In many sci-fi movies lasers are like 1 meter long projectiles (Star Wars for example)
Who came up with that idea / Which movie did it first?
To my knowledge lasers are bundled light so they also travel as fast as light…even if you trigger it just for a nanosecond > the human eye would not be able to see seperate projectiles…it would look like a continuous beam wouldn’t it?
In the case of Star Wars, they don’t call it a laser, they call it a blaster. It’s something different from a laser, I suppose.
Apparently they shoot “particle beams” : A particle beam was a form of projectile that utilized coherent particles of energy that could be fired from a particle beam blaster or particle cannon turret. The beam, usually a pale yellow bolt, differed from a normal particle bolt emitted from blasters, in that a particle beam utilized particles that were not as densely packed, but where much more energized; resulting in a bolt that was both unstable, but very powerful. :dubious:
Well ok…but there are numerous other examples…I wonder if some CGI artist said “It would look much cooler if they do not shoot continous beams. They should shoot some kind of bright future bullets”
Yes, cheap LED flashlights do this. The human eye can’t detect a flicker below 50000 Hz, generally (most people still won’t be able to see a substantially lower flicker rate, and some people claim to see it even at 50000 Hz).
In Star Wars it was done for effect, just like the ships making sound effects in airless space. It was intended to be a kid’s movie modelled on Buck Rogers.
I don’t recall any show before that using the “visibly moving pulse of light” effect because, frankly, most sci fi was done on the cheap, there were not a lot of sci-fi movies before that that used that trope; and animating that sort of action before computers was difficult, expensive, and done by hand. A solid beam was a lot simpler to insert into a movie. (I think this is what the 1950’s “War of the Worlds” did.)
Space 1999 used the visibly moving laser, but it wasn’t a pulse of light. Still, it was something you could dodge; I believe Battlestar Galactica used the pulse version.
And, if there was an early Analog with a picture of somebody shooting a 20’s-style death ray at somebody, the victim would be dodging. It’s a pretty short step from “death ray you can dodge” to “death ray that moves slow enough that you can see it move”.
Moderator Action
Since this is about movies and movie special effects, let’s shoot (beam? blast?) it over to Cafe Society.
Moving thread from General Questions to Cafe Society.
“Ray Gun” beams that move in short bursts that you can see the beginning and end of appear in SFD movies for the first time (AGAIK) in the 1950s. It’s in Forbidden Planet, This Island Earth, and (going into the 1960s)Robinson Crusoe on Mars and Star Trek or (the 1970s) Moonraker.
Whether the beam is a light beam (a la LASER) or a particle beam, it’s unphysical. The only reason to be able to see such a beam progessing like that is to give the impression of movement, and to tell which object is shooting at which other one. Eventually, they pretty much stopped doing this (look at The Black Hole, for instance.
The Star Wars Light Sabre is a different kettle of fish. Going strictly by the movies, and not by later fanfic or other rationalizations, it appears to be a finite length of standing light that can cut through things with great heat, and two of which will “block” each other, so you can fence with them. Again, it’s a thought-expanding weird idea meant to suggest things beyond everyday experience, like the space suits of “solidified electricity” in Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, or Marvel comics’ Klaw with his “Solidified Sound”. If you press too hard, the nifty SF gimmick falls apart.
Light Sabres, when I first saw them, reminded me of the “Variable Swords” in Larry Niven’s Known Universe series. It’s a wire encased in a stasis field, which explain one vague SF idea in terms of another, I suppose. But at least it doesn’t require the thing to be a self-limited light or particle beam.
Perhaps it is worth pointing out that lasers were not invented, and the word “laser” was not coined until 1957 (at the earliest), well after science fiction’s Golden Age (and I do not think lasers, and the word “laser”, became well known to the public until quie a few years after that). Science fiction had a long tradition of blasters and ray-guns, etc. (not to mention phasers) that often fired “beams”, usually of some unspecified sort of energy (not necessarily light or electromagnetic ration of any type), long before anyone ever heard of lasers. Lasers, when they arrived, fit very neatly into this tradition, of course, and were great for making the whole ray-gun fantasy idea seem a bit more genuinely scientific, but the fantasy idea long preceded the arrival of real lasers, and was not limited by what they might actually be able to do.
Indeed, someone just published a book about this.
“Ray Guns” in fiction included not only light-based weapons (which generally amounted to super-searchlights) but also particle beams, both types traceable back to 19th century discovery of various “rays” that included electromagnetic waves and particle beams. Of course, there were a lot of other types that were never clearly identified or explained – they were simply plot devices.
