March 23, 2025 • 30 mins
Forget Dr. Evil and his ridiculously evil plans... lasers are so much more practical than that! In this episode, Will and Mango discover why lasers are perfect for precision-cooking your bacon, how they can be used as chopsticks, why washing dishes is so much better when it's done by laser, and a simple laser trick for keeping pesky pirates at bay. Plus, we take a look at the very strange way Texas tried to educate aliens about queso. (Spoiler: It involved a laser.)
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of iHeartRadio Guess
what We'll what's that Mango? So earlier this year, the
mayor of Austin, Texas used a laser beam to send
a recipe for Keeso to the moon.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
That's impressive, but I have to asked why exactly did
he do this?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Well, according to his press release, this is what he said, quote,
we choose to send Keeso to the moon and maybe
someday chips as well, not because these things are easy,
but because they are hard. So maybe that's the answer.
But I think the real reason, and this is serious,
was to teach future aliens how to make Keeso in
(00:47):
case they ever stop off at our moon, which is
a serious bit of intergalactic hospitality.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
I think, wait, you're saying it's just the recipe, like
the aliens will have to supply their own chips and cheese.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
I guess it's less hospitable when you put it that way.
But still the mayor's heart, I think was in the
right place. His name is Steve Adler, by the way,
and the recipe he chose is a local favorite in Austin,
and it was sent to the Moon as part of
a lunar Library that was stowed aboard a SpaceX rocket,
the Falcon nine.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Oh like they Okay, I was confused on how you
were saying they had sent it. I was actually hoping
they kind of like carve the case a recipe into
the moon, like with a laser or something. But yeah,
I guess sending it on a rocket is that's a
little bit more practical, I guess, yeah, and a little
less like cartoon super villain. I guess that's true. All right, Well,
then how does the laser fit into this?
Speaker 1 (01:33):
So the laser is actually what made the whole library possible,
because they didn't just send a one page caso recipe
to the moon. The lunar library also included some other
quote unquote light reading.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Do you get it? I get I get it?
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yeah, And it includes the entirety of Wikipedia in English,
tens of thousands of books, and a key to translate
everything into five thousand different languages. So sending a hard
copy of all those things clearly wasn't an option, and
instead the mission crew used a powerful laser to etch
the entire library, letter by letter, into this super light
radiation proof nickel disc, and just in case, the aliens
(02:07):
who find it have bad eye sight. All the information
on the disc was also laser and coded digitally, so
the aliens can put it up on their view screens
or whatever they have.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
All Right, so all of this, like the laser etch
Casa recipe, all of Wikipedia, this is all actually on
the moon. Now, Yeah, I mean there's a bit of
a twist.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
The moon lander that was carrying the library crash landed
on the Moon, and this was on April eleventh, So
the mission wasn't exactly a success. But the good news
is the library probably did survive. According to a spokesperson
for the Foundation, small light objects like our library do
better in impact. It was probably thrown a few kilometers
away a thirty million page frisbee on the Moon.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
I like to think about certain first, Like, if you
think about it, this was the first frisbee with a
Caso recipe on it ever thrown on the Moon. I
mean that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, And it was all made possible by lasers, which
kind of sums up our show today. When you think
of lasers, it's mostly like death rays from sci fi
movies and whatever. But as the Lunar Library shows, the
truth is that real world, lasers have much more interesting
applications than just blowing things up, from levitating objects to
precision cooking bacon. There are lots of weird things you
can do with a laser beam, and we're going to
(03:16):
take a whole look at a bunch of them.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part
(03:42):
Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined
by my good friend mangesh Hot Ticketer And on the
other side of the soundproof glass, carrying on the show's
proud tradition of thematic prop comedy. That's our friend and
producer Loll. Just look at that mango. He brought in
his own laser pointer from home, waving it around, pointing
to all these different objects. I mean, it's not a
(04:02):
useful tool in his line of work, but he's made
the effort anyway. I mean, it's always putting in the effort. Yeah,
I mean, it's that kind of spirit that we really
appreciate it around here. Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
And laser pointers are actually a good place to start
because they really aren't much different from the lasers we
use in research or defense. In either case, you're dealing
with the device that works by amplifying a highly concentrated
beam of light aka laser beam. So the main difference
between these devices is their power level. Right, The maximum
allowance for a laser pointer in the US is a
measly five milliwats, but other kinds of handheld lasers can
(04:35):
rage anywhere from twenty five miliwats all the way up
to a thousand.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
And that's what would have been used to edge the
case or recipe into that disk, right.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Yeah, exactly, which is also why they're used for laser
removals and certain kinds of surgery. And those procedures aren't
just for humans either. For instance, I read that some
aquariums have started using a seven hundred miliwat laser to
remove harmful polyps from their coral Apparently the laser can
burn a polyp away that it won't ever grow back,
and the whole process only takes about ten seconds.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
I mean, it does make you question at least a
little bit how safe these laser pointers are really. I mean,
I know they're weak, but if you think about sort
of like their larger cousins and destroying pole ups whole
cloth and a matter of seconds, like the five miliwat versions,
must do some small scale damage on their own, I
would think, right.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Yeah, And that's actually why you're never supposed to look
directly into the beam of a laser pointer, because if
you're to do that, which again you shouldn't, what happens
is that a small portion of your retina will be
bombarded by like this highly focused light. And when that happens,
the optical nerves get overloaded and you wind up seeing
all these little floating spots.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
So it really is frying your retina, just not as
quickly or decisively as like one of the stronger lasers. Right.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
And so when we talk about modern lasers used for defense,
it's that ability to temporarily blind and really disorient people
that's in play. It's not like blasting through armor or
blowing apart buildings. For example. In law enforcement, there's something
called a data laser, and it's used for riot control.
It's basically like a larger version of a laser pointer.
It's about the size of a flashlight, but it's got
(06:07):
a two hundred and fifty miliwat beam and it's effective
from about thirty yards away, So if someone looks into
the beam, they can lose sight for up to fifteen
minutes and feel nauseous for even longer. So the idea
is really to incapacitate a rowdy crowd all at once,
and there's no need for physical contact, I guess.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
I mean, I could see how that'd be useful in
some like really drastic circumstances, but it still feels pretty
extreme to use these on civilians. But you know, there's
one application where it seems a little more appropriate, and
that's when ships use these dasers to ward off pirates.
Have you heard about this, I haven't.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
No.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
It's called sea lays, and the stock version is a
whopping five thousand miliwats, twenty times stronger than the flashlight
that you mentioned. But if you want it beefed up,
you can actually get one all the way up to
twenty thousand miliwads. So the base model alone, though, is
strong enough to be seen from nearly three miles away.
