All ultramans in the world were killed by Newton's Flaming Laser Sword

Image credit: Andrew Santellan/Unsplash

Slashing, blocking, deadly and elegant lightsabers are the most handy weapons in the hands of jedi. In reality, people tried all the possibilities of making lightsabers, lasers, flames, plasma, and in the end it was difficult to succeed. Perhaps, what we need is a flaming laser sword from Newton, the "grandfather of physics".

Written by | Wang Yu

Review |27

The science fiction work "Star Wars" has attracted so many fans, and cernion research (CERN) joked on April Fool's Day in 2015 that they discovered the "Force" in Star Wars. Another attraction in this sci-fi work is the Lightsaber, a weapon that is very light but can instantly cut through everything it touches. What's more, it looks handsome.

There are a lot of "lightsabers" that can be searched on the shopping platform. But when you buy them home, you will find that they are all "inferior goods", but they are milky white tubes with a light strip in the middle. Although it looks bright and shiny when it is energized, after the power is cut off, the pipe that protrudes the handle of the sword is really obstructive, making people feel as if they have bought an "Ultraman transformer".

Lightsaber without light

If you're tired of "imitations" and want a real lightsaber. Then we need to first clarify what we can use to make a lightsaber.

As the name suggests, Lightsaber is made of light. And because lightsabers are so powerful, it is generally believed that only lasers can achieve such power. But there's no way we can make the light travel a certain distance and then suddenly disappear, like the lightsaber in the movie. Even if we ignore this, this infinitely long "laser weapon" can be forcibly called a "lightsaber", and we lose one of the most wonderful points of lightsaber fighting - blocking.

Only lightsabers can block lightsabers. Unfortunately, photons are bosons, and this property determines that photons in the same state can be superimposed. That is to say, although we can achieve the cutting effect by the heat brought by the laser, two identical lasers can only pass through each other and will not collide. Such a lightsaber naturally could not withstand the attack of another lightsaber.

However, photons are not absolutely impossible to collide, and there is a class of photons that can - high-energy photons. Photons are photons' own antiparticles, and two high-energy photons can collide, resulting in a bunch of positive and negative electron pairs. However, these high-energy photons are too energetic to belong to the gamma-ray category, far beyond the visible light band and unable to be seen by the human eye. As long as this lightsaber can be seen by us, it cannot be made of light.

Since there is no wife in the wife cake, there is no light in the lightsaber. Then we have to consider another popular option - plasma.

To study medicine is also to learn lightsabers

In real life, we do use the technique of plasma cutting metals - plasma arc cutting: using high-frequency arcs to break up gas molecules, ionize, form plasma, and then spray them onto the metal, and when the plasma is recombined, it will release a lot of heat. In addition, the plasma is conductive, and the current can form a circuit through the plasma and the material, which continues to heat. In some extreme cases, this technology can even achieve a high temperature of 20 000 °C.

However, this is, after all, an industrial welding and cutting technology, and when using this technology, we need to have professional skills, adequate power supply, and most importantly, safety regulations that can protect us safely, but always interrupt our "wild thinking". Not to mention that industrial equipment such as plasma cutting machines is not convenient to carry around.

In 2019, Professor Fu Wenjie's team at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China proposed a safe lightsaber. They can use microwaves to control the plasma, enabling a high efficiency low-temperature microwave-driven atmospheric pressure plasma jet. The paper was published in Applied Physics Letters.

Image credit: Fu et al., , 2019

The same plasma beam, the plasma cutter temperature is high enough to be used to cut metal, but Professor Fu Wenjie's team can reduce its temperature to a touchable level. Of course, this beam of plasma can also be heated to a higher temperature. Although this lightsaber is short, it can become a "lightsaber" in the hands of doctors, killing microorganisms, coagulating blood, and cutting lesions. In reality, no Jedi can save your life, but a doctor with a lightsaber in his hand can.

"Forever 50 years" plasma

However, this kind of "low-energy" lightsaber naturally cannot satisfy fans who are not too big to watch the hilarity. Video blogger Hacksmith Industries has also tried to make a real lightsaber. They found a tank of liquefied petroleum gas, vaporized it and spewed it out, and let the LPG and air burn to produce plasma. In this process, they also use specific nozzles to try to maintain the ions in a stable shape...

