In honor of the release of Star Wars The Force Awakens, it's Ask Science Mike Minnie. Yeah. Welcome to Ask Science Mike Minnie, a pint-sized version of the show where I answered just one question.

We're doing this episode to tackle a Star Wars question in honor of the Force Awakens.

And next week I'm going to do several of these episodes

for Christmas because there's so many great Christmas

questions in my inbox.

But enough about that, we've got a tiny show to do, so let's get it started. So, Our question for this asked science Mike mini comes from Steve and he asks

via email, hey Mike, if Litesabers actually existed,

what do you think they'd be made of?

Would they be made of actual light or gamma rays

or something else that would give them their properties.

Thanks and may the force be with you.

Well, to answer this, we have to start by looking at the properties of a

lightsaber and then think about plausible ideas and physics that could

describe that behavior. We're going to come up with a light saber hypothesis or

at least try to. So the first thing I'd notice about lightsaber is they cut

through things quickly and easily. In the films we see them with no effort

whatsoever cutting through organic materials mainly people's arms and legs

But also small metal objects cutting the heads off droids that kind of thing and we also see that they have a ton of thermal output because Quaigon in episode one

sticks his lightsaber into a very large set of metal blast doors and those doors start to heat up very rapidly and that kind of

behavior could be associated with something like a very strong laser or a high

amplitude gamma emitter for gamma rays which are a lower frequency

version of electromagnetic radiation and we use those in our technology

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