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holographic technology


shaded6

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Even if you could create a lightsaber with light, it would be too weak to see. Also, our going to lightspeed has nothing to do with light, other then matching it's speed. It would involve the conversion of matter into energy and accelerating that energy to a velocity greater than or equal to 183,000 miles per second. The problem there is converting a person or other object to energy, then converting it back to matter, with their physical shape intact. Also, I holographic technology would have to be implemented with a laser-type light source, not the kind of light from a flashlight, because laser light can be used with a greater degree of control, such as controlling its path, length, width, and color.

 

***Edit***

As for your above post, no. Most light has no practical use other than lighting things up.

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well it would have to be held in a form, constricted to that form. if anyone could harness a mass of light or holographic mass then it could be possible. we need to know how holographs are made, not what we think they are made of.

 

seth

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Fairly long (possibly boring) discussion on light, optics, holography....

Having studied optics ad nauseum and working with optics daily, I can (unfortunately) tell you that lightsabers, real or holographic, are not currently possible in our world with science as we know it. "Holographic" technology as seen in Star Wars/Star Trek/etc. is entirely imaginary (if very creative), and is not based on the science that makes up the holograms you see all over the place on our credit or bank cards or other security items. Holography, in our world, is a fancy kind of photograph.

The exact makeup of light is debated to this day, but the general convention is that light acts both as energy (and thus follows waveform physics) and packets of particles (photons, following quantum physics). Once light is emitted, it continues from its source indefinitely unless something stops it. Theoretically you actually could shine a flashlight on an airplane 20k miles up if there was a vacuum between the flashlight and the plane, but the atmospheric particles reflect the light off in various directions, so it's dissipated or scattered before it hits the airplane. Light does not 'expand' into a room to join daylight--if you could separate out just the light from the flashlight, it would do exactly the same thing in a dark room that it does in the light. However, we perceive it differently because there's little/no contrast between a light room and the light from a flashlight, while in a dark room there's a lot of contrast between the flashlight and the dark room.

The main things you can do with light: reflect it in a different direction (fun with mirrors!), refract it (aka focus the light--using a lens (usually) to bend light so it focuses in a different place (this is what your glasses do), and diffract it (cause interference by blocking a portion of a particular light ray, but that's incredibly simplistic). Holography and 'jumping to lightspeed' are entirely different. The only relation between lightspeed and light is that lightspeed refers to how quickly light travels. It has no other relation to the function of light itself. You don't have to understand wave and particle physics to understand Einstein's famous equation.

The Reagan era "Star Wars" idea was based on using high-tech anti-missile targeting technology. Basically, the theory was if you could target an enemy's missiles in time, you could send out another missile of your own to intercept and destroy it before the enemy missile could get close enough to you to cause damage.

The 'starting a fire with a lens' thing--yep, works really well, especially on a sunny day. If you have a strong enough lens, it'll work even on a cloudy day. However, I urge everyone playing with this to do so with great caution--you don't want to do this in the middle of a very dry forest, for instance, and certainly no where were someone could get injured or where you would cause a fire. This is also the reason why we tell people not to look directly at an eclipse--the little lens inside our eye right behind our iris (the colored part of the eye) is actually an extremely powerful lens, and even though there's very little light coming through during an eclipse, it's more than enough for the lens in our eye to focus right on the retina with enough energy to burn the retina.

In the 'there is no ignorance, there is knowledge' phase, there are a lot of great books on light and its properties in the library. You can also research online--I reviewed some Wikipedia entries and they may or may not be a little too technical for some (i.e. you probably need high school physics as a minimum to fully understand the entire entries), but they have some good intro material. Words to check out include reflection, refraction, diffraction, focus, lens, light wavelength, color, for a good start.

I now return you to lightsaber discussions....

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but we're not trying to make "actual lightsabers." we're trying to make it so you dont have to buy cheesy plastic ones....

 

which, i WONT do.

 

so the possibility of harnessing light in a particular form, size and length is not possible?

 

my idea is actually hard to make. i mean, i see it clearly in my mind, so i can try and grasp what it would be like, but that doesnt make it real. yeah i have seen the mirror holographs, they are actually neat.

 

seth

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I was talking about the (holograms) in 2D. But as for light expanding indefinitely, it won't anywhere, it will dissipate anywhere, which is why there are limits to how far we can see into space, there's no light to view, thus the human eye cannot view it. If light went on indefinitely, then space would be lit up, as stars would act like lightbulbs and create light for the entire universe. But the universe is dark, cold, and therefore, not lit.

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@Astrotoy7 :) At least I gave fair warning so someone could skip it if desired! Yes, I'm an education nut. Anyway, you should have seen the guy who taught my class in physical optics. Imagine an over-warm room with bad ventilation stuffed with about 58 people, all listening to a monotone professor drone on about the derivation of the diffraction formulas....Ugh. I always had a Diet Pepsi or coffee for caffeine in that class.

 

@shaded6 With our current knowledge of physics/light, harnessing light in a particular shape form is not possible. It is possible to emit light at a certain width (think penlight vs. flashlight vs. giant spotlight) and at a certain wavelength (i.e., a certain color), and make lasers (which makes the light of a certain wavelength all line up in the same direction, increasing the power). You can emit light, the hard part is getting it to stop at a certain point or come back to the emitter like it would with a lightsaber without something like a mirror at the tip of the lightsaber (which wouldn't make it look very lightsaber-ish then). You'd also need something to diffuse the light so that you could see it from the side (which is the purpose of the plastic or glass in lightsaber replicas--so you can see the light if you stand or hold it in various positions). The holograms are pictures that look 3-D because of how light is manipulated when making the picture. Right now we can't make them 'pop up' out of the material in which they're printed to float above the page, which is what I imagine you're thinking about with your lightsaber replica. Who knows what will be available in the future, though!

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lol, do we have plasma and forcefields? trying to come to a common ground on how we can make an actual lightsaber, not out of fictional materials or any of that ****, a replica in nature to how the lightsaber is; out of a material that makes it look and feel real. i dont know what it would be made out of, first thought was holographs.

 

seth

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We have force fields (MRIs are giant magnetic force fields), but nothing that could contain light, unless the research gurus at MIT have come up with something really cool that I haven't heard about.

I wouldn't want to hold a plasma anything--too darn hot!

I think we're stuck with plastic, glass, or phosphorescent paint for the moment....

:)

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**** the plactic, i want something that retracts when i press the button. lol. i go to my first and ONLY convention. i walk in with a dark Sith robe and a lightsaber at my side. i kind of just stand there until someone makes conversation about whatever. i try to make it a conversation only a Sith could come up with. the person gets angry or weirded out or whatever, offensive. i take my lightsaber off the belt and i click the button. lol. then, i would use the force to pull a coca cola from a near by table, take a swig and walk out the door. yeah, like thats going to happen.

 

man, it would be so ****in cool to have the sounds aswell. i read somewhere on comentary of lucas that they wanted to construct actual lightsabers out of holographs or something like that, i think it was at the beginning of all the old, VHS, movie introducteries that i heard him say that.

 

seth

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lol, do we have plasma and forcefields? trying to come to a common ground on how we can make an actual lightsaber, not out of fictional materials or any of that ****, a replica in nature to how the lightsaber is; out of a material that makes it look and feel real. i dont know what it would be made out of, first thought was holographs.

 

seth

 

plasma and forcefields exist.

 

Fire and lizards and wings exist. Putting them together is the tricky part.

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