How Hot Would a Light Saber Really Be?

Datagod asks: "Has anyone ever calculated the temperature you would need to be able to slice through steel like it was thin air? How hot would a light saber really need to be? Also, I am assuming that at least some of the metal would be vaporized and the expanding gas would fling bits of molten metal at the saber wielder. Wouldn't your average Jedi be horribly scarred from all this."

Comments

Nanotechnology

[Travoltus]

A nanotech style light saber would be the best way to go. Nanites could burn through their target and work on a whitelist principle: a friend's DNA would be ignored.

Quite literally you could ram your nanotech light saber through a hostage taker and the nanites would decline to harm the whitelisted hostage.

I can't believe no one else thought of this. PATENT!!!!!! OMFG I am teh pwnz0r take that George Lucas!!!!!!

Mod me please?

[4D6963]

OK, since today the weirdest stuff happens out here, can I get this comment modded up? Looks like there just has to ask. Thanks alot.

Afraid

[Soulfader]

I don't know what the most frightening aspect of this topic is.

• The extraordinarily detailed answers from people who spend a lot of time thinking about this sort of thing.
• The retarded answers from people who don't spend a lot of time thinking about this sort of thing.
• The retarded jokes forthcoming about people's pulsing hot lightsabers
• The prospect of spending all day sifting through stuff like this looking for real news
• The fact that I'm rather curious about this myself.

I know very little of physics, Star Wars or other. So I shall link to the disturbing Star Wars-related musings of my friend instead.

Consider oxy cutters and plasma cutters instead

[dbIII]

These things don't exists

True, and the headline shows an ignorance of basic chemistry. Any oxy-acetylene cutter doesn't have to be hot enough to melt steel - the steel oxidises and burns away - so some sort of device that ionises air would be hitting steel with a lot of hot oxygen and burning it away. An oxy torch that cuts through steel like butter has trouble getting through aluminium alloy despite it having a melting point around 1000k less.

Plasma cutters are something else again, real and possibly far more like a light saber would be if such a thing was real. Heating up a gas and making it behave a lot like a liquid to burn things away leaving nothing but a clean cut and hot dust is the way the things work - all you need is high voltage electricity, appropriate electodes and a good supply of pressurised gas.

Re:The real question is really...

[rgoldste]

Scott Adams wrote a book, God's Debris, that explores your question of what happens if God gives up his omnipotence. I'll let you read the free ebook yourself, but the basic idea is that God, as a perfect being, gets bored of his own existance and tries to spice things up by committing suicide. In doing so, God created the universe.

Wikipedia notes the parallels of this to Hinduism. When I read God's Debris, I was reminded of GWF Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, where God also empties himself of divinity in order to start time and create the universe because he realized that his pure existence is meaningless. Time is the progress of God, the spirit of whom is now extended in all matter, coming to 'realize' himself as God. So, in a sense, God is evolving.

These theological moves (God is extended in the world and God is realized in the future) allow for dodging some thorny questions. For example, Can God create a rock that he can't lift? The answer is, for *now*, yes. But he might be stronger tomorrow.