WE CAN MAKE REAL LIGHTSABERS!

I have to start this post off with “I’m not bullshitting you,” because I’m certain you think I’m bullshitting you. But I’m not. Science has found a way to make real, actual, thwwoomp, bzzzz, Luke I am your father lightsabers.

Swords made of light. How the fuck is that even possible? Light is like, light. It’s not a metal. That’s what made lightsabers so cool. The sheer fantasy of them. We could never actually build one ourselves.

Except maybe we can. Because we got geeks at MIT who never have the sex (just kidding, please don’t lop off my hands like Anakin did to Count Doku). From the Guardian:

Harvard and MIT physicists writing in the new edition of Nature say they have discovered a way to bind photons together in order to form a new molecule which behaves almost exactly like George Lucas’s deadly devices.

“Most of the properties of light we know about originate from the fact that photons are massless and do not interact,” said Harvard university physics professor Mikhail Lukin. “What we have done is create a special type of medium in which photons interact with each other so strongly that they act as though they have mass, and bind together to form molecules.

“It’s not an in-apt analogy to compare this to lightsabers. When these photons interact with each other, they’re pushing against and deflect each other. The physics of what’s happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies.”

Did you hear that? Not in-apt. Those are strong words from a man of science. So when will we have real, bad-ass fighting devices? I don’t know. Three weeks? Four weeks? Probably a bit longer that that. Get ready for bedlam.

[H/T @ngreenberg]