What exactly will happen if I put two very intense light together?
Is it possible to make a big explosion?
Or just some sparkle?
My mother thinks it will create chemicals.
But i think it might just mix together and make the middle stronger, just because I think lights cannot touch each other, or anything else. So if you want to slice through things you do not need to use and strength, just put it there and it's gone.
and by mixing two of them together, will they only mix up into a really hot point of laser? or just stops when they collide?
Edit:sorry, it should be when lights collide not what.

This post has been edited by quakesand: Jan 19 2007, 12:50 PM

if you put two intense lights together you get one very intense light. I dont quite understand what you mean by putting them together though. And what you mean by when light collides.

Also to create a laser its more complicated than just a bright light, its something about the way they energise the photons or something, look it up in google.

Also its not really possible to "create" chemicals or any kind of matter, or so they say anyway! you can transform it, eg oxygen and hydrogen are gasses but when they join they become water and they can become bleach, three totally different things, gas, water, bleach. But you cant create oxygen, atleast they say so and it does seem logical!

When you combine light you just get the two light waves superimposed on each other to form a new light. This new light can either be very strong, very weak or somewhere in the middle depending on the difference in wavelengths and how much the two waves are offset when they interact together. This offset is called the phase shift.

However, if you send 1 photon into another (a photon is a massless particle that basically is what makes up light and is another way of looking at it at a quantum level) then you can get an explosion but it very small since it has no mass even though it moves at the speed of light (since it is light). The only way to get a large explosion would be using electrons or protons even instead of photons since these have much larger masses. The problem is that it takes too much energy to get these particles up to a high enough speed and is extremely hard to get them to collide with another moving particle.

Ok, what exactly DO you mean by 'light'? I mean, from what you've wrote, it seems like you're talking more about fusion or stars.


Sure it is. Your classical E=mc², converting energy to matter.

Actually I've never heard that one before. I know that Pauli's exclusion principle states that no two fermions can't occupy the same space at the same time, but I'm pretty sure that photons are bosons. I'm not sure how they react, I mean for all we know they could just go straight through each other. Any physics majors in here?

Hmmm, talk about vaguest of vague questions. As I don't really understand the question, I will provide several answers. Choose what fits.

Well a laser is not a light emission as you understand it. I'm assuming you're talking of flashing two powerful light beams at each other. What will happen in the 'center' is certainly not a laser or the formation of chemicals (again, for the purity of the experiment we will assume that all this takes place in a vacuum, where there are no 'raw' materials). What happens when two wave patterns meet can be quite interesting - for example if both beams are of equal intensity and you can get the two patterns to 'cancel' each other out exactly, then both beams will disappear.


If you were talking about lasers operating in an environment that contains 'raw materials' then it is indeed possible to use an extremely powerful laser to trigger a fusion reaction - the machine that produces the laser would have to be about as large as a football field, perhaps more. Not certain, my science here is rusty.

If you're talking about particle collisions, the collisions of certain types of particles result in sub-particles like quarks. As for individual photons - it would be extremely difficult to get two of them in the same place at the same time, really. Now tachyons, that's a different story - two tachyons are supposed to be able to occupy exactly the same place at exactly the same time, with the minimum of pushing and shoving, but then the tachyon particle is (for practical purposes) a fabulous, magical animal - we could just as well talk of Unicorns!! No, no, just kidding.



Now this may interest the original questioner - if you take two GALAXIES and fling them together, they will pass through each other with the minimum of ill-will. Strange, isn't it?



This post has been edited by Yratorm, LightMage: Jan 17 2007, 08:22 AM

Actually I'm talking about something like a light saber.
what will happen when they hit each other?
I also do not think it might do some chemical reaction, since they are just laser...
will they bounce off? or just go through each other?
sorry, I that didn't really make it clear.

I am a physics major which is why i knew of this. Basically this was the first of many experiments that were performed when they started to quantify light as a particle. However, i could be wrong its been a few years since we discussed this in Quantum Physics. Maybe they only do this will electrons, protons, and neutrons.



First of all, there is no way to make a light saber and phyisically it appears to not be possible. The reason is that it is a beam of light that has a certain length and acts as if it is a solid. First of all, lights are waves or massless particles traveling at the speed of light like i previously mentioned. There is no way to create a beam of light that is only a certain distance long that has a constant glow for that distance and then disapaits. Its like shinning a flashlight. The light slowly gets less bright as the disperses. Secondly, even though light can be quantified as a particle, it still is light. Unless you have a beam that consumes a large amount of power (way more than a typical laser) there is no way it could act like a sword or a solid and when they would colide it would just do nothing and they would just go through eachother and combine into a single wave at that point and disperse accordingly.

This post has been edited by fffanatics: Jan 17 2007, 03:37 PM

first of all i would like to say that the question is very complex or vague....or...i donno...
but as far as i can understand it.....when we pass two light beams from opposite directions i think that we must get some kind of interference pattern...since light will behave as a wave in that case ( though i myself am not able to have a logical reason that why light will not behave as particle...if someone can help). therefore their must be bright and dark fringes...but since white (normal) light contains light of different wavelengths...therefore i think that it will get blurred and we will not be able to see a pattern and we will feel as if nothing has happened.....
but still i would say that it is a very complicated topic...and i m myself not sure why light will not behave as particle....maybe its the anomaly with the light itself....

keep thinking