• Question: Would the laser that you experiment with ever be strong enough, now or in the future to create a black hole, or a hole in the atmosphere?

    Asked by to Daren, Lynne, Phillip, Simon on 24 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Lynne Thomas

      Lynne Thomas answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      Thankfully I don’t think that the lasers that I work with will ever be that strong. If they were, we would just keep blowing up our crystals before we could find out anything useful! Lasers can certainly be made powerful enough that they could make a hole in the atmosphere. High powered lasers can be very dangerous and can cut through really hard things like diamonds. Whether we can use them to make black holes is a subject of debate still but maybe one day this is how they will make an artificial black hole. Hopefully they will know exactly what they are doing to make sure it doesn’t go badly wrong though!

    • Photo: Phillip Manning

      Phillip Manning answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      Thankfully….no. Hopefully if humans ever have the ability to build such a piece of tech..,,they wont!

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      I definitely don’t think we’d make a laser big enough to create a black hole. Lasers work by bouncing light backwards and forwards between mirrors until they build up lots of energy and then we release the energy in one go. We’d need so much energy to make a black hole that we would destroy the mirrors in the laser before we got there!
      I think it’ll probably take far less energy to make a hole in the atmosphere. Hopefully there are no evil geniuses out there planning this!

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