wavelengths, and he was thinking about using a socially.

Think of it like a tube of gas. So you've got like a glass tube that contains gas inside it, and you have some mirrors on either end of the tube, and then you start, uh putting a certain wavelength of light into that tube, a very specific wavelength, whichever one it happens to be. And this is also one of those reasons why we started seeing red lasers before we saw any other colors of lasers. Those are the longer wavelengths. So you would use a very specific wavelength of light

into this this chamber of gas. The mirrors would allow the light to reflect back and forth, continuing that stimulation. Now, he didn't actually build this yet. He just thought, well, Labs patented it. But no, he did not build it. No one, no one had built one. They had just he had come up with the idea. Bell Labs patents it, and the race was on. You had lots of different companies actually, all trying to build this at the same time.

But it's interesting that the first person to build one wasn't working on behalf of one of these large companies. He had received a fifty thousand dollar budget from the research institute he was working with UH two over the course of I think nine months to build one of these. So the odds were stacked against him, and yet Theodore Harold Mayman in nineteen sixty built the first working laser. He used a ruby crystal, synthetic ruby crystal as the

lasing medium. That's the active laser medium. And we could talk more about what that actually means, but that would require going into the physics of lasers, which is incredibly complicated. I think it's funny that we now can create verbs like lazing. Yeah. Yeah, it was originally an acronym. Nobody has the idea anymore that it's an acronym. Laser is just a lower case word. Yeah, yeah, it's just a

it's just a name for a thing. It doesn't you know, unless you you really were to look into it, you wouldn't realize that those letters originally stood for individual words. So how are lasers used right now today? Like, if we wanted to talk about typical uses of lasers today, what are some of the examples we would see. Uh, well, we're still using them for spectroscopy, Yes, yes, we are. We use it to study the nature between radiated energy and matter, and and there are a bunch of different

ways that lasers can help with this. But basically it turns out that this invention really can have a very precise wavelength, which is what you're looking for in this sort of thing, because a particular wavelength can interact very predictably with atoms and molecules and stuff like that. And so by bouncing that light around with atoms and molecules and watching what happens, you can kind of figure out what it is. Right, So maybe a laser can help you look at a sample of matter and and tell

you what's inside that stuff is. Yeah, and we use this for all sorts of things, everything from chemistry labs to astronomy and other applications. Then there's a microscopy. Various techniques are used in microscopy with lasers to uh, they're very complicated. Essentially, you're talking about removing blur, getting really precise looks at things in ways that would require me to write a textbook to explain. Yeah, how about ledar, Yeah, it's another use of lasers that's very very much a

popular one. We have an idea for an upcoming episode of Forward Thinking where ldar would play a fairly significant role. I think yes, yes, uh so. Lightar would be essentially a type of laser ranging sort of. It's like radar lasers,

your basic laser ranging. It's really simple idea, and that simple idea is that you have a laser and a sensor that's all part of this one device, right, and you pointed at the thing that you're looking at, and you say, I wonder how far away that thing is, and you turn on the device, and the laser shoots out of the device, hits whatever the intended target is.

Some of that light bounces back, the sensor picks it up, and by calculating how much time it took between the laser coing out and the the light that was reflected back being picked back up, you can determine how far away things are because you know what the speed of

light is within you know certain parameter. Obviously light does not travel uh at the same speed through all media, but you it's it's it's to the point where you don't really need to split hairs unless you need to get down to like the nanometer precision level, in which case you're probably using some other methodology. Now we can use this to check out things like, um, how far away the Moon is, which you know is pretty cool.

The reason we can do that is because some of the folks who went walking around on the surface of the Moon left some stuff behind, specifically garbage, you know, Well, so that too, but also retro retro reflector rays. Yeah. So yeah, just specific mirrors since garbage on purpose. Yeah. So one of the ways that we can prove that, in fact, people have been to the Moon is the fact that we can shine a laser on one of these and detect the light that comes back. Uh so

it's not moon martians, just bouncing it back for us. No, not not lunar martians. The weirdest things. Didn't you have some horrible evil scientists shine lasers into your eyes? I had someone shining lasers into my eyes. But he wasn't horrible nor evil. He was actually quite kind and well he was very nice to me, although he did I will say he was nice to me, but he also held my eyeball down, sliced my cornea, lifted the flat back and then shined a laser into it, thus reshaping

