If you suppose of Star Wars, you consider lightsabers. Proper? What may very well be higher, from a movie-making standpoint, than a futuristic sword that allows you to create superior fencing duels like in old-time Errol Flynn swashbucklers. (So significantly better than watching Stormtroopers fireplace their blasters into partitions and ceilings and the rest besides their targets.)
Lightsabers are available in a cosmic rainbow of hues (color-coded blue or inexperienced for good guys, purple for dangerous) and a wide range of shapes. There’s even a double-bladed model in Phantom Menace. (I don’t need to begin a nerd struggle—but—however the most effective lightsaber battle within the canon must be the “Duel of the Fates” in that film, because of the talents and scariness of Darth Maul actor Ray Park.)
So … precisely what are lightsabers? After all, they aren’t actual, so no one actually is aware of how they work. Even the characters within the films appear slightly confused about it. In Phantom Menace, Anakin calls it a “laser sword.” Yeah, he was a child, however each Din Djarin (the Mandalorian) and Luke Skywalker additionally consult with it as a laser sword—although I believe Luke was being sarcastic.
Anyway, that’s simply fallacious: It will possibly’t be a laser. For starters, lasers beams are invisible from the aspect, so that you wouldn’t see a factor until you staged the duels in a disco with fog machines to scatter the beams. Second, the beams go on endlessly; they don’t have an finish. Third, laser beams can’t clank collectively like swords—they’d simply go by one another whenever you attempt to parry.
However what’s it then? We will tremendously slender the chances by asking if the blade has mass. If it’s some type of gentle (as you’d suppose from the title “lightsaber”), then the reply isn’t any—gentle, or electromagnetic radiation, has no mass. If we are able to decide that it has mass, then it’s not gentle.
This can be a query we can reply, by analyzing how lightsabers transfer whenever you wave them round. In different phrases, it’s time for some physics!
Mass and Movement
Don’t confuse mass and weight. Mass is a measure of how a lot “stuff” like protons, neutrons, and electrons are in an object, and weight is the quantity of gravitational drive appearing on an object. Right here we need to see what influence the mass of a lightsaber would have on its movement. However let’s begin with one thing easier.
As an alternative of a lightsaber, say we now have a “lightball” made from the identical buzzy substance. Because it’s symmetrical, we are able to describe its movement with out worrying about rotation. If we need to transfer this ball forwards and backwards, we name on Newton’s second legislation of movement. This says the acceleration (a) of an object depends upon its mass (m) and the quantity of drive (F) utilized to it.
