11 ms·

Why lasers are so brilliantly useful

136 points by prostoalex 6y ago

wincy 6y ago
A lifetime ago I worked a retail job. I’d often say to coworkers “isn’t it amazing we get to work in the future, we get to use laser beams all the time!” They’d stare at me blankly, and I’d squeeze the “laser gun” I was holding in my hands to scan a UPC. The most I’d ever get was a groan like I’d told a dad joke. No one was ever impressed. To me it’s amazing how such wondrous technological advances become mundane so quickly, the future is here and nobody is astonished.
- superkuh 6y ago
  When I was a child I'd often stare into the laser scanners at store checkouts in awe. They were so cool. Full of rotating mirrors and lasers. The modern handheld ones are a little less cool. But, re: "why lasers are useful", it's in the name. They're a way to get a spatial and phase coherent light source that's actually high power. In the old days they'd have to take a mercury arc lamp and put a pinhole in front of it. The pinhole gave it coherence but traded away all the intensity.
- nearbuy 6y ago
  On the topic of how wondrous technologies become mundane, I find it amazing how we surpassed some of the magic from Harry Potter, and no one is impressed. The first book was published in 1997. The characters have very handy magic wands, which among other things can be used as flashlights. They can send magical letters (howlers) that can yell at someone in the sender's voice. Fast forward to 2021, and suddenly everyone is walking around with a fancy tool in their pocket that can be a flashlight, instantly video chat with people, and answer questions on nearly any topic. Even the offensive spells seem inferior to modern weapons. The wizards have to recite an incantation for every shot, while assault rifles can spray 900 rounds per minute.
  - ampdepolymerase 6y ago
    The fidelius charm violates every known law of information theory and machine learning heuristics, not to mention the philosophical implications.
    - mrfusion 6y ago
      Can you explain?
      - serf 6y ago
        "The Fidelius Charm (incantation unknown) is an extremely difficult, multifaceted and potent charm that can be used to conceal a secret inside an individual's soul; the witch or wizard who houses the secret is known as the Secret Keeper.[1] A dwelling whose location has been protected by this spell is then invisible, intangible, unplottable and soundproof. This is an extremely old spell, one of the most ancient of all."[0] it's sort of like an in-world deus ex machina device, much like many of the spells and artifacts in the HP franchise. [0] : https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Fidelius_Charm https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Fidelius_Charm
        ampdepolymerase 6y ago
        The most important crux of the matter is that it can hide both a posteriori and a priori knowledge. An existing piece of information in the world can literally be rendered unavailable except to a select group of people. In the book: > As long as the Secret-Keeper refused to speak, You-Know-Who could search the village where Lily and James were staying for years and never find them, not even if he had his nose pressed against their sitting room window! This raises a lot of uncomfortable metaphysical and epistemological questions. Is this a purely psychological effect? Or does this operate on the information itself? If it operates on information itself, how big can you scale the effect? Ignoring magic, if such an effect truly exists, what are its implications for information theory? (Especially since the information is clearly not destroyed as the spell can be undone.) Information itself could become weaponized. Can a RAM bit flip be triggered though the application of such an effect? Or is this effect purely mental? What about second and third order effects? Does the effect propagate? Assume a machine learning system with the following knowledge/word vectors: Food + Italy = Pasta. If Italy is placed under the fidelius, are the vectors and weights going to magically re-arrange themselves? How will people talk about the dish pasta? Of all the spells in J.K. Rowling's world this is probably the most creative/disturbing. The whole gimmick with the seven horcruxes is merely distributed systems theory applied to a lich's phylactery, a concept that can be traced back millennia to various ancient civilizations. Splitting and and anchoring soul has nothing on arbitrarily erasing, manipulating, and restoring information itself on an infinitely large scale.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  "the future is here and nobody is astonished." Maybe thats because that is always the case (even though progress accelerated). But since for most people the future still means they slave away in a boring job, that might be a reason they are not thrilled all the time.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    on a similar note, most people only get to experience "future stuff" after it has been relentlessly optimized for cost to the point where it can be economically deployed at scale. a lot of the coolness has been stripped out at that point. on a couple occasions, I've flown in small GA planes. a bit bumpy for my tastes, but there really is a sense of wonder and awe when you can just ask the pilot to fly anywhere and see what stuff looks like from the sky. I don't get the same feeling on commercial flights; I just experience being stuck in a metal tube with beige plastic trim for a few hours. I'm still amazed by what computers can do, but to most people they are just "the thing I use to browse instagram".
