GE Engineer Explains Why Lightsabers Couldn't Work

Stupid scientist, ruining my dreams:

The first snag you run into is that battery. "Although real-life battery technology is coming along great," Gluesenkamp writes, "we are a long way off from creating handheld batteries with capacities like that the ones found in the lightsaber's diatium power cell." In Star Wars, Jedi didn't have to worry about that because "diatium" is a convenient bit of fiction and are attuned to the Force, so, really, they could do anything.[...]

There's another problem in getting a focused, powerful blade of plasma with an exact length and shape, which is where the concept of a lightsaber gets "really convoluted," according to Gluesenkamp.

"There are also no crystals that can 'direct' a plasma," Gluesenkamp writes, noting that today we use magnetic fields are used, but are limited as the machinery involved has to enclose the plasma. "In fact, a plasma 'being directed' by a crystal lens doesn't make any physical sense anyway. A plasma is really just an ionized gas — a gas in which the electrons have been stripped from their atomic nuclei."

Well, yeah, he has "facts" and "science" on his side. But we look really cool when we hang out at the mall in our Jedi robes. So we have that going for us.

Link | Image: Lucasfilms

Comments (0)

I can read most of it except for some words where the first letter has changed and where double consonants have moved from one end to the other.

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The main problem is in names, since you can never really know what a person is called, and if the randomized word becomes a new word (i.e. "salon" becoming "sloan" for instance).

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Yeah, names don't work at all. Especially last names.

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Must be me then, couldn't make heads or tails out of it. But then, I struggle with igpayatinlay ;-)

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Wow. For a moment there I thought I had a mini stroke and all the words got jumbled. *phew* It's odd I can easily read that I guess our brains just naturally are able to focus out the "noise" and recognize the words. Gotta love our squishy gray matter. :)

And I have to agree with MrPumpernickel: Names are definitely one of the hardest things to differentiate in this sort of brain trickery.

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Why would you do that.

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I always thought there was something fishy with that study. I couldn't make heads or tails of some words without serious thinking. "Cetilns" really got me.

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The original meme didn't have any proper names, but proves the point about first and last letters clueing the brain in to the word. good sfutf.

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I think I read about this before in this blog.

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Yeah, last names like Stawczyk and company names like Juvenex knock things out of whack.

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I'd like to point out that the context of the words really help out. You brain kind of 'expects' certain words, which is why sometimes its easy to fill in a word for someone in a conversation if they pause. The more difficult words are easier to 'guess' bassed on the easier words around them.

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