You’ve surely heard the old adage: When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That’s the complete antithesis of the laser spectrum: with colours ranging all the way from infrared to xray, and materials ranging from gas to liquid, the options are manifold. All of which means that instead of trying your best to make a solution fit your challenge, lasers can be manipulated, adjusted and tweaked to do just what you want them to do.
What, exactly, is a laser?
How is it possible that the same technology that is used to cut diamonds is popular for its ability to remove hair permanently, or even that this same technology can measure the distance to the moon?
That’s the ‘magic’ of a laser: its many and diverse characteristics – including the ability to generate light and heat energy, as well as its rapid speed and coherence or frequency stability, and the spectrum of colours available – means that the light amplifying qualities of lasers can be applied to solve a wide variety of problems.
It may surprise you to learn that, when laser first shot to prominence in the 1960s, there was no real use for it. Of course, nowadays, lasers have a place in almost every single piece of technology around – but, back then, they were more a product of a time of curiosity and imagination than usefulness and application. In fact, scientists from back then would probably be amazed if they saw how we use their invention today.