- cameronh90 6y ago
  Reminds me of that Louis CK bit about internet on aeroplanes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4 "You’re flying! It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going: “Oh my God! Wow!” You’re flying! You’re sitting in a chair, in the sky!”"
  - dver 6y ago
    And just skipping over the running out of money thing. Old enough that ATM's were a big change. Before that, it was a Friday trip to the bank to get cash for the weekend. Credit
  - atoav 6y ago
    I think bringing back that absolute bafflement intentionally once in a while is good habit, especially for people working in technology. I am constantly amazed that computers work at all. The more I learn about it the more amazed I am that anything works. Especially software wise I see soo much duct tape on so many layers, like looking at a house of cards that could (or rather should!) crumble down any minute, because it seems to defy reality.
    - pengstrom 6y ago
      My illusions of technology were lifted after a course in advanced computer architecture. The true technical complexity is unfathomable enormous. I mean, correctly flickering 3 billion times per second on nm scale and being super sure you got the designs right? Cannot imagine.
      - atoav 6y ago
        And even if you did get everything right, every now and then a friggin' cosmic ray zaps through just in the right way to flip that one bit in your memory.
  - cosmodisk 6y ago
    Yes,sometimes we need to be reminded: https://youtu.be/yFj46Ei61Mg https://youtu.be/yFj46Ei61Mg [7:30-8:00] I nearly took off the sofa just by watching it.
- throwaway314158 6y ago
  > To me it’s amazing how such wondrous technological advances become mundane so quickly, the future is here and nobody is astonished. When they're ubiquitous they lose a lot of wonder. But furthermore, a lot of these advances are buried/not directly visible to the end-user. Think of a CD player: You use a laser to produce sound from (what apppears to be) a smooth plastic disc. I bet the concept of the wheel was pretty damn wondrous in the beginning too.
- d33lio 6y ago
  I just bought a proper $250 Zebra scanner for some personal inventory projects / projects that utilize pdf417 and data matrix 2d bar codes and I have to say... this is the absolutely coolest piece of "plug and play" tech I've bought in years! Granted, these scanners largely use machine vision tech but lasers are still used as a form of "dumb" auto focus aid. On another tangent, I still CANNOT believe that one company at least within the US controls 100% of the issuance of UPC codes. They sell them for up to *$30 A PIECE*! We need a "LetsEncrypt" for UPC codes - granted they serve an important role in load balancing across online stores, preventing counterfeit goods and in Amazon's case... penalizing sellers when they find the same UPC being sold on another online platform at a lower price ;) Lasers will always be cool
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  I get you. And it's not just lasers, it's so many more. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that the technological progress is quite slow, but then I slap myself in the face to remind myself that in just couple of decades we ended up having devices in our pockets just like those from sci-fi films! Lasers are great tech,I used to be fascinated by them when I was a kid devouring science literature. I hope I'll more great use cases in the near future.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  Mitchel and Webb did a very funny sketch about this https://youtu.be/8HgejSCHRi8 https://youtu.be/8HgejSCHRi8
- mc32 6y ago
  Maybe they knew it was a cheap CCD unit (I admit, not likely if it was the multi-directional units you have at checkouts, etc.)
- tuatoru 6y ago
  It was even more exciting two lifetimes ago. In short order people got electric light (magic! just flick a switch), phonographs (on hearing one, people apparently went looking for the soprano behind the curtain), moving pictures (there are stories of audiences being panicked by a film--black and white, 16 fps, grainy, silent, and all--of a train coming toward the camera), radio (plays, orchestras, and other entertainment from hundreds of miles away), and all sorts of wonderful houshold appliances like refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and electric heaters and stoves which saved tens of hours per week. And glow-in-the-dark radium watches, and telephones. Having lived through these (in a rural area, things came a bit later than in the big cities) my mother-in-law was unimpressed by the movies about Buck Rogers rocketing around the solar system and Dick Tracy's video wristwatch, taking them as just things that hadn't made it to her town yet.