my eyeball so that I might see better. Well, but you would ask him to I did. I paid him for the for the for the privilege of having this done to me. We're talking, of course, about lazing, one of the many types of eye surgery that involves lasers. Yes, many types of surgery can use lasers as cutting tools. These days, the lasers can take the place of physical tools, mechanical tools, stuff that could introduce contamination. You know, if you're using light, then you don't have to worry about

any any germs on the cutting device itself. Um So there there are a lot of different medical uses for lasers. We'll talk about some upcoming possible medical uses for lasers as well. Sure, and on a very much larger scale, you can use lasers for drilling and cutting into things other than Jonathan's eyeballs. Yeah, Like, let's say that you wanted to do something similar to cutting into Jonathan's eyeballs, except that the thing you wanted to cut into was steel.

Then clearly the laser that works on my eye is probably not going to get you very far with this massive block of steel. I wouldn't imagine so, but I know, but I haven't tested your eyeballs to see whether they're made it. It's just assume, um for the moment, that we don't actually have to test any of this out. So, Yeah, you can actually find very high powered lasers that are

used in precision cutting. Obviously, you could have a laser mounted onto a computerized electronic table or a robotic arm and and it will follow a very specific pathway as dictated by you using a computer program, and thus you

can carve away things in a very very precise way. Also, military lots of military uses, right, I think this separates pretty cleanly into two categories, which is lasers that are used in some kind of James Bond death trap scenario and then lasers that are not used in those scenarios.

So that's that's hardly the clean scientific way of defining that. Yeah, obviously you have things like laser sights, things that allow people to be more effective in aiming weaponry for example, or uh there are also again laser range finders, are lots of other detection devices, and then there are a lot of proposed but potential use as of lasers, either

as a counter weapon, against things like missiles. I mean, there was, of course the entire Star Wars program that was proposed to allow a satellite based system to either fire missiles or lasers at incoming uh, you know, an incoming attack that would disarm them. Obviously that never happened, but that was a proposed military use for lasers. They got the idea from Nicola Tesla, right well, Nikola Tesla certainly had a very similar idea about being able to

bring down airplanes. He was specifically talking about airplanes. Um, although that's an entirely different episode. And then we have you know, there are other like less weighty uses for lasers, things like laser pointers, like if you if you really really need two give give your cat, give your cat some some stimulation using a laser pointer to make cat run as fast as it possibly can into a wall is way up there into a wall. Or if you want to, yeah, if you want claw marks up your walls.

Usually I could get a good satisfying thunk out of it. It was. Dogs are are also susceptible to both of my both of my dogs when I had them, they were both very much fans of chasing the laser pointer. In fact, one of them even knew where the laser was coming from, but that didn't bother him. He still wanted to play with He would look at me when when the laser would point, when the dot would move away,

and he's like, hello, we're not done. Um, you were obviously not really putting forth nearly the same amount of effort I am, So I think we can keep playing. Hey, what about the Dark Side of the Moon laser show? Or or here in Atlanta. Of course, if you wanted to, you could take yourself out to the Stone Mountain Park and see the Stone Mountain Laser show or laser backgrounds

in portrait photography. Okay, yeah, so obviously lots of uses today for lasers, but we really wanted to spend a lot of time talking about some emerging uses of lasers. Some of the the cutting edge uses, and not meaning cutting edge in the sense of actually cut cutting necessarily. One of them is to use lasers to make optical quote unquote cables out of air. Okay, I have seen this in our notes, but I do not understand it at all. So break break this one down, all right.

So first, it helps to understand generally speaking, how a fiber optic cable works. So fiber optic cable is essentially think of it as a glass tube because that's pretty much what it is UH, and it's a glass tube that is more dense in the middle that is on

the outside, like the outer edge. UH. That density actually allows light to pass through it pretty effectively, whereas the outer edge when the light starts to like if light tries to escape this tube, it gets reflected back into the core, so it continues down its path until it gets to wherever you want it to go. So typically with telecommunication systems, we use this to allow data to pass between different nodes, whether those are computers or telephone systems, whatever, whatever,

we're using fiber optics for now. Using UH lasers to make optical cables quote unquote cables out of the air is a little different, but it uses the same principle. Researchers at the University of Maryland have been really pioneering this research and what they're doing is they're using UM they're using high powered UH lasers to create kind of

a channel through the air. So if you just use a regular laser through the air and you're just trying to use it to to get some data about something like inspector scopy, then um, you might be uh suffering

some problems at greater distances. Because light does disperse as it travels, you lose some of that focus the longer it So if you're using just a regular laser without any kind of of control over how that disperses, you lose precision over the course of you know, whatever distance you're talking about, and the greater the distance, the more precision you lose. So they were looking at a way of fixing that, and by using this high powered laser.