So the idea is that at a distance you could
(07:03):
signal the pirates not to come any closer, like a
warning shot, basically, than if they continue to approach anyway,
the daser's real effects would start to kick in, the
pirates would find themselves nauseous, disoriented, and of course temporarily blind,
which just doesn't seem pleasant.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Yeah, and that's like consumer grade tech, Like anyone on
the streets can buy the stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Well, they go for about one hundred thousand dollars a pop,
so maybe not anybody off the street, but anybody with
one hundred thousand dollars in their pocket. They are available
for civilians.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Of course, the military has their own brand of daser lasers,
and these go back as far as the early sixties,
when the first real laser was invented. They are early
reports of a so called eye popper developed by the
Air Force. So, according to this nineteen seventy two edition
of the Post, quote the strangest of weapons was dreamed
up in the early sixties as a means of exploding
(07:55):
the eyes of enemy soldiers and their officers from distances
of more than a giant pulse lasers would sweep back
and forth across a battlefield, blinding anyone who looked directly
at it. That's sort of terrifying. Well was it ever
used in combat? Thankfully not. I mean, the military eventually
decided that exploding the enemy's eyes from a mile away
(08:15):
might not be the most honorable form of engagement, And
in nineteen ninety five, an update to the Geneva Conventions
actually ban the use of any laser weapons that cause
permanent blindness, So this idea was actually put to rest.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
So weird that there are like rules to wars. Really
like that, But why don't we move towards some of
the more wholesome ways to use a laser beam? For instance,
did you know that judges have started using lasers to
help score gymnastics competitions.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Now I had not heard this, and I'm curious why
this is necessary, Like what was wrong with the old
way of scoring competitions.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
So the main problem is that humans can sometimes miss
important details when deciding the outcome of a sporting event.
And that's true even with instant replays. In fact, there
was a study on gymnastics competitions, and this was back
in twoenty fifteen, and it concluded that up to sixty
percent of athlete errors go totally overlooked by judges.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
And so the solution to that is to shoot a
bunch of lasers at the gymnast. I guess, well sort of.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
I mean, there's this Japanese electronics company, it's called Fujitsu,
and it's been working to develop three D laser sensors
that can capture a gymnast's movements and analyze them on
the spot as I guess numerical data. So the idea
is to use these recordings as a supplement to the
judge's own observations, and if there's an error they didn't cash,
the system will draw their attention to it. And if
(09:32):
a judge ever needs evidence to back up or ruling,
the system can provide that too.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
I see. So then it's kind of like the motion
capture that's used in the digital characters for movies like
Gollam and Lord of the Rings. Is it kind of
like that?
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Yeah? I mean, except in this case, the gymnast doesn't
have to do backflips while wearing like a suit covered
in those pingpong balls. Instead, there's a series of lasers
that track their movements in real time and then transmit
the data to a software program, and that way there's
a detailed record of every movie the athlete makes, no
matter how fast or complex it is. And this includes
everything from like the placement of their joints to the
(10:06):
exact angles of their movements.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
It sounds pretty amazing actually, and you said, this is
already being used in competitions.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Fujitsu announced a deal last fall with the International Gymnastics
Federation and they've already tested the system at a handful
of competitions this year, and the goals really to roll
it out in earnest at the Gymnastics World Championships in
late September. But beyond that, Fujitsu is hoping the laser
system will become the go to tool for judges, not
just for gymnastics, but also for things like figure skating
(10:33):
or any other sport where they're like scoring inconsistencies and
involves decisions about precise movements.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
That's pretty cool, But I actually want to take us
back to laser pointers for a second, because there's a
practical use for them that I never would have thought
about before. We were doing our research this week, and
apparently home care nurses sometimes use common laser pointers as
a way to enable their patients to communicate. So, say
a patient has limited mobility as well as difficulties speaking.
(11:00):
In a case like that, a nurse might attach a
laser pointer to a pair of eyeglasses or maybe the
rim of a hat, and then the nurse would set
up this communication board filled with common phrases plus all
the letters of the alphabet, and you know, and the
patient could express themselves by pointing to whatever it was
they wanted to say. That's funny.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
It's like the simplest use of a pointer, but it's
also to communicate in such a specific way. It's so
much more clever than you know, just using it to
get a cat to run around a room. Speaking of which,
I know, we both found some scientific uses for lasers
that were equally unexpected. But before we get into those,
let's take a quick break.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
And you're listening to part time Genius, So we're talking
about all the surprising things you can do with a laser.
So just keep in mind that even though you theoretically
could do these things, you probably shouldn't do all or
actually any of them. As in point, you could use
(12:03):
a high powered laser to heat a material to well
over a million degrees, the atoms of that substance would
cease to exist, and you'd be left with a soupy
mix of electrons and ions, what scientists lovingly referred to
as plasma. But again, that doesn't mean you should do that,
So don't do that, Nigo, Yeah, I mean, you definitely
shouldn't do that. Recreating the core of the sun in
(12:25):
your living room is not recommended by the show. Well
that's a good call on a less dangerous, but just
as difficult side of things. It's also possible to use
a laser to levitate tiny objects.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
So this is something I'm fascinated by, but it makes
zero sense to my mind. I mean, lasers burn and
melt and singe, so how could that possibly transfer into
making something flow in mid air?
Speaker 2 (12:47):
I agree, I mean it's not very intuitive for laymen
like ourselves, but it helps to remember that light, including
laser light, is made up of photons, and those photons
exert a special kind of force known as radiation pressure. Sure,
and that's really the key to what scientists call optical levitation.
So when you have a really powerful beam of light,
(13:07):
the radiation pressure it exerts is sometimes strong enough to
overcome the force of gravity. So if you aim a
high enough power laser beam at a super light object,
the force of the light's pressure can actually propel it
forward or even lift it off the ground, which makes
a little more sense to me. I guess. So are
like solar sales an example of this technology. Yeah, that's
(13:30):
it exactly. I mean most people have probably seen one.
They're like big gold colored square sheets attached to the
end of a space probe or another small spacecraft, and
the reflective surface harnesses radiation pressure from sunlight, and that
in turn propels the craft through space.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
But you're saying it's possible to float something with a
laser here on Earth as well.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
I mean theoretically, yes, the principle behind it has been
proven in a lab setting, but a real world test
is still years away. And if that works, researchers would
be able to push around tiny particles that are too
small to control through other means. And even cooler than that,
they'd be able to power real life micro machines, by
(14:11):
which I don't mean the tiny monster trucks that used
to be popular when you were kids, even though those
are just as awesome as levitating things, but rather things
like flying a teeny tiny camera over a volcano or
through the wreckage of a building or something like that.
That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Well, since you brought up radiation pressure, I do have
to tell you about this other weird application Gabe told
me about. Basically, you can use two focused laser beams
to create what's known as optical tweezers, and this allows
scientists to manipulate objects smaller than a single micron, like
a unit of measure that's equal to about thirty nine
millions of an inch, or in other word, it's really
(14:45):
really small.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
And so this works because of radiation pressure from the lasers.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Yeah, so when you have a laser beam on either
side of the object, the resulting forces actually work together
and allow you to grip the object. So you can
kind of think of it like laser beam chops.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
That's cool. So is this something that was just recently
discovered or what When Gabe brought up I thought so too.
But researchers first created optical tweezers back in the nineteen
eighties and they've been improving on the concept ever since.