- 7952 6y ago
  That is how I feel about WiFi. The fact that you can send out large amounts of data on shared channels is amazing. It is astonishing that it works as well as it does.
ralusek 6y ago
I think anything that does a controlled, specific, and consistent behavior is typically much easier to use in an experiment or utility. A laser is like a log statement for light.
pfdietz 6y ago
The rejection of lasers is simply incoherent.
- ingsoc79 6y ago
  It really is a polarizing topic.
  - lisper 6y ago
    Relax, it's just a phase. :-)
    - KIFulgore 6y ago
      But a stimulating discussion topic!
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Can definitely amplify divergence of opinions.
        DoingIsLearning 6y ago
        We are certainly diving into the lattice of this subject.
        opwieurposiu 6y ago
        These spontaneous emissions of laser puns have me in an excited state.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Looks like red, it.
        umvi 6y ago
b5 6y ago
In high school, my physics teacher told us about his time at Glasgow University where he’d worked on Scotland’s first laser. This would have been in the ’60s. He said it was fascinating, but they had no idea what to do with it then. He called it “a solution in search of a problem”.
- aqme28 6y ago
  Thankfully it found quite a few problems to solve.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- nikanj 6y ago
  The phrase “a solution in search of a problem” really reminds me of block chain. It's a really cool piece of tech, that so far has mostly enabled speculative investing and anonymous drug trade.
  - Scarblac 6y ago
    I disagree. It's a neat solution to exactly one, pretty theoretical problem: how to have digital currency without any trust involved in the system whatsoever. And nothing else, because tracking things in the real world instead of currency requires trust that what's on the chain really is what is in the real world, and besides there are lots of highly trusted institutions in the world that it's not practical to do without, like the judiciary system.
    - a1369209993 6y ago
      No, a neat solution to one, not at all theoretical problem: how to maintain a append-only database (eg mapping domain names to registrant public keys and (less critically) append-only lists of signed IP addresses) without giving any participant the ability to either redact the database (eg remove the registration for thepiratebay.org) or prevent (specific or any) future appendments (eg, prevent new IP addresses for thepiratebay.org). You're quite right that "solution in search of a problem" is not accurate, though.
iOmkarBirje 6y ago
If you use Twitter and got some amazing tweets then you must try this https://twitter.com/LaserTweets https://twitter.com/LaserTweets
gdebel 6y ago
Lasers revolutionized medicine, particularly in two specialties where the organ is accessible to light: dermatology and ophthalmology. We use : - excimer laser (UV) for their photoablative properties, to change to anterior corneal radius of curvature in refractive surgery (fun fact: the first attempt to use this laser was pure serendipity : "oh I got this excimer in my lab, here is a chicken sandwich, let's see what is gives on organic tissues") - ND:Yag laser to pierce a small hole in the iris when it is necessary to establish a communication, or to locally break the posterior lens capsule when it opacifies after cataract surgery ; those two procedures where far from benign when they had to be performed surgically , today it is made in the office in a few seconds - femtosecond lasers to cut a thin layer of cornea , which is lifted , before applying the excimer laser, in LASIK procedures - diode lasers to reduce the intraocular pressure by destroying parts of the ciliary body in very specific cases - various lasers to photocoagulate lesions on the retina.... Ophthalmology without lasers would look like a middle-ages practice.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  A few more I can think of, Laser Doppler imaging of blood vessels, and certain types of oxymetry also use laser diodes instead of LEDs. Laser is pretty much everywhere.
porphyra 6y ago
I'm pretty excited about the future of VCSEL technology. Not only is it profoundly useful for lidar and stuff, dense arrays of lasers could also be used for all kinds of display technology. If we can somehow make cheap VCSELs that emit blue or green light, red, green, and blue VCSELs could even take over general purpose lighting. One imagines a TV where each subpixel is a VCSEL. It would potentially be better even than microLED displays. The spectral purity would give really amazing colors.
