Gadgetory

lasers they can be found in everything from grocery store scanners and Printers to lethal alien blasting weapons and ill-tempered sharks to protect your freaking evil lair okay the last two are science fiction but lasers were originally developed for scientific applications that were very much real it was all the way back in 1917 that the illustrious Albert Einstein published a paper containing the underlying science that would allow light to be amplified enough to form a laser beam but it wasn't until the late 1950s that the idea really took off with the first ever laser being turned on in 1960 it didn't take long then for people to find real applications for lasers as the laser was used to treat an eye patient the very next year and then by 1969 we were using lasers to estimate the distance to the moon but how do you laser generate powerful enough light for these cool uses the idea basically boils down to the way electrons that spin around the nuclei of atoms behave you see electrons can gain or lose energy in a number of ways which can happen if lights hits them inside of a laser a powered lamp flashes and the light from this flash energizes or excites electrons in a material called a gain medium some of these excited electrons spontaneously lose their energy and in the process give off a photon an extremely tiny unit of light the photons then hit other excited electrons causing more and more photons to be released which travel at exactly the same angle and phase as the original photon eventually enough in phase photons will bounce back and forth off of two mirrors on either side of the laser and shine through one mirror which is semi-transparent forming a laser beam that you can use to play with your cat laser beams are powerful due to the way the internals amplify the light and they're narrow due to the fact that the photons are coherent or in phase and although the first laser was that familiar red color these days we can produce many different colors of laser light by using different gain media different materials will emit different wavelengths of light and also need different amounts of energy to excite their electrons both the costs of these very guest materials and their different energy requirements contribute to the fact that some colors of laser are more expensive than others with red typically being the most readily available and cheapest and with advancements in laser design it's become one of the most versatile pieces of technology invented in the last hundred years high-energy lasers have made it possible to cut things with light alone sends data over very long distances through fiber optic lines identify fingerprints with precision at crime scenes and even remove embarrassing body hair we're seeing other cool stuff too like Facebook Aquila an experimental drone that transmits data and very high bandwidth using laser light and of course we'd be remiss if we didn't mention the humble optical drive which while it might be on its way out really got people thinking about the benefits of using lasers to store access and send information but if lasers have been around for over half a century why then don't we have cool weapons like the phasers from Star Trek well the main hurdles to real-life laser guns are power we just haven't gotten energy sources powerful enough to weaponize lasers shrunk down to any kind of practical size and efficiency as lasers strong enough to cause physical damage are susceptible to overheating however active research into directed-energy weapons has made some progress in recent years just don't hold your breath waiting for someone to turn the moon into oh I don't know a space station speaking of directed things what if there was a way for people to easily direct their online payments to you how about Braintree if you're building a mobile app and searching for a simple payment solution there Braintree V zero SDK is one amazingly simple integration that gives you every way to pay 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