All about lasers!

All about fiber optics!

            The first person to ever invent the light bulb was Thomas Edison. It allegedly took over 1,000 tries for him to create the filament for the light bulb. Ever since, the light bulb has been one of the most commonly used and least thought about household appliance ever invented. They are actually very complicated to understand and difficult to make.

The most obvious use of light is in the ordinary, everyday iridescent light bulb. The way a light bulb works is that electricity is run through a filament, and that creates friction, and which in turn heats it. The filament has so much heat energy in it that it begins to give off photons. That is what makes the filament glow. This whole process takes places in a vacuum, inside of the actual bulb. Different light bulbs need different amounts of power, or are different sizes with different length filaments.

Not all light bulbs work that way, however. Florescent light bulbs work by running an electrical current through a special type of gas that gets ‘excited’. In its ‘excited’ form, the gas molecules rush around and bump into each other. That friction, like with the filament in a normal bulb, creates energy and launches photons everywhere. With florescent bulbs, instead of a glowing filament, the actual gas glows.

Those are the two main types of light bulbs; iridescent and florescent. They are both used for different purposes and have different qualities. Iridescent bulbs are cheaper, give off more energy as heat, and have a shorter life. Florescent bulbs are brighter, give off less energy as heat, have a longer life, and are usually slightly more expensive. Iridescent bulbs are also able to be manufactured much smaller than florescent bulbs can, and so are used in flashlights and Christmas lights. Florescent bulbs are used in hallway lights and ceiling lights because they are brighter and need less changing.

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            Lasers are, like light bulbs, widely used and just as under appreciated. They are used in everything from laser pointers and advanced weapons targeting systems, to laser eye surgery and even high-tech laser microphones. Also like light bulbs, they are very complicated to understand and produce.

But what actually are lasers? The phrase LASER is an acronym; it stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. I don’t know the textbook definition of what that means, but what happens is that light is bounced between two mirrors, one of which is a “partially silvered” mirror; it lets some light through, but most is bounced back. Each time the light is bounced back, it passes through a special substance that, when photons hit it, enters an “excited” state. These “excited” particles zoom around and, when they hit another particle, release a photon. In this example, two photons (the ones that excited the particles) have become three! So, essentially, the light level is always increasing and decreasing at the same time. It is increasing because the substance is amplifying (not focusing) the light, and decreasing because some light is escaping through the mirror. It is a very ingenious device, the laser.

This is all very well and good, you might say, but what practical uses are there for a laser? There is an alarming amount of uses for a laser. CD players, CD-ROM readers in computers, distance finders, almost all manufacturing plants, and those things I named above all use lasers. Distance finders work by sending a short burst of laser light and timing how fast it takes to come back. CD players and CD-ROM readers work in a similar fashion, bouncing light off of CDs, which have many small ridges on them, and then timing how fast and in which direction the light is reflected. Manufacturing plants use lasers to cut sheets of metal when precision is needed. Ultra-high intensity lasers can quickly melt the hardest sheets of metal. Sort of like being warmed up by the sun, but multiplied by one thousand. Futuristic laser microphones work by bouncing a laser beam off of a pane of glass, and, like with the CDs, measuring when and how much the beam moves. Laser eye surgery is pretty much welding and scorching specific spots in the eye.

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Light can also be used in communication. I’m not talking about using flashlights to talk to your friends in Morse code, I mean fiber optics. Most telephone and internet companies are switching their land lines over to fiber optics because it needs less energy. Fiber optics are thin, flexible tubes made out of a special kind of clear plastic that traps light inside of it. Have you ever seen one of those lamps with lots of thin tubes spreading out of it in a tree shape? And each tube glows at the tip? Well, those are fiber optic tubes.

Fiber optics, like I mentioned above, are used mainly in long-range communication. But people have found many ways to use them. For example, in places where light bulbs and such won’t fit, like micro surgery, doctors use fiber optics for light sources and video feeds. Fiber optics are also commonly used in decorations and rarely used in clothing. They are woven into pants, shirts, or even pillows as changeable designs, or can be twisted into glowing knots. There are a lot of other uses, I’m sure, but I can’t think of any.

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Light, in general, is astounding. In its uses, it is miraculous. In its composition, complicated is the right word. Light is amazing! And there is nothing to say other than that.