COULD WE EVER MAKE A LIGHTSABER IN REAL LIFE?
Lightsabers certainly look cool – and just think how much time you’d save if you could slice your bread and toast it at the same time – but in reality you just can’t get light to behave that way. Once you have let a beam of light go – firing it out of the hilt of a lightsaber, for instance – it will keep on travelling in a straight line forever unless something gets in its way, so you’d need something to trap light within it. Imitation lightsabers work in this way, bouncing light around inside a semitransparent tube-shaped ‘blade’. This also lets you play at fighting with them – in reality, two beams of light would just pass straight through each other rather than clashing. The closest thing we could get to a real-life lightsaber would actually be a beam of plasma – glowing, superhot electrically charged gas trapped in a powerful magnetic field. This is the same stuff that the Sun is largely made of, but producing it on Earth requires huge amounts of energy – a lot more than you could ever store in a lightsaber.