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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."
april fools! it's first.
-gjr
Buy one and point it at a thermometer.
http://wickedlasers.com/
O.K. so these aren't really lightsabers.
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!!!!!!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Light sabers work at the subatomic level, disintegrating matter. However, heat is generated within resistant materials, giving the impression that the sabers themselves are actually hot. Don't the slashdot guys know this?
not as hot as the pink on the site
Not necessarily, Padawan. If a Jedi cuts through a door/bulkhead/vehicle with a light saber s/he could avoid getting splashed with melted metal by applying a subtle Force push along with the slicing motion of the saber. To Saber 101 class you should return, youngling. ;)
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
More importantly, could a Jedi make a light sabre so hot that he himself could not wield it?
The light saber would need to be 6241 F to cut through metal. At that temperature, the metal would be separated into sub-atomic particles called 'fooltrons'. As I'm sure you are aware, fooltrons are far to small to cause damage to the human body.
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.
You just got troll'd!
- 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.Looking at this comment I found, the author makes a good arguement: If the light sabre were hot enough to easily melt stuff, wouldn't it radiate so much heat that it would burn the user?
Very, very cold.
As the anti-protons move at uniform speed and the temperature is defined by the relative speed of particles wrt the flow.
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
... are HERE .
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Dunno about you, but I've never seen "steel" on my periodic table. Maybe I have the unpatched version...
I submitted this as a serious question 24 hours ago (or so). Just my luck, the only time my question gets accepted its april fools, and the whole site is pink! LOL
Mace Wendu: I don't want no muthafrakking metal bita coming at my muthafrakking eyes! I will not be some blind-ass ...and this the JEDI adopted OSHA standards.
........
Stevie Wonder jedi.
It is a time of great eye protection in the republic.
Eyeprotection worn by leading scientists without the force powers to deflect metal bits from their eyes.
They found the lightsaber:
Was developed from an ancient bread-slicer / toaster.
Contains 1.21 gigawats of power between recharge of it's flux capacitors.
Ranges from 350F to 50000F (battery life may suffer from extended operation, and overheating may occur at high temperatures.
Still makes a tasty grilled cheese sandwich in a pinch.
It was a dark time in the Republic.
Mainly because light sabers are really, really bright at high temperatures.
So bright as to be blinding.
Hence the recall.
*sigh* and so the 100th episode of the Star Wars series aired... in gravity distorting 3-D.
1138 left to go.
Luke warm maybe, but Leia in slave-dress is hot.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
It's not the heat...it's the humidity.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
"Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it?"
No, he could always eat the burrito, no matter how hot. He would just suffer while eating it. Horribly. For all our sakes. (And of course, since a Jewish man prepared the burrito, we Christians would hold the Jewish people guilty of this for the rest of time, or at least for a millenium or two...)
Well, assume for a moment that it works. To melt metal one needs a lot of energy - so it likely comes from a nuclear source.
1kg of steel has specific heat of 448 joules per degree Kelvin.
Energy from fusion of hydrogen atoms is at most 8 Mev, the energy stored in Hafnium atom is 3 Mev - let's assume that the agent used has weight of Hafnium but produces 1 Mev per atom.
Thus 1kg of energy agent stores 9e10 Joules - plenty enough to heat 20e3 tonnes of steel to 10000 degrees - cool !
So, as long as I am having fun, here is a "complete" light saber design - just so that no one tries to patent something that obvious:
- Handle - let's separate in two compartments - one contains energy agent and the other initiator that bombards that agent with nuclear particles.
- In response to bombardment energy agent produces new particles in much greater proportion - this is a sticky point as single pass stimulated emission amplification is likely not that efficient - but then we have power to spare ! In fact this might be a feature as the handle will last very long time - the amplification medium will deplete slowly and from one end.
- the particles are passed through moderator which limits their mean path in air to desired length.
- put peltier element around the energy agent and moderator and feed the energy into the initiator.
- initiator could be made as short pulse laser striking metal foil - these have been tested as tabletop devices already and should be capable to produce 3Mev gamma rays.
- move the initiator around as energy agent is used up.
The particle fountain would be very narrow - but it will heat up the air and that would produce the glow. Oh - and plasmas are opaque to light so there will be a shadow.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.