Image credit: Hacksmith Industries

The quick-reacting reader may have reacted, and yes, they are actually making a flamethrower, or a flamethrower with a very stable flame. They can also control the color of the flame through flame reaction. While the visuals are great, and it's true that you can cut a lot of objects with heat, this lightsaber doesn't achieve blocking.

In fact, the several plasma "lightsabers" mentioned above cannot achieve the blocking in Star Wars. If we want to achieve blocking, we may need plasma controlled by electromagnetic fields: a special electromagnetic field is used to confine the plasma to a lightsaber, and when two lightsabers collide with each other, the two electromagnetic fields may be able to produce repulsion – like a maglev train.

But the immaturity of this technology is precisely the reason why it is difficult for us to achieve controlled nuclear fusion. The realization of controlled nuclear fusion is still far away, 20 years ago some people predicted that controlled nuclear fusion will be achieved in 50 years, but today, the predicted time seems to be 50 years. With such a technological divide in place, we don't seem to be able to make a real lightsaber in our lifetime.

Newton's Flaming Laser Sword

But even if we can't build a real lightsaber, that doesn't stop scientists from building a "Newton's Flaming Laser Sword." This is a concept proposed by the Australian mathematician Mike Alder in the journal Modern Philosophy in 2004, and the title of the article is "Newton's Flaming Laser Sword".

Older, a former assistant professor at the University of Western Australia, has worked on artificial neural networks, or in a more fashionable way of saying it — an artificial intelligence. He was popular with his students for his love of writing, but fame always had two sides. One day, he was "blocked" by a philosophy student. The student argued that Alder could not achieve artificial intelligence at all, because in his view, the computer scientist had only set up a special computer program in advance, and the computer program itself could not think, and the program could not even make mistakes, so it was impossible to achieve artificial intelligence.

This made Alder feel angry and funny, explaining that the "artificial intelligence" he was studying could only identify a number that looked like a 5 into a 5, and a number that looked like a 3 into a 3. The recognition rate is not always so perfect, and sometimes there will be a mistake.

The student kept arguing that as long as the program was written by a person, it was impossible to think in itself, and even if it was a mistake, it was the person who wrote the program who deliberately made the program wrong. In short, the student "warned" Olde not to waste any more efforts on artificial intelligence.

This attitude upset Alder. He never tried to argue against the unproven question of whether "artificial intelligence" has intelligence, he just wanted his neural network not to recognize 5 as 3. So he wrote Newton's Flaming Laser Sword, which introduced Newton's principles in studying physics (or natural philosophy)—to verify only what could be verified, and to those things that could not be verified, regardless of whether they were asked.

Inspired by Newton, he summed up his philosophical principles of science in the article -

On the one hand, we should not dispute a proposition unless we can prove from precise logic that there is an observable result; on the other hand, if we want to prove that a proposition is true, we must list the observable results after it is established.

Newton's Blazing Laser Sword emoji. There is no evidence that the historical Newton had a physical flaming laser sword. Image source: imgur

For example, before learning of this theory, you can suspect that your friend is actually Ultraman's human body, hiding himself all the time, never telling anyone else, and never changing. But after picking up Newton's Flaming Laser Sword, you'll find that since you can never prove that your friend is an Ultraman, you have no reason to suspect that your friend is an Ultraman.

Olde named the theory "Newton's Flaming Laser Sword" because it was "sharper and more dangerous than Occam's razor."

So, even though we may not be able to build a real lightsaber for a while, all the Ultramans in the world were killed by Newton's Flaming Laser Sword.

Reference Links:

https://home.cern/news/news/cern/cern-researchers-confirm-existence-force

https://www.sciencealert.com/could-we-ever-make-a-real-lightsaber

https://www.sciencealert.com/we-re-one-step-closer-to-healing-wounds-with-tiny-light-sabres

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5108538

https://philosophynow.org/issues/46/Newtons_Flaming_Laser_Sword

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Source: Global Science

Edit: fiufiu