Wannabe-Jedi rejoice all around the world as Harvard and MIT physicists announce their latest discovery which may very well lead to the creation of the weapons envisioned by George Lucas, featured in the long-running Space Opera "Star Wars".
You heard it from the mouth of the professor himself - we can now build sabers... out of light. Not that it'd be an actually practical weapon, but it's still an interesting discovery right there..."Most of the properties of light we know about originate from the fact that photons are massless and do not interact (...) What we have done is create a special type of medium in which photons interact with each other so strongly that they act as though they have mass, and bind together to form molecules. (...) It's not an in-apt analogy to compare this to lightsabers. When these photons interact with each other, they're pushing against and deflect each other. The physics of what's happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies."
~Professor Mikhail Lukin, Harvard University
Ahh, magnets - how do they work?
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