In fact, the biggest limitation to the technology was finally
overcome just a few years ago. For the last thirty
years or so, there was always a cap on how
finally you could focus a beam of laser light, and
(15:21):
the result was that anything smaller than one hundred nanometers
couldn't be gripped by the tweezers. So I'm a little
rusty on the micro measurements, like how small is that
compared to the microns that you mentioned earlier. I'm embarrassed
to admit that I'm a little rusty on these measures.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Yeah. Well, if I didn't have a sheet of paper
in front of me, I wouldn't know. So one hundred
nanometers is equal to just zero point one microns. So
we were already dealing with incredibly small forms of matter
before that, like the organelle's inside a living cell or
a particle of bacteria. But these are even smaller than those,
and our laser chopsticks just couldn't get a hold of them.
(15:57):
But back in twenty fourteen, researchers an institute in Spain
finally figured out how to focus laser light to such
a fine degree that they could actually manipulate particles as
small as just fifteen animeters.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
And so what kind of stuff does that actually allow
them to do so much stuff? Right?
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Okay, enough, I mean we'll never really understand any fact.
I'm just going to defer to Scientific American on this
one and tell you that possible applications include, quote, building
medical products with nanoscale exactness, manufacturing nanocrystal geometries for electronic
devices and manipulating single molecules such as proteins.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yeah stuff, Oh right, right, I guess that sounds good,
I think, But we've still got a few strange uses
for lasers to talk about, including a couple that are
strictly just for laughs. But first, let's take one more
quick break.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Welcome back to part time Genius. Okay, Well, so we've
talked about what lasers can do for aliens, and for
sports judges and for scientists, but let's be selfish for
a minute and talk about what lasers can do for us.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
All right, Well, how about this one. You can use
a laser on your dirty dishes and have them cleaner
than they've ever been before. Like, say goodbye to your dishwasher.
You really won't need it from here on out because
of lasers.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Well, in my family, I'm actually the one who washes
the dishes, and I'm always looking for an excuse to
throw out my dishwasher.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
So tell me more. All right. So it's pretty simple, really,
Like you talked about burning polyps off a coral earlier,
and it's the same premise here, except with all the
grease and oil and mystery crust that gets stuck to
your cookwaar to just install this device that kind of
looks like really like a table lamp, I guess, and
you put it in your kitchen and then you never
have to scrub another baking sheet or nonstick pan again.
(17:52):
You don't even have to control the laser by hand.
It is totally automated, so the beam just scans back
and forth over the pan or whatever it is that
you're clean. It just burns the grease right off of there.
It's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Wait, so it's gotta leave something behind, right, It doesn't
just vaporize all that gunk.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
That is true, like there should be some food ash
left behind. But that's not the case actually, because the
laser cleaner also comes with a built in nozzle that
sucks up whatever the laser leaves behind. I mean, this
is just amazing. And the coolest part is that these
two functions occur simultaneously. So the surface of the pan
just goes from pitch black with grease to shiny and
(18:31):
clean right before your eyes. It's like some kind of
low key kitchen magic. It should totally be an infomercial.
This honestly feels like you're infomercial pitching. I am kind of.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Also, I'm sold because you know, I'm the designated dishwasher
and I hate scrubbing pans in the most.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
It's definitely a pretty amazing invention. You can find the
videos of this thing online. You just look up laser
age TV on YouTube and look for the laser cleaning
of a baking tray. But if you do, make sure
you turn up the sound because you can hear the
food waste just sizzling away with every sweep of this laser.
It almost sounds like an electric shaver or something. And
(19:10):
it's all just weirdly satisfying.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Yeah, I bet you know. I'm already sold. But my
only qualm is if it's kid friendly to have like
lasers in your kitchen.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Oh mango, it is absolutely not kids, say, and it's
really just for large scale kitchens and bakeries, not something
you'd want to keep around the house. In fact, this
might actually be the strongest commercial laser we have talked
about today. You remember the sea las thing that ships
used to scare off pirates.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Right, Yeah, sorry, are you suggesting this technology? It can
be used to clean pirates too.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
You know what, that's actually a great idea, but not
exactly what I'm getting at here. But as strong as
that was, it maxed out at twenty thousand miliwats. Well,
the laser for this cleaning system is six times stronger,
at one one hundred and twenty thousand miliwats. But if
you want to know the real deal breaker, here's another
scary note. Forty five thousand dollars. That's actually the going
(20:03):
rate for your own laser cleaner.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
I don't know, sending my kids to college for getting
clean dishes and I have to it feels like an
even trade.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Possibly, But all right, well, fair enough, So tell me
how this strikes you though, Mango laser cooked bacon. I'm listening,
all right. So there's this mathematical science professor in Tokyo
named Kintaro Fukushi, and a few years ago he partnered
with a guy who runs a maker space in Japan,
and together they design this laser cutter that can perfectly
(20:34):
fry the fatty part of the bacon, leaving the rest
of it completely untouched. That's interesting, but why not cook
the bacon all the way? Well, you could definitely set
it so that the whole piece of bacon was cooked
like The setup uses imaging software to build a map
of each bacon strip, and then you can set the
laser to aim at whichever parts you want.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
I love that this is like probably the most complicated
way to cook bacon ever. But I still don't understand,
like why would you want partially raw bacon? Like did
they leave it that way on purpose?
Speaker 2 (21:04):
I mean, I love how much this is bothering you
instead of just focusing on the amazing technology. I mean,
the truth is they left the meaty parts of the
bacon uncooked for a couple of reasons. First, it showed
off the mapping feature for their laser cutter, and second,
it was a way of honoring the raw food tradition
in Japan, like seafood is you know, the big example,
(21:24):
but there are lots of traditional Japanese dishes that call
for raw chicken or pork. Eating raw meat is much
less common in Japan these days, but some people still
prefer their bacon only slightly browned. That's really interesting. I
never heard of that.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Here's another unusual application for laser as I just learned about.
According to research from the Lincoln Lab at MIT, it's
possible to beam a secret message directly into someone's ear
using a laser. So you could actually be walking along
and all of a sudden you hear a whisper in
your ear. But it's not coming from the person next
to you. It's coming from someone eight feet away that
you haven't even noticed. Who just shot a laser at
your ear?
Speaker 2 (21:57):
That is so creepy sounding. So how would this even work? Like,
what do lasers have to do with transmitting sound?
Speaker 1 (22:03):
According to the research team behind this, it works because
laser light excites the moisture in the air around a
target's ear. So basically there's a phenomenon called the photoacoustic effect,
and because of that, the water vapor in the air
will absorb the laser's emission. And then what that produces sound. Yeah,
the water vapor gets so excited by the laser that
it actually starts to vibrate an audible frequency.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
All right, So, let's say you live in a dry climate, Like,
would this not work there? I feel like I might
have to move to a desert just to escape this
weird thing.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Well, it actually does work there because even if you're
somewhere dry, there's still usually enough water in the air
to produce the effect. You maybe you wouldn't hear it
as strongly as you might in a wetter environment. But
even then, the researchers think the volume of the sound
has more to do with how well the water absorbs
the sound, rather than how.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Much water there is in the air.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
That's terrific, you know, I'm still trying to decide if
this is fascinating or horrifying. Like, on one hand, it'd
be pretty fun to beam whispers back and forth without
leaving a paper trail or like disturbing people around you.