Essentially they create a core of dense air that's then surrounded by a an expanding circumference of air that's lower density, so you've got a lower density uh surrounding a a high density core. That high density core acts like the core of a fiber optic cable, so light can travel. A laser can travel down that core, and whenever it encounters that lower density on the outer edge, it reflects back into that core. The whole thing lasts for a split second, a fraction of a second, but a fraction

of a second is an eternity for a laser. Because lasers are travel ling at the speed of light, they are light, so you don't have to worry about something lasting only a fraction of a second. Because light that they're like, it seemed like it was forever to me um although they don't really say that because as far as we know, because they're not sentiented. So what you would do is you could set up a system where

you have essentially two lasers. You have the high powered laser that creates this channel to whatever destination you're looking at, and then within a split second of it firing, a second laser, the one that you're actually using to measure whatever the target is, would fire and it would travel

along this pathway created by the first laser. So you would have this more dedicated channel, and that would allow you to have that precision, to retain that precision that you would have as if it were traveling through fiber optic, and not have to worry about the the light getting

less focused as it goes along. I've seen a similar technique to this used in in other science branches, and what I suspectus going on here is that the first laser is is heating the air in a very particular pattern, causing that pattern of density density difference and that's that's what's creating the channel more or less. Yeah, that's that's

essentially what's happening. You can actually see. There was one example I saw where they were using four of these high powered lasers together and then the four expanding areas of low density air would converge in the center and that would become the channel. So that becomes even more crazy. So that's that's cool. I feel like my head just like Cronenberg style. But that's awesome. The whole point the researchers used it to analyze the air itself that was

affected by this high powered laser. They found that the signal from their measurements was about one and a half time stronger than if they had not used a wave guide. That is that that channel, right, So if they had used just a regular laser and regular air they hadn't changed anything, it would have been one point five times weaker than the what they had experienced once they did

use the wave guide. So that was pretty cool. And while that's not such a huge deal for a a short range analysis where they were talking like three feet, once you start getting to really more significant distances, one point five times improvement in signal strength is a huge deal, and so the U. S. Military is very interested in this,

but so are a lot of research institutions. So it could be that we could see this used in upper atmosphere applications where obviously using something like fiber optics would be difficult, if not impossible, to do. So it's kind of cool that they're actually thinking about using lasers to change the air itself and just to act as this temporary fiber optic cable, like I said, within them, within

less than a second, the effect disappears. So to us, we humans, we would never be able to detect this, you know, in any meaningful way without the use of very precise distrimentation. Yeah, so that was one that I thought was really super cool. Of course, there's another one that we've talked about before, right, uh, not on this show, but on our sister show, Tech Stuff. We did a whole episode back in early we've talked about on the

show Beam Tractor Beams. That's that's right. I had forgotten completely. Well, Lauren and I do a lot of episodes about technical and scientific things, but this is one of those super awesome emerging uses of lasers. Yeah, and okay, not for entire spaceships the way that you might think of tractor beams being used, because a laser that beg would mostly just burn up a spaceship. But different types of laser beams can indeed beas to trap and manipulate and move

small particles from cells to molecules to atoms. And since the last time we talked about it was a little bit over a year ago, I'll go through some of some of our favorites here. Um optical tweezers are are the first one, and these are made with Gaussian beams, which are just laser beams that are brighter in the

center than they are at their edges. And if you focus the beam with optical microscopes, you can, um like, remove bacteria from a sample, or sort cells, or move medical particles, or manipulate DNA strands or alter cell membranes. And the idea of optical tweezers is that light has momentum. Okay, so when light hits an object, the object bends the light, which changes the light's momentum, and due to the law of conservation of momentum, the light will then push back

on the object equally and oppositely. The Gauzian nature of the beam here is important because if the sample gets off center in the beam, the weaker light at the edges will be bending around the object and pushing it out, but the stronger light in the center will be bending around it and pushing it back in, and the stronger

force wins. This is really incredible stuff. And and again it's one of those things where when you first think about when you think about our our normal experience with light, you don't think of light as having momentum necessarily. I mean, you don't think of it as having a force, right,

