The ray-gun is no longer science fiction

“However it is done, it is certain that a beam of heat is the essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of visible, light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass …”

HG Wells, The War of the Worlds, 18987

Cathal O'Connell, Cosmos Magazine October 3, 2018

The turret emerges from the ship and pivots, following its target with its telescopic eye. Silently it fires, and two kilometres away, a small, glowing spot appears on the fuselage of an aircraft—the engine bursts into flames.   Not the Millennium Falcon. Not the USS Enterprise. But the USS Ponce, an American Navy vessel in 2015. The ray-gun is here.

In War of the Worlds, the invading Martians devastated Earth’s forces with their ‘heat-ray’. Variants of the ray-gun have been a mainstay of science fiction ever since, from the phasers of Star Trek to the blasters of Star Wars.   But though the US military pursued the idea for decades—culminating in Reagan’s proposed Star Wars defence system for using satellites to blast missiles out of the sky—the research never bore fruit. Not, at least, until now. 

In 1960, American physicist Ted Maiman built the first laser. He crafted a cylinder of ruby with reflective ends, and placed it inside a powerful xenon lamp. A flash of light sent the atoms of a ruby into an excited state. Some of these atoms emitted a photon—which themselves went on to hit other excited atoms, causing ‘stimulated emission’ of other photons—identical to the first.{%recommended 7948%}

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