You could even have a conversation from across a crowded room,
which would make for like an amazing party trick or
a spy trick or whatever. But on the other hand,
it's easy to imagine like companies beaming ads into our
(23:09):
ears at all hours of the day. Like imagine walking
past a cocad at a bus stop and it triggers
this like motion sensor, and as you walk away, you
hear someone like playing the company jingle in your ear,
and things could start to feel super dystopian like pretty
quickly with something like that around.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Wow, it'd be pretty unnerving. Yeah, it's so weird.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Right, But amazingly, that's not even the scariest potential use
for sound based lasers. Wired had this article recently about
how hackers will soon be able to use lasers to
speak to any kind of computer that uses voice commands.
So we're talking smartphones, tablets, even home assistants like Alexa, Siri,
and Google Home waits.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
You're saying, the microphones and those devices will respond to
the light of a laser just like they would respond
to a.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Sound exactly so, according to the researchers who discovered this
was possible, if you point a laser at a microphone
and change the intensity to a precise frequency, the light
will somehow stimulate the microphone's membrane at that same exact frequency.
They aren't completely sure yet what causes this light as
speech effect, but the result is that the microphone reads
the incoming light as a digital signal, just like it
(24:16):
does with sound. So if you were in a room
when this happened, you wouldn't actually hear anything. The laser
voice is completely silent, but the microphone inside your device
would respond as if it had just received a voice command.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
All right, So what about the voice assistant that's on
your phone, Like on my phone's SERI only responds to
commands if I'm the one who speaks them. So does
that make smartphones immune to these kind of laser attacks?
Speaker 1 (24:39):
I mean, they've got a slightly better line of defense
than smart speakers like the Amazon Echo or the Google Home.
Those don't have the kind of voice authentication you're talking about,
and that makes them especially vulnerable to light commands from hackers.
But that said, if a hacker had a recording of
your voice or was somehow able to reconstruct it, they
could actually adjust the frequency of their laser to match
the sound of your own voice and then use that
(25:00):
to issue commands to your phone.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
So what kind of commands are we talking about exactly?
Speaker 1 (25:04):
I mean, it's terrifying. They can make online purchases, unlock
your car, adjust your thermostat, open the garage door. It
really just depends on the kind of system that's being
hacked and what the user has it hooked up to.
And the worst part is, because of how intense a
laser beam is, hackers could use this trick even on
devices that are hundreds of feet away. So if you
have a home assistant that responds to voice commands, your
(25:26):
best bed is to keep it away from any windows.
If it's in a hacker's line of sight, then it's
in the line of their fire too.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Yeah that's interesting. You know, I thought we were selling
a dishwasher laser in this show, but it turns out
we're advocating for really heavy curtains and blinds. I feel
like at this point, I mean, it really all goes
back to what we were saying earlier. Just because we
can do all of these things with lasers doesn't mean
we should. I mean, for my part, I think I'll
just stick to using them to point at things and
(25:53):
we'll leave the rest to the professionals.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
Yeah, that's probably a good idea. But before we bout
of this laser game for good, let's fire off a
few more rounds in today's fact off. Okay, So I
wanted to start with this one because it's something I
always forget, which is that the word laser is really
(26:17):
an acronym. It stands for light amplification by stimulated emission
of radiation. And the other weird thing is that most
of that name was actually taken from an earlier technology
that amplified microwaves instead of.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Light waves, So masers, I guess, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
I used to think masers were some kind of made
up science fiction version of lasers. Like in the old
Godzilla movies, the military always rolled out these tanks with
satellite dishes on them to fight the monsters, and they
were called maser cannons. But it turns out that those
were a real thing, and they actually predate lasers by
about a decade or so.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Plus they're effective against Godzilla, which isn't nothing. I mean,
that's impressive.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Right.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
Well, back to lasers. If today's show has you craving
a few more lasers in your own life, you could
always head to No Man's Land for the most remote
game of laser tag on the planet. So originally built
during the Victorian era, as this British sea fort, the
aptly named No Man's Land is an artificial island that
never saw much action and was ultimately decommissioned during the
(27:18):
nineteen fifties. So from there, the fort had a single
brush with fame back in the seventies, when it served
as a location for a Doctor Who episode apparently was
home to a race of these evil bipedal reptiles called
the Sea Devils. Then in twenty fifteen, No Man's Land
entered the strangest chapter yet when it was converted into
(27:38):
a luxury hotel and entertainment resort. These new features of
the fort include twenty two bedrooms, a cabaret bar, a sauna,
plenty of shops and restaurants, and of course, a twenty
one room laser tag labyrinth that winds through the entire
lower level. And if you think about it, like, who
doesn't want to play laser tag in the basement of
an abandoned sea fort, it just sounds so awesome, pretty awesome, yea.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
In November twenty seventeen, a British laser lighting company set
the world record for the largest laser light show of
all time. This is at a convention in Las Vegas.
The company made history with a thirty minute laser show
that featured to staggering three hundred and fourteen different lasers.
The show culminated in a seven minute finale that lit
up the Nevada sky with a massive one three hundred
(28:22):
and seventy seven watts of laser power. And again, for
a reference, the average laser pointer uses just five milliwatts.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Yeah, that's a lot of juice. That's that's interesting, all right,
So we've run through a bunch of different applications for
lasers today, but back in the sixties when they were
first being developed, no one was really sure how you
could actually use these things. In fact, the inventor of
the laser didn't even really know. His name was Theodore Maymon,
and despite building the first functioning laser for Hughes Laboratories
(28:50):
in nineteen sixty, he later referred to his creation as
quote a solution seeking a problem. And the good news,
as I think we've shown today, is there turned out
to be all all kinds of problems that lasers can
actually help solve.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Yeah, that is true, but I have to point out
there's at least one major problem that lasers could potentially
create in the future, and that is, of course, the
warping of space time.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
You know, I thought for sure this was going to
be about some like real life death star or something.
But what do lasers have to do with space time?
So this all comes down to gravity. Light carries energy,
and because of that, light has its own gravity. But
the gravitational force created by laser light is scientifically speaking,
a little bit funky. It turns out that when you
rotate a laser beam, it's gravity actually warps the nearby
(29:35):
space time, which you might recall, is basically the fabric
of the universe. So as the beam rotates, spacetime curls
along with it. And I know this all sounds kind
of scary in world ending, but don't worry because the
researchers behind this discovery have a much less upsetting way
to think about it. According to them, the reality warping
effect is like if you put a ball into honey
and spin it, the ball kind of drags along the
(29:56):
honey around it. You know, I'm not sure that's any
more reassuring, but it is fun to imagine the fabric
of the universe is honey. So I really feel like
for that alone, you've earned the trophy for this week. Mango. Congratulations.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Well, it is an honor as always. I do think
we should thank Gabe for doing the heavy lifting on
this episode, as he does for most episodes, But laziers
are so complicated.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
And you did so much research for it.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
But I think that's it for today's Part Time Genius
from Will, Gabe Lowell and myself. Thank you so much
for listening. We'll be back next week with another new episode.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Part Time Genius is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite show.
Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of iHeartRadio Guess
what We'll what's that Mango? So earlier this year, the
mayor of Austin, Texas used a laser beam to send
a recipe for Keeso to the moon.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
That's impressive, but I have to asked why exactly did
he do this?
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Well, according to his press release, this is what he said, quote,
we choose to send Keeso to the moon and maybe
someday chips as well, not because these things are easy,
but because they are hard. So maybe that's the answer.
But I think the real reason, and this is serious,
was to teach future aliens how to make Keeso in
(00:47):
case they ever stop off at our moon, which is
a serious bit of intergalactic hospitality.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
I think, wait, you're saying it's just the recipe, like
the aliens will have to supply their own chips and cheese.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
I guess it's less hospitable when you put it that way.
But still the mayor's heart, I think was in the
right place. His name is Steve Adler, by the way,
and the recipe he chose is a local favorite in Austin,
and it was sent to the Moon as part of
a lunar Library that was stowed aboard a SpaceX rocket,
the Falcon nine.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Oh like they Okay, I was confused on how you
were saying they had sent it. I was actually hoping
they kind of like carve the case a recipe into
the moon, like with a laser or something. But yeah,
I guess sending it on a rocket is that's a
little bit more practical, I guess, yeah, and a little
less like cartoon super villain. I guess that's true. All right, Well,
then how does the laser fit into this?
Speaker 1 (01:33):
So the laser is actually what made the whole library possible,
because they didn't just send a one page caso recipe
to the moon. The lunar library also included some other
quote unquote light reading.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Do you get it? I get I get it?
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yeah, And it includes the entirety of Wikipedia in English,
tens of thousands of books, and a key to translate
everything into five thousand different languages. So sending a hard
copy of all those things clearly wasn't an option, and
instead the mission crew used a powerful laser to etch
the entire library, letter by letter, into this super light
radiation proof nickel disc, and just in case, the aliens
(02:07):
who find it have bad eye sight. All the information
on the disc was also laser and coded digitally, so
the aliens can put it up on their view screens
or whatever they have.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
All Right, so all of this, like the laser etch
Casa recipe, all of Wikipedia, this is all actually on
the moon. Now, Yeah, I mean there's a bit of
a twist.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
The moon lander that was carrying the library crash landed
on the Moon, and this was on April eleventh, So
the mission wasn't exactly a success. But the good news
is the library probably did survive. According to a spokesperson
for the Foundation, small light objects like our library do
better in impact. It was probably thrown a few kilometers
away a thirty million page frisbee on the Moon.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
I like to think about certain first, Like, if you
think about it, this was the first frisbee with a
Caso recipe on it ever thrown on the Moon. I
mean that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, And it was all made possible by lasers, which
kind of sums up our show today. When you think
of lasers, it's mostly like death rays from sci fi
movies and whatever. But as the Lunar Library shows, the
truth is that real world, lasers have much more interesting
applications than just blowing things up, from levitating objects to
precision cooking bacon. There are lots of weird things you
can do with a laser beam, and we're going to
(03:16):
take a whole look at a bunch of them.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part
(03:42):
Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined
by my good friend mangesh Hot Ticketer And on the
other side of the soundproof glass, carrying on the show's
proud tradition of thematic prop comedy. That's our friend and
producer Loll. Just look at that mango. He brought in
his own laser pointer from home, waving it around, pointing
to all these different objects. I mean, it's not a
(04:02):
useful tool in his line of work, but he's made
the effort anyway. I mean, it's always putting in the effort. Yeah,
I mean, it's that kind of spirit that we really
appreciate it around here. Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
And laser pointers are actually a good place to start
because they really aren't much different from the lasers we
use in research or defense. In either case, you're dealing
with the device that works by amplifying a highly concentrated
beam of light aka laser beam. So the main difference
between these devices is their power level. Right, The maximum
allowance for a laser pointer in the US is a
measly five milliwats, but other kinds of handheld lasers can
(04:35):
rage anywhere from twenty five miliwats all the way up
to a thousand.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
And that's what would have been used to edge the
case or recipe into that disk, right.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Yeah, exactly, which is also why they're used for laser
removals and certain kinds of surgery. And those procedures aren't
just for humans either. For instance, I read that some
aquariums have started using a seven hundred miliwat laser to
remove harmful polyps from their coral Apparently the laser can
burn a polyp away that it won't ever grow back,
and the whole process only takes about ten seconds.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
I mean, it does make you question at least a
little bit how safe these laser pointers are really. I mean,
I know they're weak, but if you think about sort
of like their larger cousins and destroying pole ups whole
cloth and a matter of seconds, like the five miliwat versions,
must do some small scale damage on their own, I
would think, right.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Yeah, And that's actually why you're never supposed to look
directly into the beam of a laser pointer, because if
you're to do that, which again you shouldn't, what happens
is that a small portion of your retina will be
bombarded by like this highly focused light. And when that happens,
the optical nerves get overloaded and you wind up seeing
all these little floating spots.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
So it really is frying your retina, just not as
quickly or decisively as like one of the stronger lasers. Right.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
And so when we talk about modern lasers used for defense,
it's that ability to temporarily blind and really disorient people
that's in play. It's not like blasting through armor or
blowing apart buildings. For example. In law enforcement, there's something
called a data laser, and it's used for riot control.
It's basically like a larger version of a laser pointer.
It's about the size of a flashlight, but it's got
(06:07):
a two hundred and fifty miliwat beam and it's effective
from about thirty yards away, So if someone looks into
the beam, they can lose sight for up to fifteen
minutes and feel nauseous for even longer. So the idea
is really to incapacitate a rowdy crowd all at once,
and there's no need for physical contact, I guess.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
I mean, I could see how that'd be useful in
some like really drastic circumstances, but it still feels pretty
extreme to use these on civilians. But you know, there's
one application where it seems a little more appropriate, and
that's when ships use these dasers to ward off pirates.
Have you heard about this, I haven't.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
No.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
It's called sea lays, and the stock version is a
whopping five thousand miliwats, twenty times stronger than the flashlight
that you mentioned. But if you want it beefed up,
you can actually get one all the way up to
twenty thousand miliwads. So the base model alone, though, is
strong enough to be seen from nearly three miles away.
