Actually, c is the speed of light in a vacuum, but light travels slower through a medium, like air. So lasers shot through air will actually travel slower than c.
(For anyone curious, the speed of light in earth air is like 99.97% as fast as in vacuum)
A laser strong enough to be used as a weapon will probably not leave a lot of medium on its path.
But the front-most part will still travel at less than c. It will just speed-up after a while.
I'm curious. What happens to the medium? Does it simply get pushed aside? Or pushed along? Or will it eat up some energy and react to something else?
Much like lightning, a powerful enough laser will ionize the air. That ionized air is hot and rises, just like the ionized gasses from combustion.
A powerful laser will look like a beam of fire.
Imagine if they made it fire so slow that you could just do a dark souls dodge roll to avoid it
just shine a laser through a thing of zircon (n=index of refraction=1.923~2)
so speed of the laser in the zircon = c/n ~c/2
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Claims to travel at the speed of light.
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Still takes eight minutes to get here.
Sus.
The laser pointer can travel the light of speed? If you turn it on, does the laser not come out of the laser pointer?
The laser and the laser pointer are both traveling away from each other at the speed of light, so from the pointer's perspective the laser is traveling at twice the speed of light.
You are being downvoted as if your point was offensive or harmful. You are wrong, but it's totally counter intuitive and I think this is a mistake that everyone makes when studying introductory physics. This would be correct for anything moving at relatively low speeds. But when you're talking about light, or anything that goes so fast that "percentage of the speed of light" starts being a useful unit to describe their speed, this concept starts being a bit weirder.
This is actually the basic principle of Einstein's theory of relativity: the speed of light (in a vacuum) is the same for all observers, regardless of their frame of reference. That means that if the laser pointer emits a laser, the light is moving away from the pointer at the speed of light. If the pointer itself is moving at a speed reeeeeally close to the speed of light... Then the laser will STILL be traveling away from the pointer at the speed of light. And if you, an observer in a frame, see the pointer moving at near the speed of light emit a laser... The laser that the laser emitted is also traveling at the speed of light from your point of view.
And there's no wordplay here. I don't mean that it's light, so of course any speed it travels at is the speed of light. I mean that if you measure its speed from any reference frame, you will get around 300000000 m/s, or around 671 million miles per hour. No matter if you are also traveling at near light speed.
I think you've got to be a little careful how you say what you mean here:
In light's own reference frame, this is true-ish from a pure special relativity perspective. Velocity is sort of undefined in that case because at c, Lorentz transformations bring all distances to zero, meaning that the photon is everywhere at the SAME time. Or said another way, it's everywhere on its own simultaneity curve. Maybe this is splitting hairs on the definition of "undefined" because, mathematically yeah you're right, but a rock also moves zero distance in zero time. Its more like it's velocity doesnt make sense to compute.
From the outside though (as in a non photon frame) this is not true at all. Using laws of refraction you can compute, and even photograph and verify a real, defined speed for a photon in a medium.
That's impressive. Having a non-photon mass traveling at the speed of light would break our understanding of physics. Get that laser pointer to the lab ASAP
Wait, how do you make the laser pointer travel at the speed of light? I assume it has some mass.
Elections are slower than light waves so technically you have a slow, shitty router, but at least it can electrocute people so that's something.
Impressive. The future is awesome! Can we maybe apply this to regular light too? Maybe even green light? Or purple? I'm so excited.
Well, for the green light we already have FTL tech, it was invented and perfected by the car behind you as you are waiting for the light to turn green.
According to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, the same people also write about politics, environment and society.
It was coined by Michael Crichton, you know, the man behind the Jurassic Park. Big Dino man can't lie. And if they lie they are instantly forgiven.
He was a anthropogenic climate change denier. I guess you can forgive him instantly but I don't.
I missed that thing in his biography and that link looks like an excessive explanation to what you've mentioned: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/michael-crichton-and-global-warming/
The medium that the laser goes through could slow it down, but it would still be insanely fast.
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It would also still be the speed of light. Always is, unless you specify ‘in a vacuum’ every time.
Adding to the fun - The light is still going the same speed within the medium, but it's bumping into more things. Those collisions divert the light, lengthening the distance it travels through something like 1 cm of glass vs 1 cm in a vacuum. It changes the time it takes to travel through glass rather than the speed at which the light is moving.
At least that's what I remember from a YouTube video.
The real fun starts when things move faster than the speed of light, that's when you get Cherenkov radiation!
There was an auction that started at the price of 69420 USD on the 1st of april of 2022
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(The lightsaber is real, selling an extremely dangerous weapon was the joke)
Has Science Really Gone Too Far Even as Decided to Use Even Go Want to do Look More Like?
Have you not seen those Blaster from the galaxy far far away that fire laser half the speed of sound?
I mean, the video one makes a little more sense, as it's about destroying things at the speed of light rather than just firing the laser.