the_only_law 6y ago
I’ve been interested in applications of visible light for a short time now, but I started watching styropyro videos on YouTube even more recently and find myself suddenly interested in lasers, even for stupid, impractical usages.
zwieback 6y ago
Technically it should be LASER, since it's an acronym.
- sleavey 6y ago
  I am part of an organisation called the LAAC, which is the LVK Academic Advisory Committee. The LVK is the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration. LIGO is the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory, and Laser is Light Amplification from Stimulated Emission of Radiation. So the L of LAAC is a 5th order initialism...
  - jandrese 6y ago
    It makes you want to address a paper to: Light Amplification from Stimulated Emission of Radiation Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory-Virgo-Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector Academic Advisory Committee. It's like looking at the preprocessor output from some template heavy C++ code.
  - porphyra 6y ago
    Reminds me of GTK which stands for GIMP Toolkit where GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program where GNU stands for GNU is Not UNIX where UNIX stands for Uniplexed Information and Computing System And on top of that there is a variety of software built on GTK whose names are acronyms containing a G that stands for GTK.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- porphyra 6y ago
  By now the word laser is so common that it is a just an uncapitalised word accepted by major dictionaries [1][2]. There are also inflections (lased, lasing) [3]. Nobody spells it in all caps now. Likewise with radar and soon lidar. [1] https://www.lexico.com/definition/laser https://www.lexico.com/definition/laser [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/laser https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/laser [3] https://www.lexico.com/definition/lase https://www.lexico.com/definition/lase
sillyquiet 6y ago
Tangential, but there are so many common in-use technologies we should be in awe of but aren't. I mean, just look at the average home or apartment built relatively recently. For example, we have reached standards of insulation, weather-proofing, and energy efficiency that would just blow the mind of any builder from just 30 years ago (not that there isn't room for improvement). It's not flying cars or robot butlers, but it impresses me at least.
xanax 6y ago
Optical Tweezers. Basically people use lasers to move microscopic particles around. Lasers can also levitate things. Here's a really interesting video on this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq7GaO8iqu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq7GaO8iqu8
aksss 6y ago
Non paywalled link: https://archive.is/ho2FH https://archive.is/ho2FH
jonplackett 6y ago
Mitchel and Webb did a very funny sketch about this https://youtu.be/8HgejSCHRi8 https://youtu.be/8HgejSCHRi8
1_2__4 6y ago
One of the things I find fascinating about lasers is their history is an excellent instructional tool for how science copes with things it doesn't understand. When lasers were invented, we didn't know how they worked. A lot of laypersons don't even understand this as a concept. We knew how to build lasers, we knew they worked (what they did), but we didn't know the mechanism by which they did it. Their adoption as a part of our world came, for awhile, in tandem with our learning about how they function. This has all sorts of fascinating implications for people who have never been exposed to it before. I think intuitively a lot of people think discovery and adoption goes understanding -> invention -> application, but sometimes it's invention -> application -> understanding. We, as humans, are capable of making use of things we don't fully understand the inner workings of, and we can even build our knowledge on top of what at first glance appears to be a base of ignorance. I read a book awhile ago that described this approach thusly: Imagine there are aliens who visit earth who can't see objects with white/black patterns on them. Now imagine them at a soccer game: they can easily tell something organized is going on, that there seems to be some object of focus for the players, etc. You could go so far as to figure out many of the rules of the game, all without ever actually being able to see the ball. (the thought exercise is used in the book to also demonstrate the theoretical physics and the scientific method, and concludes with one of the aliens eventually saying, "Let's presume, for a moment, that there's a ball down there they're all chasing..." and trying to prove that hypothesis).
discordance 6y ago
My solid state physics teacher at university used to joke that lasers rely on oscillation rather than amplification so they should be called losers. It didn't stick because no one likes a loser.
Ansil849 6y ago
This article should have been titled 'The Real Genius Behind Lasers'.

