The Science of Star Wars: The Scientific Facts Behind the Force, Space Travel, and More!

by Mark Brake

Everyday laser cutters, used for cutting sheet metal as thick as fifteen millimeters, can typically work at powers of five hundred to six thousand watts. The thicker the sheet of metal, the more power is needed to cut through it. It’s been estimated that a lightsaber would need fifteen to twenty million watts of power to cut through metals like we see in Star Wars. For comparison, Lockheed Martin needed a thirty-thousand-watt laser to disable a vehicle one mile away. And that device needed to be mounted on a truck. However, the most powerful laser ever built has a beam with a peak power of two thousand trillion watts (two petawatts); that said, the laser only operated for one trillionth of a second. A major issue with laser beams is that, once they’re emitted, they keep on going until they’re absorbed or reflected. This means a laser saber would need some other mechanism to keep it contained within a fixed length. The laser beam would also suffer the same problem as the flamethrower saber in that it couldn’t be used to block the strike of another weapon. One light beam would travel straight through the other. However, in an online discussion between astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson and particle physicist Brian Cox, it was suggested that at ultra high-energies there’s a probability that gamma ray photons will actually bounce off each other. Tyson subsequently proposed that if you could make two gamma ray lightsabers, then you could possibly duel.