So the idea is that at a distance you could
(07:03):
signal the pirates not to come any closer, like a
warning shot, basically, than if they continue to approach anyway,
the daser's real effects would start to kick in, the
pirates would find themselves nauseous, disoriented, and of course temporarily blind,
which just doesn't seem pleasant.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Yeah, and that's like consumer grade tech, Like anyone on
the streets can buy the stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Well, they go for about one hundred thousand dollars a pop,
so maybe not anybody off the street, but anybody with
one hundred thousand dollars in their pocket. They are available
for civilians.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Of course, the military has their own brand of daser lasers,
and these go back as far as the early sixties,
when the first real laser was invented. They are early
reports of a so called eye popper developed by the
Air Force. So, according to this nineteen seventy two edition
of the Post, quote the strangest of weapons was dreamed
up in the early sixties as a means of exploding
(07:55):
the eyes of enemy soldiers and their officers from distances
of more than a giant pulse lasers would sweep back
and forth across a battlefield, blinding anyone who looked directly
at it. That's sort of terrifying. Well was it ever
used in combat? Thankfully not. I mean, the military eventually
decided that exploding the enemy's eyes from a mile away
(08:15):
might not be the most honorable form of engagement, And
in nineteen ninety five, an update to the Geneva Conventions
actually ban the use of any laser weapons that cause
permanent blindness, So this idea was actually put to rest.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
So weird that there are like rules to wars. Really
like that, But why don't we move towards some of
the more wholesome ways to use a laser beam? For instance,
did you know that judges have started using lasers to
help score gymnastics competitions.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Now I had not heard this, and I'm curious why
this is necessary, Like what was wrong with the old
way of scoring competitions.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
So the main problem is that humans can sometimes miss
important details when deciding the outcome of a sporting event.
And that's true even with instant replays. In fact, there
was a study on gymnastics competitions, and this was back
in twoenty fifteen, and it concluded that up to sixty
percent of athlete errors go totally overlooked by judges.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
And so the solution to that is to shoot a
bunch of lasers at the gymnast. I guess, well sort of.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
I mean, there's this Japanese electronics company, it's called Fujitsu,
and it's been working to develop three D laser sensors
that can capture a gymnast's movements and analyze them on
the spot as I guess numerical data. So the idea
is to use these recordings as a supplement to the
judge's own observations, and if there's an error they didn't cash,
the system will draw their attention to it. And if
(09:32):
a judge ever needs evidence to back up or ruling,
the system can provide that too.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
I see. So then it's kind of like the motion
capture that's used in the digital characters for movies like
Gollam and Lord of the Rings. Is it kind of
like that?
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Yeah? I mean, except in this case, the gymnast doesn't
have to do backflips while wearing like a suit covered
in those pingpong balls. Instead, there's a series of lasers
that track their movements in real time and then transmit
the data to a software program, and that way there's
a detailed record of every movie the athlete makes, no
matter how fast or complex it is. And this includes
everything from like the placement of their joints to the
(10:06):
exact angles of their movements.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
It sounds pretty amazing actually, and you said, this is
already being used in competitions.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Fujitsu announced a deal last fall with the International Gymnastics
Federation and they've already tested the system at a handful
of competitions this year, and the goals really to roll
it out in earnest at the Gymnastics World Championships in
late September. But beyond that, Fujitsu is hoping the laser
system will become the go to tool for judges, not
just for gymnastics, but also for things like figure skating
(10:33):
or any other sport where they're like scoring inconsistencies and
involves decisions about precise movements.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
That's pretty cool, But I actually want to take us
back to laser pointers for a second, because there's a
practical use for them that I never would have thought
about before. We were doing our research this week, and
apparently home care nurses sometimes use common laser pointers as
a way to enable their patients to communicate. So, say
a patient has limited mobility as well as difficulties speaking.
(11:00):
In a case like that, a nurse might attach a
laser pointer to a pair of eyeglasses or maybe the
rim of a hat, and then the nurse would set
up this communication board filled with common phrases plus all
the letters of the alphabet, and you know, and the
patient could express themselves by pointing to whatever it was
they wanted to say. That's funny.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
It's like the simplest use of a pointer, but it's
also to communicate in such a specific way. It's so
much more clever than you know, just using it to
get a cat to run around a room. Speaking of which,
I know, we both found some scientific uses for lasers
that were equally unexpected. But before we get into those,
let's take a quick break.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
And you're listening to part time Genius, So we're talking
about all the surprising things you can do with a laser.
So just keep in mind that even though you theoretically
could do these things, you probably shouldn't do all or
actually any of them. As in point, you could use
(12:03):
a high powered laser to heat a material to well
over a million degrees, the atoms of that substance would
cease to exist, and you'd be left with a soupy
mix of electrons and ions, what scientists lovingly referred to
as plasma. But again, that doesn't mean you should do that,
So don't do that, Nigo, Yeah, I mean, you definitely
shouldn't do that. Recreating the core of the sun in
(12:25):
your living room is not recommended by the show. Well
that's a good call on a less dangerous, but just
as difficult side of things. It's also possible to use
a laser to levitate tiny objects.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
So this is something I'm fascinated by, but it makes
zero sense to my mind. I mean, lasers burn and
melt and singe, so how could that possibly transfer into
making something flow in mid air?
Speaker 2 (12:47):
I agree, I mean it's not very intuitive for laymen
like ourselves, but it helps to remember that light, including
laser light, is made up of photons, and those photons
exert a special kind of force known as radiation pressure. Sure,
and that's really the key to what scientists call optical levitation.
So when you have a really powerful beam of light,
(13:07):
the radiation pressure it exerts is sometimes strong enough to
overcome the force of gravity. So if you aim a
high enough power laser beam at a super light object,
the force of the light's pressure can actually propel it
forward or even lift it off the ground, which makes
a little more sense to me. I guess. So are
like solar sales an example of this technology. Yeah, that's
(13:30):
it exactly. I mean most people have probably seen one.
They're like big gold colored square sheets attached to the
end of a space probe or another small spacecraft, and
the reflective surface harnesses radiation pressure from sunlight, and that
in turn propels the craft through space.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
But you're saying it's possible to float something with a
laser here on Earth as well.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
I mean theoretically, yes, the principle behind it has been
proven in a lab setting, but a real world test
is still years away. And if that works, researchers would
be able to push around tiny particles that are too
small to control through other means. And even cooler than that,
they'd be able to power real life micro machines, by
(14:11):
which I don't mean the tiny monster trucks that used
to be popular when you were kids, even though those
are just as awesome as levitating things, but rather things
like flying a teeny tiny camera over a volcano or
through the wreckage of a building or something like that.
That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Well, since you brought up radiation pressure, I do have
to tell you about this other weird application Gabe told
me about. Basically, you can use two focused laser beams
to create what's known as optical tweezers, and this allows
scientists to manipulate objects smaller than a single micron, like
a unit of measure that's equal to about thirty nine
millions of an inch, or in other word, it's really
(14:45):
really small.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
And so this works because of radiation pressure from the lasers.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Yeah, so when you have a laser beam on either
side of the object, the resulting forces actually work together
and allow you to grip the object. So you can
kind of think of it like laser beam chops.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
That's cool. So is this something that was just recently
discovered or what When Gabe brought up I thought so too.
But researchers first created optical tweezers back in the nineteen
eighties and they've been improving on the concept ever since.
In fact, the biggest limitation to the technology was finally
overcome just a few years ago. For the last thirty
years or so, there was always a cap on how
finally you could focus a beam of laser light, and
(15:21):
the result was that anything smaller than one hundred nanometers
couldn't be gripped by the tweezers. So I'm a little
rusty on the micro measurements, like how small is that
compared to the microns that you mentioned earlier. I'm embarrassed
to admit that I'm a little rusty on these measures.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Yeah. Well, if I didn't have a sheet of paper
in front of me, I wouldn't know. So one hundred
nanometers is equal to just zero point one microns. So
we were already dealing with incredibly small forms of matter
before that, like the organelle's inside a living cell or
a particle of bacteria. But these are even smaller than those,
and our laser chopsticks just couldn't get a hold of them.