136 points by prostoalex 6y ago

A lifetime ago I worked a retail job. I’d often say to coworkers “isn’t it amazing we get to work in the future, we get to use laser beams all the time!” They’d stare at me blankly, and I’d squeeze the “laser gun” I was holding in my hands to scan a UPC. The most I’d ever get was a groan like I’d told a dad joke. No one was ever impressed. To me it’s amazing how such wondrous technological advances become mundane so quickly, the future is here and nobody is astonished.

superkuh 6y ago
When I was a child I'd often stare into the laser scanners at store checkouts in awe. They were so cool. Full of rotating mirrors and lasers. The modern handheld ones are a little less cool. But, re: "why lasers are useful", it's in the name. They're a way to get a spatial and phase coherent light source that's actually high power. In the old days they'd have to take a mercury arc lamp and put a pinhole in front of it. The pinhole gave it coherence but traded away all the intensity.
nearbuy 6y ago
On the topic of how wondrous technologies become mundane, I find it amazing how we surpassed some of the magic from Harry Potter, and no one is impressed. The first book was published in 1997. The characters have very handy magic wands, which among other things can be used as flashlights. They can send magical letters (howlers) that can yell at someone in the sender's voice. Fast forward to 2021, and suddenly everyone is walking around with a fancy tool in their pocket that can be a flashlight, instantly video chat with people, and answer questions on nearly any topic. Even the offensive spells seem inferior to modern weapons. The wizards have to recite an incantation for every shot, while assault rifles can spray 900 rounds per minute.
- ampdepolymerase 6y ago
  The fidelius charm violates every known law of information theory and machine learning heuristics, not to mention the philosophical implications.
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    Can you explain?
    - serf 6y ago
      "The Fidelius Charm (incantation unknown) is an extremely difficult, multifaceted and potent charm that can be used to conceal a secret inside an individual's soul; the witch or wizard who houses the secret is known as the Secret Keeper.[1] A dwelling whose location has been protected by this spell is then invisible, intangible, unplottable and soundproof. This is an extremely old spell, one of the most ancient of all."[0] it's sort of like an in-world deus ex machina device, much like many of the spells and artifacts in the HP franchise. [0] : https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Fidelius_Charm https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Fidelius_Charm
      - ampdepolymerase 6y ago
        The most important crux of the matter is that it can hide both a posteriori and a priori knowledge. An existing piece of information in the world can literally be rendered unavailable except to a select group of people. In the book: > As long as the Secret-Keeper refused to speak, You-Know-Who could search the village where Lily and James were staying for years and never find them, not even if he had his nose pressed against their sitting room window! This raises a lot of uncomfortable metaphysical and epistemological questions. Is this a purely psychological effect? Or does this operate on the information itself? If it operates on information itself, how big can you scale the effect? Ignoring magic, if such an effect truly exists, what are its implications for information theory? (Especially since the information is clearly not destroyed as the spell can be undone.) Information itself could become weaponized. Can a RAM bit flip be triggered though the application of such an effect? Or is this effect purely mental? What about second and third order effects? Does the effect propagate? Assume a machine learning system with the following knowledge/word vectors: Food + Italy = Pasta. If Italy is placed under the fidelius, are the vectors and weights going to magically re-arrange themselves? How will people talk about the dish pasta? Of all the spells in J.K. Rowling's world this is probably the most creative/disturbing. The whole gimmick with the seven horcruxes is merely distributed systems theory applied to a lich's phylactery, a concept that can be traced back millennia to various ancient civilizations. Splitting and and anchoring soul has nothing on arbitrarily erasing, manipulating, and restoring information itself on an infinitely large scale.
hutzlibu 6y ago
"the future is here and nobody is astonished." Maybe thats because that is always the case (even though progress accelerated). But since for most people the future still means they slave away in a boring job, that might be a reason they are not thrilled all the time.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  on a similar note, most people only get to experience "future stuff" after it has been relentlessly optimized for cost to the point where it can be economically deployed at scale. a lot of the coolness has been stripped out at that point. on a couple occasions, I've flown in small GA planes. a bit bumpy for my tastes, but there really is a sense of wonder and awe when you can just ask the pilot to fly anywhere and see what stuff looks like from the sky. I don't get the same feeling on commercial flights; I just experience being stuck in a metal tube with beige plastic trim for a few hours. I'm still amazed by what computers can do, but to most people they are just "the thing I use to browse instagram".