Furthermore, the term is a misuse of an acronym that became uncontrollably popular as a sci-fi trope. LASER stands for Light And Sound Emitting Ray and, as CalMeacham noted, a LASE Ray-Gun was simply one of many in a well-equipped space-farer’s arsenal. Even as late as the 1970’s I was reading childrens’ books that told me scientists were working on devices to generate a LASER beam and direct it at things. Back then they were talking about tripod-mounted devices pumping energy through a ruby – the picture I remember in one book looked like a Mark 19 grenade-launcher on a tall tripod – but the principle of focusing a beam of light down to a very concentrated point had been known since at least 212 B.C.E. (q.v. MythBusters: Archimedes’ Mirror) and the idea of not just reflecting sunlight but maximizing electrically generated light would have come up shortly after Edison began lighting homes in New York. I dunno what happened to the Sound part, but lasers have been a reality for quite a while now, even showing up as cheap Chinese toys in 99-cent stores and causing real damage to real people (particularly the eyes of aircraft pilots). More intentional uses of the focus-and-burn aspect include fancy wood engraving, fancy art inside glass and plastic, and various types of surgery, all involving the laser’s ability to burn away material with extreme precision. But, contrary to the speculative fiction-writers’ portrayals, the idea of pointing them at incoming missiles proved infeasible and I don’t think they’ve been made big enough to quickly fry anything as large as an ant, much less make things explode instantly the way Hollywood likes to depict.
But the fictional portrayal is overwhelmingly popular. Even after laser-surgery and laser engraving was moderately popular, I remember overhearing some fellow passengers on a flight who were complaining about an episode of MacGyver in which he redirected a laser beam using a woman’s make-up mirror (compact?). They were agreeing that a mirror could never stand up to the destructive force of a laser beam. These were college-aged kids who were still unaware that a laser beam is still a beam of light. Maybe they’d seen too much Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica.
–G!
Zaphod: I want you to imagine I’m pointing a kill-o-zap ray-gun at you.
Intruders: You ARE pointing a kill-o-zap ray-gun at us.
Thinking tactical use… With a typical projectile handgun, you brace yourself in a firing stance, try to hold as still and steady as you can, and fire.
But if you were firing a brief burst, e.g., a one-second squirt from a water hose – wouldn’t you want to sweep the nozzle? Pull the trigger in the middle of a kind of “chop” motion, so the burst moves across where the target is? The burst would splash over the target area, increasing the chances of a hit.
With submachine guns and machine pistols, if you’re firing fully-automatic, you move the gun back and forth, horizontally, to hit lots of targets and to increase your chances of hitting a single target.
So…Han Solo, with his blaster, shouldn’t “point and shoot” but “slash and shoot,” firing with a kind of wrist motion to spread out the shot… (At least against unarmored targets. Against armor, you might want the entire duration of the burst to hit exactly the same spot, so the energy accumulates and drills through.)
Summer isn’t over; let’s do some waterfight experimenting!
(Okay, in the northern hemisphere, summer is over…but it’s still hot outdoors!)
Huh? Cite? I’m pretty sure the S in laser stands for stimulation, not sound! Online Etymology Dictionary, not sure if that’s particularly reliable, but it was one of the first google hits when I looked for “laser etymology.”
Maybe in San Diego it is. 
I’ve never heard this before and a Google search comes up with a bare handful of other uses.
The laser is a descendant of the maser:
When further research allowed scientists to produce coherent waves with visible light, the laser was the logical new name. They’ve increased in potency by many orders of magnitude since 1957. I’m certain you can fry much larger things than ants, but the power source is infeasible for handheld weaponry.
Cal, are you referring to How the Ray Gun Got Its Zap: Odd Excursions into Optics by UofR professor Stephen R. Wilk? It’s a fine addition to the tradition of collecting columns for a scientific publication, in this case Optics and Photonics News, and making them available to the general reader. If not, I’d be grateful if you named the other book.
Death rays precede Buck Rogers, and there were a great flurry of them in the 1920s (yep, real life 1920s-style death rays) after Harry Grindell Matthews claimed to have invented one. A couple of quicky movies were made featuring death rays in 1924, which were already portrayed as continuous beams. The concept developed even earlier in a 1915 movie serial and novelization by Arthur B. Reeve, The Exploits of Elaine (Pearl White’s follow-up to the Perils of Pauline), one of whose chapters had the title The Death Ray.
You can go even farther backwards to the heat ray used by Wells’ Martians in The War of the Worlds. Lasers are retro-justification for a concept already a half-century old.
Almost all of which are corrected.
I’m honestly wondering if it’s a failed attempt at creating a meme.
I suspect this meme was originally inspired by tracer bullets.
(link goes to obligatory xkcd strip)
(Wait, is it obligatory to call a link to an xkcd strip “obligatory?” No? Well, all right , then)
(link goes to xkcd strip)
Exapno, how good of you to comment. Many thanks.
And I agree that I’ve never heard Grestarian’s explanation of LASER before. The one you give is the commonly given and dictionary one.
You’re also quite right about the real-life weapons and “death rays”. There was a plethora of them prior to 1940. most of the inventors never revealed the secrets of their operation – they wanted to sell them to the military. Only Tesla told us how his was to work, and I’m dubious that it would have.
As for the age of such weapons, they arguably go back farther than Wells, even: