The Force Awakens: Can Science Build Real Lightsabers?

Many people have wondered whether or not it would be possible to build a lightsaber. Most though, have believed it to be largely impossible because light passes through other light. In other words, two lightsaber swords would simply pass through each other rather than colliding.

Now, MIT scientists may have created an actual lightsaber-sort of. They've developed a type of technology that could, in theory, be used to build one of the laser swords made famous by Star Wars.

Until now, photons, which are massless particles that constitute light, were thought to not interact. Instead, they were thought to simple pass through each other; this is similar to two beams of light passing through one another during a laser-light show.

In this case, the researchers at MIT used laser to discover a new form of matter. They have managed to make photons behave as if they're normal particles by pumpkin rubidium atoms into a vacuum chamber and then cooling the chamber down until it's only a few degrees from absolute zero.

Weak laser light that's shone through this vacuum actually loses energy to the rubidium atoms and slows down. In this case, the researchers found that when they fired two photons, the photons became a two-photon molecule by the time it left the medium. In other words, the particles of light interacted.

Now, this doesn't mean that a lightsaber is going to be built any time soon. In fact, it may not be light at all that eventually makes up a real life lighsaber.

James Bennett, research physicist, says that it's possible that lasers and plasma could potentially be used in combination to create the weapon.

"You can make something vaguely like a lightsaber," said Bennett in an interview with ABC. "If you read the nerdy story behind Star Wars, it's not light in a lightsaber, it's actually plasma which is contained in a loop that feeds back into itself. We can contain plasmas and it's something we have been doing for decades now."

So is a lightsaber possible to create? Maybe. Only time will tell whether or not we'll see the weapon.

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