I heard tons of trivia and rumors about the movie Real Genuis. But nobody covered the point that is any of what they did possible? I mean from what I remember: making a liquid laser, synthesizing excited bromide in an argon matrix, and making it that powerful. Any truth to this or is it just Hollywood garbage?
-M:dubious:
I don’t remember the movie so I don’t know where you got the words “excited bromide in an argon matrix” but that part sounds like crap to me.
There are lasers, called Dye Lasers that use a liquid for the gain medium. You can also make powerful lasers, but without remembering the movie well, I don’t know about “that powerful”
There are lasers used for cutting through stainless steel. That’s pretty powerful. There is the Airborn Laser (ABL) that the mitary put in an airplane and plan to shoot stuff down with it. That’s pretty powerfull.
I thought in the movie, they used ice.
From what I remember, the name of the school (Tanner International?) resembles the name of a tech school in California. The character Laslow is really about a teacher at the school who actually lived in the boiler. Every character in real genuis was fashioned from a real person…except the plot, of course. I beleive it was frozen bromide in its excited state in an argon matrix.
When you use a halogen (bromine) and a noble gas (argon) to make a laser, this is called an excimer. You put both elements in gaseous form in the laser, and then you excite them with energy, which causes the two elements to form a compound temporarily. The compound then breaks up and emits photons of laser light. I don’t know enough about physics to provide a real answer, but I suspect that freezing an excimer in its excited state is indeed impossible. Of course, that would mean Kent was right…
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- Fun Link: I dunno what a university or DARPA can do, but if you can build it at home, this set of pages probably covers it:
http://www.repairfaq.org/sam/lasersam.htm
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- Fun Link: I dunno what a university or DARPA can do, but if you can build it at home, this set of pages probably covers it:
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- If you want to burn stuff, cheapest to make is CO2.
Economy took a dive before I got around to buying the lenses I wanted though (~$400 for two 1-inch diameter ZeSn windows)…
(sigh),someday,
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Kent. Heh heh.
“I want you to think about what you’ve done…and stop playing with yourself!”
“It is g-d…”
“Oh, sure, I tell you and you tell somebody else and before you know it we’re in a new ice age.”
“I had a couple of hours free last night, so I knitted you a sweater.”
I love that movie.
It’s garbage, but classy garbage.
1.) Although there are a lot of excimer lasers, I don’t think Argon Bromide is one of the lasing species. At any rate, it’s not common, like Argon Fluoride
2.) You can isolate things in a matrix of solid argon. The guy two doors down from me was working on this. But frozen argon requires extremely low temperatures, and it has the consistency of Jello. Real wet and almost-melted jello. If you pumped any energy into it, it would liquefy, then vaporize pretty quick (all that’s holding it together is pretty weak van der Waals bonding). Not a good choice for a high-power laser.
3.) There are a lot of liquid lasers, but not high powered ones, for the most part. One exception was the liquid neodymium laser. It wasn’t coolede to low temps, but it did employ a highly toxic liquid host (usuually sulfer oxychloride = thionyl chloride, or something equally hideous. A leak of 2 milliliters of this stuff once caused evacuation of a building) that has been turned into an aprotic acid. This stuff dissolved Teflon. And, at one point, someone suggested adding uranium salts to improve the fluorescent yield. This would have made it radioactive, to boot.
My conclusion: Someone just mixed together some impressive-sounding chemicals for their ersatz laser, with enough reality behind it to give it a veneer of plausibility.
“This is ice. It’s what happens to water when it gets too cold.”
Chris Knight is one of my heros.
Not too long ago I saw a documentary made by the guy who wanted to break the world record for popped corn. I think he filled a box about 20’ x 20’ by 15’ (I mean a geometric box, it was really a section of a warehouse) . It took several weeks of constant popping and a couple tons of popcorn to do it. And suddenly I realized that Real Genius might have scientific inaccuracies in it. My world was crushed.
“Is that liquid nitrogen?”
“Yes.” (slices off a solid chunk of it, puts it in vending machine.)
" ‘Rue the day’? Who talks like that?"
one of my favorite movies…heehee
Just wanted to point out, Real Genius takes place at “Pacific Tech” a rather thinly disguised version of CalTech.
I think early exposure to Real Genius radically altered my dating habits (mmm… geeks…). I was telling Cranky that just the other day, in fact.
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- Or, ZnSe windows, that is…:smack:
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- Or, ZnSe windows, that is…:smack:
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Garbage?!? Real Genius?!?
It was a great show!
Ok, it wasn’t so great but it had some great scenes.
You also have to put it in the time that it came out. There was many ‘Geek’ shows. Shows that put Geeks/nerds in a bad light and that they weren’t even human. Even shows like ‘Revenge of the nerds’ were really ‘anti-geek’ 
Along came Real Genius with lines like…
‘Why aren’t you laboring? You’re laborers so you should be laboring not sitting around. That’s what you get for not having an education!’. (may not have quote completely right)
or
{smart guy says something} Person says ‘Huh’? Smart guy says ‘Which word didn’t you understand’?
Attractive women were actually attracted to these guys because they were smart.
The smart guys actually were portrayed as winners and not losers. They were the world and ‘normal’ dummies were a side show and used for laughs from both the good guys and and bad guys.
The fact that many of my fellow students were truely pissed off at the movie showed it hit a nerve.
I loved that movie!
I think CalMeacham meant the science of the movie was garbage, not the movie itself.
That IS was you meant, Cal, right? RIGHT!?
To be completely nitpicky, the school prefers “Caltech”, with a little “t”. I don’t know why, that’s just the way it is. But yeah, the movie was supposed to be “inspired” by the school and its annual “Ditch Day” tradition where seniors design puzzles for the frosh to solve. Any senior found after 8AM on the morning of Ditch Day gets duct taped to a tree, or something like that.