the.com/laser
the most disciplined light in the universe, all marching in perfect, deadly lockstep
means A device that produces a narrow, intense beam of light in which all the waves are aligned and the same color, used for everything from surgery to barcode scanners to cutting steel.
from Not a word handed down but one built to order: an acronym for 'Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation,' coined in 1959 by physicist Gordon Gould. It rides on the coattails of an earlier sibling, the maser (the same trick done with microwaves), and the underlying idea of 'stimulated emission' traces back to Einstein in 1917. So 'laser' is a word that started life as a sentence — its whole engineering spec folded into five tidy letters.
- acronym
- stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation
- first one
- built in 1960, called a solution seeking a problem
- moon ruler
- lasers measure the moon's distance to millimeters
- surgery
- can cut steel or gently reshape a human eye
- cold trick
- lasers can cool atoms to near absolute zero
ruby laser — first working laser built by theodore maiman in 1960, using a ruby crystal
helium neon laser — created by ali javan in 1962, produced the first continuous visible light laser
nd yag laser — neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet laser, widely used in surgery and industrial cutting since the 1970s