(15:57):
But back in twenty fourteen, researchers an institute in Spain
finally figured out how to focus laser light to such
a fine degree that they could actually manipulate particles as
small as just fifteen animeters.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
And so what kind of stuff does that actually allow
them to do so much stuff? Right?
Speaker 1 (16:12):
Okay, enough, I mean we'll never really understand any fact.
I'm just going to defer to Scientific American on this
one and tell you that possible applications include, quote, building
medical products with nanoscale exactness, manufacturing nanocrystal geometries for electronic
devices and manipulating single molecules such as proteins.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yeah stuff, Oh right, right, I guess that sounds good,
I think, But we've still got a few strange uses
for lasers to talk about, including a couple that are
strictly just for laughs. But first, let's take one more
quick break.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Welcome back to part time Genius. Okay, Well, so we've
talked about what lasers can do for aliens, and for
sports judges and for scientists, but let's be selfish for
a minute and talk about what lasers can do for us.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
All right, Well, how about this one. You can use
a laser on your dirty dishes and have them cleaner
than they've ever been before. Like, say goodbye to your dishwasher.
You really won't need it from here on out because
of lasers.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Well, in my family, I'm actually the one who washes
the dishes, and I'm always looking for an excuse to
throw out my dishwasher.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
So tell me more. All right. So it's pretty simple, really,
Like you talked about burning polyps off a coral earlier,
and it's the same premise here, except with all the
grease and oil and mystery crust that gets stuck to
your cookwaar to just install this device that kind of
looks like really like a table lamp, I guess, and
you put it in your kitchen and then you never
have to scrub another baking sheet or nonstick pan again.
(17:52):
You don't even have to control the laser by hand.
It is totally automated, so the beam just scans back
and forth over the pan or whatever it is that
you're clean. It just burns the grease right off of there.
It's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Wait, so it's gotta leave something behind, right, It doesn't
just vaporize all that gunk.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
That is true, like there should be some food ash
left behind. But that's not the case actually, because the
laser cleaner also comes with a built in nozzle that
sucks up whatever the laser leaves behind. I mean, this
is just amazing. And the coolest part is that these
two functions occur simultaneously. So the surface of the pan
just goes from pitch black with grease to shiny and
(18:31):
clean right before your eyes. It's like some kind of
low key kitchen magic. It should totally be an infomercial.
This honestly feels like you're infomercial pitching. I am kind of.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Also, I'm sold because you know, I'm the designated dishwasher
and I hate scrubbing pans in the most.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
It's definitely a pretty amazing invention. You can find the
videos of this thing online. You just look up laser
age TV on YouTube and look for the laser cleaning
of a baking tray. But if you do, make sure
you turn up the sound because you can hear the
food waste just sizzling away with every sweep of this laser.
It almost sounds like an electric shaver or something. And
(19:10):
it's all just weirdly satisfying.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Yeah, I bet you know. I'm already sold. But my
only qualm is if it's kid friendly to have like
lasers in your kitchen.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Oh mango, it is absolutely not kids, say, and it's
really just for large scale kitchens and bakeries, not something
you'd want to keep around the house. In fact, this
might actually be the strongest commercial laser we have talked
about today. You remember the sea las thing that ships
used to scare off pirates.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Right, Yeah, sorry, are you suggesting this technology? It can
be used to clean pirates too.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
You know what, that's actually a great idea, but not
exactly what I'm getting at here. But as strong as
that was, it maxed out at twenty thousand miliwats. Well,
the laser for this cleaning system is six times stronger,
at one one hundred and twenty thousand miliwats. But if
you want to know the real deal breaker, here's another
scary note. Forty five thousand dollars. That's actually the going
(20:03):
rate for your own laser cleaner.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
I don't know, sending my kids to college for getting
clean dishes and I have to it feels like an
even trade.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Possibly, But all right, well, fair enough, So tell me
how this strikes you though, Mango laser cooked bacon. I'm listening,
all right. So there's this mathematical science professor in Tokyo
named Kintaro Fukushi, and a few years ago he partnered
with a guy who runs a maker space in Japan,
and together they design this laser cutter that can perfectly
(20:34):
fry the fatty part of the bacon, leaving the rest
of it completely untouched. That's interesting, but why not cook
the bacon all the way? Well, you could definitely set
it so that the whole piece of bacon was cooked
like The setup uses imaging software to build a map
of each bacon strip, and then you can set the
laser to aim at whichever parts you want.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
I love that this is like probably the most complicated
way to cook bacon ever. But I still don't understand,
like why would you want partially raw bacon? Like did
they leave it that way on purpose?
Speaker 2 (21:04):
I mean, I love how much this is bothering you
instead of just focusing on the amazing technology. I mean,
the truth is they left the meaty parts of the
bacon uncooked for a couple of reasons. First, it showed
off the mapping feature for their laser cutter, and second,
it was a way of honoring the raw food tradition
in Japan, like seafood is you know, the big example,
(21:24):
but there are lots of traditional Japanese dishes that call
for raw chicken or pork. Eating raw meat is much
less common in Japan these days, but some people still
prefer their bacon only slightly browned. That's really interesting. I
never heard of that.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Here's another unusual application for laser as I just learned about.
According to research from the Lincoln Lab at MIT, it's
possible to beam a secret message directly into someone's ear
using a laser. So you could actually be walking along
and all of a sudden you hear a whisper in
your ear. But it's not coming from the person next
to you. It's coming from someone eight feet away that
you haven't even noticed. Who just shot a laser at
your ear?
Speaker 2 (21:57):
That is so creepy sounding. So how would this even work? Like,
what do lasers have to do with transmitting sound?
Speaker 1 (22:03):
According to the research team behind this, it works because
laser light excites the moisture in the air around a
target's ear. So basically there's a phenomenon called the photoacoustic effect,
and because of that, the water vapor in the air
will absorb the laser's emission. And then what that produces sound. Yeah,
the water vapor gets so excited by the laser that
it actually starts to vibrate an audible frequency.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
All right, So, let's say you live in a dry climate, Like,
would this not work there? I feel like I might
have to move to a desert just to escape this
weird thing.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Well, it actually does work there because even if you're
somewhere dry, there's still usually enough water in the air
to produce the effect. You maybe you wouldn't hear it
as strongly as you might in a wetter environment. But
even then, the researchers think the volume of the sound
has more to do with how well the water absorbs
the sound, rather than how.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Much water there is in the air.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
That's terrific, you know, I'm still trying to decide if
this is fascinating or horrifying. Like, on one hand, it'd
be pretty fun to beam whispers back and forth without
leaving a paper trail or like disturbing people around you.