cameronh90 6y ago
Reminds me of that Louis CK bit about internet on aeroplanes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4 "You’re flying! It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going: “Oh my God! Wow!” You’re flying! You’re sitting in a chair, in the sky!”"
- dver 6y ago
  And just skipping over the running out of money thing. Old enough that ATM's were a big change. Before that, it was a Friday trip to the bank to get cash for the weekend. Credit
- atoav 6y ago
  I think bringing back that absolute bafflement intentionally once in a while is good habit, especially for people working in technology. I am constantly amazed that computers work at all. The more I learn about it the more amazed I am that anything works. Especially software wise I see soo much duct tape on so many layers, like looking at a house of cards that could (or rather should!) crumble down any minute, because it seems to defy reality.
  - pengstrom 6y ago
    My illusions of technology were lifted after a course in advanced computer architecture. The true technical complexity is unfathomable enormous. I mean, correctly flickering 3 billion times per second on nm scale and being super sure you got the designs right? Cannot imagine.
    - atoav 6y ago
      And even if you did get everything right, every now and then a friggin' cosmic ray zaps through just in the right way to flip that one bit in your memory.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  Yes,sometimes we need to be reminded: https://youtu.be/yFj46Ei61Mg https://youtu.be/yFj46Ei61Mg [7:30-8:00] I nearly took off the sofa just by watching it.
throwaway314158 6y ago
> To me it’s amazing how such wondrous technological advances become mundane so quickly, the future is here and nobody is astonished. When they're ubiquitous they lose a lot of wonder. But furthermore, a lot of these advances are buried/not directly visible to the end-user. Think of a CD player: You use a laser to produce sound from (what apppears to be) a smooth plastic disc. I bet the concept of the wheel was pretty damn wondrous in the beginning too.
d33lio 6y ago
I just bought a proper $250 Zebra scanner for some personal inventory projects / projects that utilize pdf417 and data matrix 2d bar codes and I have to say... this is the absolutely coolest piece of "plug and play" tech I've bought in years! Granted, these scanners largely use machine vision tech but lasers are still used as a form of "dumb" auto focus aid. On another tangent, I still CANNOT believe that one company at least within the US controls 100% of the issuance of UPC codes. They sell them for up to *$30 A PIECE*! We need a "LetsEncrypt" for UPC codes - granted they serve an important role in load balancing across online stores, preventing counterfeit goods and in Amazon's case... penalizing sellers when they find the same UPC being sold on another online platform at a lower price ;) Lasers will always be cool
cosmodisk 6y ago
I get you. And it's not just lasers, it's so many more. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that the technological progress is quite slow, but then I slap myself in the face to remind myself that in just couple of decades we ended up having devices in our pockets just like those from sci-fi films! Lasers are great tech,I used to be fascinated by them when I was a kid devouring science literature. I hope I'll more great use cases in the near future.
jonplackett 6y ago
Mitchel and Webb did a very funny sketch about this https://youtu.be/8HgejSCHRi8 https://youtu.be/8HgejSCHRi8
mc32 6y ago
Maybe they knew it was a cheap CCD unit (I admit, not likely if it was the multi-directional units you have at checkouts, etc.)
tuatoru 6y ago
It was even more exciting two lifetimes ago. In short order people got electric light (magic! just flick a switch), phonographs (on hearing one, people apparently went looking for the soprano behind the curtain), moving pictures (there are stories of audiences being panicked by a film--black and white, 16 fps, grainy, silent, and all--of a train coming toward the camera), radio (plays, orchestras, and other entertainment from hundreds of miles away), and all sorts of wonderful houshold appliances like refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and electric heaters and stoves which saved tens of hours per week. And glow-in-the-dark radium watches, and telephones. Having lived through these (in a rural area, things came a bit later than in the big cities) my mother-in-law was unimpressed by the movies about Buck Rogers rocketing around the solar system and Dick Tracy's video wristwatch, taking them as just things that hadn't made it to her town yet.
7952 6y ago
That is how I feel about WiFi. The fact that you can send out large amounts of data on shared channels is amazing. It is astonishing that it works as well as it does.

