All the Altman in the world were killed by Newton's scorching laser sword.

The chopping, blocking, deadly and elegant lightsaber is the most handy weapon in the hands of the Jedi. In reality, people have tried all the possibilities of making a lightsaber, laser, flame, plasma, but it is difficult to succeed in the end. Perhaps what we need is a scorching sun lightsaber from Newton, the "grandmaster of physics".

Science fiction "Star Wars" attracts a lot of fans, and the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) joked on April Fool's Day in 2015 that they had discovered the Force in Star Wars. Another attraction of this science fiction work is the Lightsaber, a very light weapon that can instantly cut open anything you touch. More importantly, it looks very handsome.

A lot of lightsabers can be found on the shopping platform. But when you buy them home, you will find that they are all "inferior goods", but milky white tubes with a light belt in the middle. Although it shines brightly when electrified, the pipe that protrudes the hilt of the sword is really unsightly after the power is cut off, making people feel as if they had bought an Altman shifter.

A lightsaber without light

If you are tired of "imitation", you want a real lightsaber. Then we need to be clear about what it takes to make a lightsaber.

As the name implies, Lightsaber is made of light. And because lightsabers are so powerful, it is generally believed that only laser (laser) can achieve such power. But there is no way, like the lightsaber in the movie, to let the light travel a certain distance and suddenly disappear. Even if we ignore this point, if this infinitely long "laser weapon" can be forcibly called a "lightsaber", we will also lose the best part of the lightsaber fight-blocking.

Only lightsabers can block lightsabers. Unfortunately, photons are bosons, and this property determines that photons in the same state can be superimposed. In other words, although we can achieve the cutting effect through the heat brought by the laser, the two identical lasers can only pass through each other and will not collide. Such a lightsaber naturally cannot resist the attack of another lightsaber.

However, photons are not absolutely impossible to collide, and there is a class of photons that can-- high-energy photons. Photons are their own antiparticles. Two high-energy photons can collide with each other and produce a bunch of positive and negative electron pairs after the collision. However, these high-energy photons are so energetic that they already belong to the category of gamma rays, far beyond the visible band and cannot be seen by the human eye. As long as this lightsaber can be seen by us, it cannot be made of light.

Since there is no wife in the old woman's cake, it is understandable that there is no light in the lightsaber. Then we have to consider another hot option-plasma (plasma).

Study medicine and learn lightsaber.

In real life, we do use the technology of plasma cutting metal-plasma arc cutting: using a high-frequency arc to break up gas molecules, ionize them, form plasma, and then spray them on the metal, which releases a lot of heat when the plasma is recombined. In addition, the plasma is conductive, and the current can form a loop through the plasma and the material, thus continuing to heat. In some extreme cases, this technology can even achieve a high temperature of 20,000 ℃.

However, after all, this is an industrial welding and cutting technology, and when using this technology, we need to have professional skills, adequate power supply and, above all, safety regulations that keep us safe but always interrupt our "wishful thinking". What's more, industrial equipment such as plasma cutting machines is not easy to carry.

The same plasma beam, the plasma cutting machine temperature is so high that it can be used to cut metal, while Professor Fu Wenjie's team was able to reduce its temperature to the point where it can be touched. Of course, this beam of plasma can also be heated to a higher temperature. Although this lightsaber is very short, it can become a "lightsaber" in the hands of doctors, killing microbes, clotting blood and cutting lesions. In reality, no Jedi can save your life, but a doctor with a lightsaber can.

The plasma of "forever and 50 years"

However, this kind of "imbecile" lightsaber naturally can not satisfy the fans who are not too busy to watch. Video blogger Hacksmith Industries has also tried to make real lightsabers. They found a can of liquefied petroleum gas, gasified it, and burned it with air to produce plasma. In this process, they also use specific nozzles to keep the ions in a stable shape as far as possible.

Quick readers may have responded, yes, they are actually making a flamethrower, or rather, a flamethrower with a very stable flame. They can also control the color of the flame through the flame color reaction. Although the visual effect is great, and it is true that many objects can be cut by heat, this kind of lightsaber does not block.

In fact, none of the plasma "lightsabers" mentioned above can achieve the block in Star Wars. If we want to block, what we need may be electromagnetic field-controlled plasma: the plasma is confined to a lightsaber with a special electromagnetic field, and when two lightsabers collide with each other, two electromagnetic fields may produce repulsion-just like a maglev train.

But the immaturity of this technology is the reason why it is difficult for us to achieve controllable nuclear fusion. The realization of controlled nuclear fusion is still a long way off. 20 years ago, some people predicted that controlled nuclear fusion could be achieved in 50 years. Today, it seems that it is still 50 years. With such a technological gap ahead, it seems that we will never be able to make a real lightsaber in our lifetime.

Newton's laser sword in the scorching sun

But even if we can't make a real lightsaber, that doesn't stop scientists from building a "Newton's scorching sun lightsaber (Newton's Flaming Laser Sword)." This is a concept put forward by Australian mathematician Mike Alder in the journal Modern philosophy in 2004. The title of the article is "Newton's Sunset Lightsaber" (Newton's Flaming Laser Sword).

Ould, a former assistant professor at the University of Western Australia, has studied artificial neural networks, or, in more fashionable terms, a form of artificial intelligence. He is welcomed by the students because he loves writing, but his fame always has two sides. One day, he was "blocked" by a philosophy student. The student argued that it was impossible for Oder to achieve artificial intelligence, because in his view, computer scientists simply set up a special computer program in advance, and the computer program itself could not think, and the program could not even make mistakes, so it was impossible to achieve artificial intelligence.

This made Oder angry and amused, explaining that the "artificial intelligence" he studied could only recognize a number that looks like 5 into 5 and a number that looks like 3 into 3. The recognition rate is not always perfect, and sometimes there is a situation of admitting mistakes.

The student has been arguing that as long as the program is written by a person, it is impossible to think, and even if the program is wrong, the person who wrote the program deliberately let the program make mistakes. In short, the student "warned" Ould to stop working on artificial intelligence.

This attitude upset Ould. He never wants to refute the unprovable question of whether "artificial intelligence" has intelligence. He just wants his neural network not to recognize 5 as 3. So he wrote this article, "Newton's scorching Sun Lightsaber," which introduced Newton's principles in the study of physics (or natural philosophy)-- to verify only what can be verified, regardless of what cannot be verified.

Inspired by Newton, he summed up his own philosophy of science in his article.

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