especially since you think of photons is being massless. But they do have a relativistic mass, meaning that at least when you get down to the to the math level, you have to take into account the fact that they have this this mass that exists on a relativistic level, if not on a practical physical real world I can feel this level. And then again we get into that realm of when you start getting into the real the world of the really small things get crazy you. That

is the official science line, the slogan. I mean, you know obviously in Latin, but if you if you go to CERN, it is written above the door In Latin, what's what's the translation for y'all and y'all? You know, uh funny you should say that. Actually, in ancient languages there were often words that specifically meant groups of you being like larger than three people as opposed to you singular. So not really that unusual, but that's a linguistics course

for another day. Next, we have optical conveyors, which are made of Bessel beams Vessel beams being light formed in concentric circles around a central dot, so they look kind of like a target. Yeah, yeah, And the central dot itself is created by the light from the surrounding circles, so it can it can therefore reform behind a solid object. So here we have that. That's right. These are the beams that, if they encounter something physical, will continue on

as if they had not been interrupted. Yes, which is pretty nifty all on its own. But if you take two of these beams and kind of bend and overlap them using a lens, you can create essentially like a like a laser strobe that will hit the front of a particle um and then reform on the other side with enough energy to push the particle back towards the

source of the light. I see. So when you have the two beams focus so that the you get that formation right on the very rear side of whatever the particle is, that the combination of those two forming together create that push necessary to move the particle forward. I don't understand it extremely technically, but I think I think that's about it. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna go with that.

Any particle physicists out there who are experts in this sort of thing, or like, you know, you're you've oversimplified that, Mr Strickland far too much. You just let me know, because I like to learn. It's just this is certainly one of those areas where, uh my, my brain tries

to make analogies to deal with stuff that's foreign to me. Well, I think we were just saying recently, and I still stand by it that for some reason, I think optical physics is like the most difficult thing to understand and talk about all the things. For sure. I mean, photons, they're they're dual nature, and the fact that it's light and that that alone is just a very confusing concept because because we all like to work in the dark. Yes,

in yeah, well, and not not you, Jonathan. You would prefer us to have like all of the lights on all the time. I'm not the one who turns on the lights. I turned the lights off. I have a lamp at my desk that I never turn on, and I get what I wonder when it is on. I need some tractor beams to pull you all apart. Move on to the next one. Okay, yeah, the the really cool new one. These past two have been around for well, okay, the optical tweezers have been around since the nineteen eighties,

so that's not necessarily cutting edge. Conveyors are within the past few years. I think eleven was when they began development. But the really cool new things are anti Kepler tractor beams. And they're called anti Kepler because, Okay, Kepler observed that comets tails always point away from the sun um and we gleaned from this that the beams of light push objects. Well, there, I think there are a couple of things pushing, right. There's the solar wind and there's the light. I've tried

to oversimplify things, Joe, but you're you're you're totally correct. Yeah, um, but but you know, but light will it stands push at an object along the direction of its stream. All right, um, But sometimes this this Kepler force can reverse because science. Uh by that, I I mean that the reasons for this reversal are way beyond my immediate grasp of photonic physics. But researchers are working on creating that reversal on purpose.

And they found that by using a mirror to bounce a Gaussian laser beam back across itself, they can create a sort of interference within the beam that will actually pull we little particles back towards the source of light. Um. And I understand the least about this one of the three that we've just talked about, none of which I really understand extraordinarily well. Um, But under certain conditions, the particles held by these beams have been shown to rearrange

themselves into structures that can make the poll stronger. Um. And by rotating the polarization of the beam, they that the researchers can sort particles by like their size or their mass or etcetera. Okay, that last part just you just stole it from Star Trek, right. Oh yeah, Okay, No,

I didn't know. That's real. That's real science. That's pretty awesome. Uh. One of the other ones I wanted to talk about was using lasers to simulate conditions in planet cores, as in the core, as in the core of the Pupid. Yeah not not Earth, uh specific or other planets. Joe. I hate to hate to drop a bombshell on you in the middle of an episode, but yes, uh so specifically, what we're talking about here are using lasers to create

a pressure wave. It's pretty incredible. So scientists with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories Ignition Facility use lasers to create these conditions found in cores of giant planets that are heavy and carbon. Carbon is the fourth most common element in our galaxy. So first they created synthetic diamonds, so you know that's standard. Okay, So you got these synthetic diamonds. Then they decided to point a hundred and seventy six

