If you want to technically broach the concept of LASER, first thing you should probably learn is that LASER is an acronym and it expands to Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. But to a layman, a LASER device is simply another source of light with a particular property. It could be channelized into a single straight line and is seen from a long-distance while normal light sources just fade into convex beams.
Now, as the book “LASER: Light of a million uses” rightly highlights, the uses of a LASER source of light are plenty, but what are you buying it for? You may have seen professors dangling a pen during presentations and using it to point at screens. Well, this is the simplest kind of a LASER light and it is commonly used as a pointing device at slide shows and presentations. It doesn’t matter if you use a red LASER or green LASER as long as it serves the purpose.
With the rate of pollution due to fireworks, it could be nice to truly have a LASER light display rather than smoke and fire all across the sky on the fourth of July or Guy Fawkes’Day. If you’re a pyromaniac, you may even opt for LASER to ignite things like paper, cardboard boxes, cotton, and matches. Use your creativity to even light a cigarette or a fat Cuban cigar if you should be a smoker.
In glass cutting industries, they are used for cutting glass with an impressive quantity of precision and accuracy. This has also been extrapolated to many other industries. If you’re in construction, this may be used to even measure distances and depths of structures. Its practical application in science reaches the fields of biology, spectroscopy, and chemistry.
A regular camper might consider the use of LASER beams to scare away wild animals. Unless you’re a gift, you’d not be carrying a high power LASER beam generator of more than 1W power as it becomes a possible weapon. Battlefields usually have a lot to do with LASER where they are used as weapons and beacons.
While you don’t have to be a scientist, a bit of scientific knowledge would assist you to know how LASER is generated. The expansion of the word provides a very succinct description of what sort of LASER beam is created. Let’s take you back to the fundamentals of matter; everybody knows, all matter is made of molecules which often are composed of tiny particles called competition pellet gun. An atom has a central nucleus manufactured from protons and neutrons; small negatively charged particles called electrons circulate the nucleus in a way similar to that of the sun and the planets in the solar system.
This is really a depiction of the balanced state of an atom. Consider that the atom is heated or given a little bit of energy in some form – this causes the electrons in its orbit to visit an excited state leading to the formation of an excited atom. If you extrapolate this concept to an item which contains millions of atoms, you have myriad atoms within their excited state. But how maybe the beam of red light generated? The clear answer is simple – the tendency of atoms to go back to their balanced state results in the creation of a light energy packet called a photon.
It’s something such as this – somebody gives you money, you feel extremely excited and you then decide that you were better off whenever you didn’t have hardly any money and throw it into a river, except that there are a million other folks like you dumping each of their money in a lake. This way, when all the photons bond and travel in one direction, it forms a LASER beam.