You could even have a conversation from across a crowded room,
which would make for like an amazing party trick or
a spy trick or whatever. But on the other hand,
it's easy to imagine like companies beaming ads into our
(23:09):
ears at all hours of the day. Like imagine walking
past a cocad at a bus stop and it triggers
this like motion sensor, and as you walk away, you
hear someone like playing the company jingle in your ear,
and things could start to feel super dystopian like pretty
quickly with something like that around.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Wow, it'd be pretty unnerving. Yeah, it's so weird.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
Right, But amazingly, that's not even the scariest potential use
for sound based lasers. Wired had this article recently about
how hackers will soon be able to use lasers to
speak to any kind of computer that uses voice commands.
So we're talking smartphones, tablets, even home assistants like Alexa, Siri,
and Google Home waits.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
You're saying, the microphones and those devices will respond to
the light of a laser just like they would respond
to a.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Sound exactly so, according to the researchers who discovered this
was possible, if you point a laser at a microphone
and change the intensity to a precise frequency, the light
will somehow stimulate the microphone's membrane at that same exact frequency.
They aren't completely sure yet what causes this light as
speech effect, but the result is that the microphone reads
the incoming light as a digital signal, just like it
(24:16):
does with sound. So if you were in a room
when this happened, you wouldn't actually hear anything. The laser
voice is completely silent, but the microphone inside your device
would respond as if it had just received a voice command.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
All right, So what about the voice assistant that's on
your phone, Like on my phone's SERI only responds to
commands if I'm the one who speaks them. So does
that make smartphones immune to these kind of laser attacks?
Speaker 1 (24:39):
I mean, they've got a slightly better line of defense
than smart speakers like the Amazon Echo or the Google Home.
Those don't have the kind of voice authentication you're talking about,
and that makes them especially vulnerable to light commands from hackers.
But that said, if a hacker had a recording of
your voice or was somehow able to reconstruct it, they
could actually adjust the frequency of their laser to match
the sound of your own voice and then use that
(25:00):
to issue commands to your phone.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
So what kind of commands are we talking about exactly?
Speaker 1 (25:04):
I mean, it's terrifying. They can make online purchases, unlock
your car, adjust your thermostat, open the garage door. It
really just depends on the kind of system that's being
hacked and what the user has it hooked up to.
And the worst part is, because of how intense a
laser beam is, hackers could use this trick even on
devices that are hundreds of feet away. So if you
have a home assistant that responds to voice commands, your
(25:26):
best bed is to keep it away from any windows.
If it's in a hacker's line of sight, then it's
in the line of their fire too.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Yeah that's interesting. You know, I thought we were selling
a dishwasher laser in this show, but it turns out
we're advocating for really heavy curtains and blinds. I feel
like at this point, I mean, it really all goes
back to what we were saying earlier. Just because we
can do all of these things with lasers doesn't mean
we should. I mean, for my part, I think I'll
just stick to using them to point at things and
(25:53):
we'll leave the rest to the professionals.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
Yeah, that's probably a good idea. But before we bout
of this laser game for good, let's fire off a
few more rounds in today's fact off. Okay, So I
wanted to start with this one because it's something I
always forget, which is that the word laser is really
(26:17):
an acronym. It stands for light amplification by stimulated emission
of radiation. And the other weird thing is that most
of that name was actually taken from an earlier technology
that amplified microwaves instead of.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Light waves, So masers, I guess, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
I used to think masers were some kind of made
up science fiction version of lasers. Like in the old
Godzilla movies, the military always rolled out these tanks with
satellite dishes on them to fight the monsters, and they
were called maser cannons. But it turns out that those
were a real thing, and they actually predate lasers by
about a decade or so.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Plus they're effective against Godzilla, which isn't nothing. I mean,
that's impressive.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Right.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
Well, back to lasers. If today's show has you craving
a few more lasers in your own life, you could
always head to No Man's Land for the most remote
game of laser tag on the planet. So originally built
during the Victorian era, as this British sea fort, the
aptly named No Man's Land is an artificial island that
never saw much action and was ultimately decommissioned during the
(27:18):
nineteen fifties. So from there, the fort had a single
brush with fame back in the seventies, when it served
as a location for a Doctor Who episode apparently was
home to a race of these evil bipedal reptiles called
the Sea Devils. Then in twenty fifteen, No Man's Land
entered the strangest chapter yet when it was converted into
(27:38):
a luxury hotel and entertainment resort. These new features of
the fort include twenty two bedrooms, a cabaret bar, a sauna,
plenty of shops and restaurants, and of course, a twenty
one room laser tag labyrinth that winds through the entire
lower level. And if you think about it, like, who
doesn't want to play laser tag in the basement of
an abandoned sea fort, it just sounds so awesome, pretty awesome, yea.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
In November twenty seventeen, a British laser lighting company set
the world record for the largest laser light show of
all time. This is at a convention in Las Vegas.
The company made history with a thirty minute laser show
that featured to staggering three hundred and fourteen different lasers.
The show culminated in a seven minute finale that lit
up the Nevada sky with a massive one three hundred
(28:22):
and seventy seven watts of laser power. And again, for
a reference, the average laser pointer uses just five milliwatts.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Yeah, that's a lot of juice. That's that's interesting, all right,
So we've run through a bunch of different applications for
lasers today, but back in the sixties when they were
first being developed, no one was really sure how you
could actually use these things. In fact, the inventor of
the laser didn't even really know. His name was Theodore Maymon,
and despite building the first functioning laser for Hughes Laboratories
(28:50):
in nineteen sixty, he later referred to his creation as
quote a solution seeking a problem. And the good news,
as I think we've shown today, is there turned out
to be all all kinds of problems that lasers can
actually help solve.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Yeah, that is true, but I have to point out
there's at least one major problem that lasers could potentially
create in the future, and that is, of course, the
warping of space time.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
You know, I thought for sure this was going to
be about some like real life death star or something.
But what do lasers have to do with space time?
So this all comes down to gravity. Light carries energy,
and because of that, light has its own gravity. But
the gravitational force created by laser light is scientifically speaking,
a little bit funky. It turns out that when you
rotate a laser beam, it's gravity actually warps the nearby
(29:35):
space time, which you might recall, is basically the fabric
of the universe. So as the beam rotates, spacetime curls
along with it. And I know this all sounds kind
of scary in world ending, but don't worry because the
researchers behind this discovery have a much less upsetting way
to think about it. According to them, the reality warping
effect is like if you put a ball into honey
and spin it, the ball kind of drags along the
(29:56):
honey around it. You know, I'm not sure that's any
more reassuring, but it is fun to imagine the fabric
of the universe is honey. So I really feel like
for that alone, you've earned the trophy for this week. Mango. Congratulations.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Well, it is an honor as always. I do think
we should thank Gabe for doing the heavy lifting on
this episode, as he does for most episodes, But laziers
are so complicated.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
And you did so much research for it.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
But I think that's it for today's Part Time Genius
from Will, Gabe Lowell and myself. Thank you so much
for listening. We'll be back next week with another new episode.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Part Time Genius is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite show.
Part-Time Genius News
Hosts And Creators
Will Pearson
Mangesh Hattikudur
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