high powered lasers at these synthetic diamonds. I don't know what the diamonds did to merit such treatment. By powering up these lasers, they create a pressure wave greater than fifty million times that of Earth's atmospheric pressure to compress that diamond. Now the diamond vaporized in ten billions of a second. What Yeah, the diamond. They used such incredible pressure simultaneously from these hundred and seventy six or was a hundred hundred seventy six lasers that it vaporized the

diamond within ten billions of a second. I think that's pretty fair. I mean I wanted the diamond ever due to you. I mean, this was a synthetic diamond too. This wasn't like some diamond that's been out in the world. Yeah, so no, but the reason for this was really to study what happens in that instant that which, again to us, is over so quickly there's no way to perceive it, right. We we would never be able to perceive something that

happens in ten billions of a second. But with the proper instrumentation, we're talking about stuff that's on the same level as what you would find at the large Hadron collider. You can actually study the uh, the what actually happened at that moment. And the reason for this is to really get an idea of the core of these planets and how planets developed, how they evolved, really just about

the nature of carbon based planets themselves. Uh. There there's talk of them using similar methods to reproduce the conditions of planet cores that are besides like, you know, Jupiter, So we could see this as a tool to check out all sorts of uh conditions that we just cannot directly observe and we can't see the core of Jupiter. This is based upon the information we've already gleaned from various scientific disciplines like astronomy and combining it with using

lasers to blow up diamonds, which I think it's pretty cool. Uh, or it's a little cool, Joe, this this one's this one's for you. This was this is the one that you're really going to think. It's cool. Okay, so Joe, how's that three D printer treating you? It's great? Yeah, yeah, he had a had one or two little three D print job fails. Well, yes, as is the nature of three D printing, you will often have things go a

little bit awry. In fact, it's probably one of my favorite things to do on the Internet is just look up all the pictures of people's failed three D print job. It kind of looks like a who's who of HP Lovecraft mythology, really, doesn't it? This is even more eldritch than the last three D print job I looked at. Oh, it starts off as an a blinking head and ends

with plastic tentacles going hair and pain. So, so, Joe, what if let's say, in a typical situation, let's say that you have a three D print job that has a fail at some point. Let's say it's a fail that even the machine detects and it stops printing. Uh. Now, typically you would just have to call that a loss, right, You would have to start the print job all over. You remove the failed print job, you take it to the three D graveyard, and which I think is your

desk right now. Yeah, added to all of the other whistles that never the whistles in potentia, they're not actually whistles. They are the idea of a whistle not fully formed. All the would be whistles would be pyramids, would be Illuminati pyramids that's making for the stuff they don't want

you to know, guys, would be how stuff works logos. Um, So what if you could, instead of just tossing away a failed three D print job, use a laser scanner to scan the failed job, detect all the parts that did not print properly, in other words, the missing pieces because the print job ended prematurely, and then put that back and have it start up again and finish the print jobs as if it was fine from the beginning. To end witchcraft, Lauren, we've got to burn him. Well,

don't don't burn me. I'm not the one who came up with this. Students at m I T. Did they built a a device. Well, really, it's not even They

didn't even really build a device. They purposed a laser scanner for this, where they were able to take a failed three D print job to put it through a laser scanner so it can scan exactly the parameters of this in in three dimensions, and then run it through some software that compares the model made from the scan against the virtual model of what it was supposed to look like, and then say, all right, well here's the part of the the virtual model that's missing from what

really came out of that three D printer, and then send those as directions to the three D printer so it could continue its print job and build upon the the what had been a failed print job and finish it. That's pretty cool, but of course this is not the only use of laser scanners in three D printing. I mean, we talked last week in a podcast about using scanners three D scanners to say, just gather the information about a three D object converted to a digital file so

you can print a copy of it. Absolutely so yeah, this is sort of a continuation of that and an adaptation to deal with the realities of three D printing, which is that sometimes things don't work out the way you thought they would. Uh. And then we have another medical use for lasers. I like this one a lot, collecting a blood sample without having to use an actual needle, which is kind of cool just having to use a laser.