ralusek 6y ago

I think anything that does a controlled, specific, and consistent behavior is typically much easier to use in an experiment or utility. A laser is like a log statement for light.

pfdietz 6y ago

The rejection of lasers is simply incoherent.

ingsoc79 6y ago
It really is a polarizing topic.
- lisper 6y ago
  Relax, it's just a phase. :-)
  - KIFulgore 6y ago
    But a stimulating discussion topic!
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Can definitely amplify divergence of opinions.
      - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
        We are certainly diving into the lattice of this subject.
        opwieurposiu 6y ago
        These spontaneous emissions of laser puns have me in an excited state.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Looks like red, it.
        umvi 6y ago

b5 6y ago

In high school, my physics teacher told us about his time at Glasgow University where he’d worked on Scotland’s first laser. This would have been in the ’60s. He said it was fascinating, but they had no idea what to do with it then. He called it “a solution in search of a problem”.

aqme28 6y ago
Thankfully it found quite a few problems to solve.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
nikanj 6y ago
The phrase “a solution in search of a problem” really reminds me of block chain. It's a really cool piece of tech, that so far has mostly enabled speculative investing and anonymous drug trade.
- Scarblac 6y ago
  I disagree. It's a neat solution to exactly one, pretty theoretical problem: how to have digital currency without any trust involved in the system whatsoever. And nothing else, because tracking things in the real world instead of currency requires trust that what's on the chain really is what is in the real world, and besides there are lots of highly trusted institutions in the world that it's not practical to do without, like the judiciary system.
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    No, a neat solution to one, not at all theoretical problem: how to maintain a append-only database (eg mapping domain names to registrant public keys and (less critically) append-only lists of signed IP addresses) without giving any participant the ability to either redact the database (eg remove the registration for thepiratebay.org) or prevent (specific or any) future appendments (eg, prevent new IP addresses for thepiratebay.org). You're quite right that "solution in search of a problem" is not accurate, though.

iOmkarBirje 6y ago

If you use Twitter and got some amazing tweets then you must try this https://twitter.com/LaserTweets https://twitter.com/LaserTweets

gdebel 6y ago

Lasers revolutionized medicine, particularly in two specialties where the organ is accessible to light: dermatology and ophthalmology. We use : - excimer laser (UV) for their photoablative properties, to change to anterior corneal radius of curvature in refractive surgery (fun fact: the first attempt to use this laser was pure serendipity : "oh I got this excimer in my lab, here is a chicken sandwich, let's see what is gives on organic tissues") - ND:Yag laser to pierce a small hole in the iris when it is necessary to establish a communication, or to locally break the posterior lens capsule when it opacifies after cataract surgery ; those two procedures where far from benign when they had to be performed surgically , today it is made in the office in a few seconds - femtosecond lasers to cut a thin layer of cornea , which is lifted , before applying the excimer laser, in LASIK procedures - diode lasers to reduce the intraocular pressure by destroying parts of the ciliary body in very specific cases - various lasers to photocoagulate lesions on the retina.... Ophthalmology without lasers would look like a middle-ages practice.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago
A few more I can think of, Laser Doppler imaging of blood vessels, and certain types of oxymetry also use laser diodes instead of LEDs. Laser is pretty much everywhere.

porphyra 6y ago

I'm pretty excited about the future of VCSEL technology. Not only is it profoundly useful for lidar and stuff, dense arrays of lasers could also be used for all kinds of display technology. If we can somehow make cheap VCSELs that emit blue or green light, red, green, and blue VCSELs could even take over general purpose lighting. One imagines a TV where each subpixel is a VCSEL. It would potentially be better even than microLED displays. The spectral purity would give really amazing colors.

