A laser beam being tested during a laboratory experiment at Trion Instruments, Ann Arbor,
Michigan, December 1962.
The hottest treasure hunt in the scientific world today involves a small device with the odd name of “laser” and such impressive potentialities that few companies in electronics, optics or space research dare to be left out of the race. The laser (an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”) stands for an entirely new conception of what light can do.
Its invention is comparable to the invention of the vacuum tube with all the developments of radio, radar, TV and transistors yet to come.
With the laser’s help, light stops being just something to see by. It becomes a powerful tool able to carry messages over gigantic distances, perform delicate surgery, make radar 10,000 times more precise and weld microscopic wires. When properly focused over a short distance, the narrow, intense beams of laser light have an even more startling property: they can vaporize any known material.
Lasers make it possible to generate light in much the same fashion as radio, TV or radar waves, over which light has certain breath-taking advantages. Since laser light starts out in waves that are almost perfectly parallel, its rays never diverge seriously, regardless of distance. Furthermore, light waves are tens of thousands of times shorter than radio waves, which means that even a narrow band of visible light can hold trillions of cycles per second and thus transmit enormous amounts of information. It has been calculated that, under the right conditions, a single laser beam could carry as many messages—radio, telephone, teletypewriter and TV—as all communications channels in existence today.
Even now radio and TV frequencies are crowded; but the present electronic traffic jam is nothing compared with that forecast for the near future. Communications experts believe that the message load will double within the next ten years. This is why so much interest has centered on the laser’s promise in the communications field, though its immediate uses there are still very few.
Radar based on laser light is also a possibility. One practical use will be in tracking earth satellites. The time it takes laser beams to reach the satellite and come back, as well as the angles of the reflected light, will serve to calculate the satellite’s position.
Besides their narrowness, laser beams have another useful characteristic: the immense power and heat they can mobilize when focused on small areas at close range. A beam from a ruby laser can be millions of times hotter than the sun’s surface.
This searing heat can be put to work in ultra-delicate surgery. Eye specialists at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center have used laser beams to destroy tiny tumors on a patient’s retina instantly and painlessly.
Despite the extraordinary progress of lasers in less than three years, many scientists believe that their real impact will not be felt for another decade. By then it may be found that their greatest achievements lie in research on the frontiers of chemistry, biology or physics.
Dr. Arthur L. Schawlow has remarked, “With the advent of the laser, man’s control of light has reached an entirely new level. Indeed, one of the most exciting prospects for workers in the field is that this new order of control will open up uses for light that are as yet undreamed of.”
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