Well yeah, but but well, a laser can be very very precise and actually be so so tiny and if you if you place it in an area that doesn't have h you know, isn't really nerve dense, you could have a painless method of drawing blood. Um that would mostly be what this would be used for. You wouldn't use it for other intravenous kind of applications like like putting in an ivy. You can't really do that with

a laser. But you could use this for drawing blood and in fact, there's a startup called No Needles Vinny Puncture that's working on device that would do just this. It would use a laser that would fire for one quadrilliant of a second that would pierce your skin and make a little opening in a vein. There would be a a collection port that would connect. I don't know how because I didn't see any any pictures of this, but the collection port would create a seal so it

could collect the blood and then the laser. After blood collection was done, the laser would fire again and close that opening in your veins, so you don't have any bleeding, you don't have to have any healing. It just yeah, which is kind of cool. It's kind of like you think of it and you're like, wow, this is like just one step away from the Star Trek kind of methodology of waving a wand in front of someone and

say hey, you're sick. Uh. This would actually uh, you know, potentially cut down on things like again contamination, also just pain. So they're really looking at this as a possible application for things like, uh, pediatricians who you know when you're working with kids and they're smaller, yes, essentially, but they're they're smaller it istually how I feel about Sorry wait, okay,

here's the thing though, kids obviously are smaller than adults. Uh, they have you know, they can have a very traumatic reaction to getting poked and prodded. Um, and so having something that can reduce that that stress and pain on a child is something I'm sure a lot of parents would very much welcome for their their visits to the pediatrician. So that's pretty cool. Now, Granted, the that's still in the research phase. It's not like there's a working prototype

out there that's used right now as far as I know. Um. In fact, all the all the stuff I read said if this works the way we intend it to, which means to me that they are still fine tuning it to make sure that it's perfectly safe, that it's going to be effective and uh that you know, it'll end up actually being something that can potentially replace uh the

needles that we use for drawing blood. And again, we would still need needles for those other purposes, right like an ivy, as we will talk about in another episode very soon, possibly before this one comes out. There there's a very long preclinical and also clinical trial process for

getting any kind of medical technology out into the world. Right, Yeah, there Obviously, when you're talking about something that is uh potentially you know, life altering, because we're talking about health here, then there are a lot of different regulations that you have to make sure you meet before you can just launch a product out there unless you're not ever by the FDA. But that's an entirely different story. So then

we've got meta materials. Now. We talked about these on our sisters show Tex stuff meta materials, and we mentioned them on board the GAKE a couple of times. Meta materials are really cool. They are physical synthetic materials that we humans have created that are able to interact with electromagnetic radiation in some sort of interesting way, or not just electromagnetic really anything that travels in a wave, it can interact in a in a special way depending upon

the actual physical structure of the stuff itself. Right, We create them like atom by atom nanostructure wise, to have these very strange properties that go against a lot of what we know about physics. Yeah, it seems to be very counterintuitive, like you could in theory create a a a substance that has repeating structure inside of it. That matches up to the wavelength of certain sounds, and you

could create a soundproofed room out of the stuff. You wouldn't put anything else on it, it it would just be the actual physical structure. Again, it wouldn't necessarily matter what it was made out of. It was the actual nanostructure of the material itself that could allow either sound to pass through it as if there were no wall there, which would not be sound proof that be the opposite, or it could absorb the sound perfectly. It's really cool.

But this could also work with electromagnetic radiation. Uh. This is whenever anyone talks about a cloaking device, chances are they're talking about meta materials. There are other ways to achieve an apparent cloaking device, but the way that a lot of the reports, you know, if you see a press release, it tends to be about meta materials. Those usually focused specifically on microwaves, because again, microwaves, as far

as I know, entirely so. No, there's actually some that are working on with visible light, but only very specific wavelengths of visible light and lasers and lasers, so there are some, but it's limited success and also of very limited amounts because making these things is pretty hard to do. You're talking about having to build it on the nanoscale. Nanoscale, you know, you're talking about a billionth of a meter with a nanometer. I mean, that's so tiny that it's

very difficult for us to manipulate stuff. Right, it's so small. But lasers can come back in and help with that part two, right, Yeah, the University of Cambridge has some researchers who have been using unfocused lasers. I'm not entirely certain what that means. Yeah, I thought sort of the point of a lationships, well, it's it's it's coherent, I guess, but not focused. Yeah, there's different kinds of you know, like I was talking, there's different kinds of beams. That's true.