the_only_law 6y ago

I’ve been interested in applications of visible light for a short time now, but I started watching styropyro videos on YouTube even more recently and find myself suddenly interested in lasers, even for stupid, impractical usages.

zwieback 6y ago

Technically it should be LASER, since it's an acronym.

sleavey 6y ago
I am part of an organisation called the LAAC, which is the LVK Academic Advisory Committee. The LVK is the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration. LIGO is the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory, and Laser is Light Amplification from Stimulated Emission of Radiation. So the L of LAAC is a 5th order initialism...
- jandrese 6y ago
  It makes you want to address a paper to: Light Amplification from Stimulated Emission of Radiation Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory-Virgo-Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector Academic Advisory Committee. It's like looking at the preprocessor output from some template heavy C++ code.
- porphyra 6y ago
  Reminds me of GTK which stands for GIMP Toolkit where GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program where GNU stands for GNU is Not UNIX where UNIX stands for Uniplexed Information and Computing System And on top of that there is a variety of software built on GTK whose names are acronyms containing a G that stands for GTK.
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porphyra 6y ago
By now the word laser is so common that it is a just an uncapitalised word accepted by major dictionaries [1][2]. There are also inflections (lased, lasing) [3]. Nobody spells it in all caps now. Likewise with radar and soon lidar. [1] https://www.lexico.com/definition/laser https://www.lexico.com/definition/laser [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/laser https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/laser [3] https://www.lexico.com/definition/lase https://www.lexico.com/definition/lase

sillyquiet 6y ago

Tangential, but there are so many common in-use technologies we should be in awe of but aren't. I mean, just look at the average home or apartment built relatively recently. For example, we have reached standards of insulation, weather-proofing, and energy efficiency that would just blow the mind of any builder from just 30 years ago (not that there isn't room for improvement). It's not flying cars or robot butlers, but it impresses me at least.

xanax 6y ago

Optical Tweezers. Basically people use lasers to move microscopic particles around. Lasers can also levitate things. Here's a really interesting video on this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq7GaO8iqu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq7GaO8iqu8

aksss 6y ago

Non paywalled link: https://archive.is/ho2FH https://archive.is/ho2FH

jonplackett 6y ago

Mitchel and Webb did a very funny sketch about this https://youtu.be/8HgejSCHRi8 https://youtu.be/8HgejSCHRi8

1_2__4 6y ago

One of the things I find fascinating about lasers is their history is an excellent instructional tool for how science copes with things it doesn't understand. When lasers were invented, we didn't know how they worked. A lot of laypersons don't even understand this as a concept. We knew how to build lasers, we knew they worked (what they did), but we didn't know the mechanism by which they did it. Their adoption as a part of our world came, for awhile, in tandem with our learning about how they function. This has all sorts of fascinating implications for people who have never been exposed to it before. I think intuitively a lot of people think discovery and adoption goes understanding -> invention -> application, but sometimes it's invention -> application -> understanding. We, as humans, are capable of making use of things we don't fully understand the inner workings of, and we can even build our knowledge on top of what at first glance appears to be a base of ignorance. I read a book awhile ago that described this approach thusly: Imagine there are aliens who visit earth who can't see objects with white/black patterns on them. Now imagine them at a soccer game: they can easily tell something organized is going on, that there seems to be some object of focus for the players, etc. You could go so far as to figure out many of the rules of the game, all without ever actually being able to see the ball. (the thought exercise is used in the book to also demonstrate the theoretical physics and the scientific method, and concludes with one of the aliens eventually saying, "Let's presume, for a moment, that there's a ball down there they're all chasing..." and trying to prove that hypothesis).

discordance 6y ago

My solid state physics teacher at university used to joke that lasers rely on oscillation rather than amplification so they should be called losers. It didn't stick because no one likes a loser.

Ansil849 6y ago

This article should have been titled 'The Real Genius Behind Lasers'.