I'm sure that this is a specific type of beams, slacker beams, right, this is this is a beam that doesn't know what it's doing in its life. But no, they used unfocused laser light to pull together gold nanoparticles to stitch them together. They actually use the analogy of saying imagine that it's like a needle and thread physically

stitching these tiny particles together to form specific chains. So the hope is that this particular methodology can be scalable, because that's one of the biggest challenges with meta materials is not that we can't make certain types of stuff that could work with different wavelengths. It's that how can you make enough of it for it to be useful as opposed to just well, this is what it would do if we could build it on a larger scale, but we can't. So this is a possible UH solution

for that, and I think that's pretty awesome. There's some other methods that other kind of cutting edge or potential uses of lasers that we could see in the future. We talked about space elevators a few times on Forward Thinking exactly beam propulsion, either either using it in space itself or with a space elevator. You'd probably have a sensor that would you beam lasers directly at the sensor.

This converts the light energy into electricity, which then can turn an electric motor which can power climbers that make the elevator either climb or descend the long cable that extends out from the surface of the Earth into space. UH, that's one potential. One. Long distance communication is another. This would be a line of sight style of communication, which in some ways is less useful than say radio, but it also can allow for a greater throughput of information

than radio waves can. So if you're able to communicate with lasers across space and you need to send a lot of information to the destination let's say that there's a Mars colony, for example, then using lasers might mean you could cut down on the amount of time it takes to transmit a single message. It's still going to take several minutes to get from Earth to Mars. It's not like it's not like the laser is traveling faster than radio waves. It can just carry more information on

that on that journey, and it's by the speed of light. Yes, we don't. We don't make it move faster than other forms of electromagnetic radiation. It just can it can hold more data, is really what we're talking about. Um. There's also the use of lasers and space exploration rovers like the Curiosity rover has a laser that allows it to vaporize rocks so that uh Nasakin can have its Yeah, well it's it's partly you know, spite take that Mars

showing them whose boss. But it's also you know, the idea of of of measuring the vapors that are given off by rocks that are vaporizing so that we know more about the actually constitute uh. And then there's high throughput optical fiber communications. I'm sure you guys have seen at least at some point a news release about some research facility breaking all records in you know, the fastest data transferent speeds of all time. Now again we're talking

about moving at the speed of light. It's not really speed, it's throughput how much data was able to be moved in that span of time. And I've seen some really

interesting ones. Some use multiplexing. Multiplexing is when you use lots of different fiber optic cables and lots of different lasers of different colors in order to transmit a ton of information simultaneously across one solid cable that's just made up of a whole bunch of fiber optics um Or you could have a fiber a single fiber optic line that has multiple cores that operates in kind of the

same way. I saw a report about recently about a team in Denmark who have said that they using a seven core fiber optic cable we're able to transmittive terabits per second, which is it's hard for me to even grasp I say that now, but then keep in mind, I'm old enough to remember when uh like sixty four megabytes. Who would ever need this much memory? Yeah? Yeah, my brain just snapped back to a five and a quarter inch floppy and I was just trying to understand what

that number of terabytes even means. Yeah, it's a it's a lot of data and in a very little Now. Granted, there are other other benchmarks that are faster than that, but they're using multiplexing. They're not using a single fiber optic cable, so you know. But so if you were to use that kind of multi core fiber optic cable and then multiplex it, then you would get even more

data transference per second, which is pretty amazing. And this is stuff that we have to think about because in the era of big data, where we're creating lots and lots of information, we have to have ways to move that information around so it can be analyzed, processed, and used in a way that makes sense. I mean, it doesn't do us any good to make data if we can't do anything with it. Right. The Internet of things depends upon the ability to make action on the information

that it gathers. So we have to have all this infrastructure in order to support that kind of future that we want, because I want the world where my environment is is catering itself to my personal needs all the time and not complaining the way everybody here does when I make them do it. I got a dream anyway. Lasers are pretty awesome, one of my favorite kinds of technology for all the different reasons we've talked about. They're just so versatile and people are coming up with crazy

ways of using them all the time. It's pretty amazing. What I assume you two are are on board the laser train. I'm maybe not quite as a Michaeloman nikel as you are, but yes, ILL slightly prefer phasers, but I could understand that overall lasers are very I can I can understand that I actually I still like blasters, which, depending upon whom you ask, I have nothing to do with lasers. But that's a controversial topics. That's a whole

other episode. So if you guys have any questions about what we've talked about, or maybe you have suggestions for future episodes. Perhaps you really want us to talk about things like phasers and blasters and just explain what within how in the context of the the various forms of fiction, how do they work, and would they ever in reality? We'd love to tackle a show like that. We're just waiting for some direction from you, guys, so let us know. You can drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook

or Google Plus. We have to handle f W thinking. We look forward to hearing from you, and you'll hear from us again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go Places,