Isherwood column: Star Wars and the power cord
By Justin Isherwood
The back story is Lucas Films fashioned Star Wars after Shakespeare’s King Lear. Shakespeare’s bitter commentary on humanity where nothing ends well, everybody dies, commits suicide, or gets hung. It is said that Shakespeare fronted King Lear in winter to reinforce the metaphor that the mindset of kings can’t ever thaw out.
After 40 years, Star Wars has finally been put to bed, including its King Lear version of the Dark Empire. I went to Star Wars, episode IX, “The Rise of Skywalker” at the Rosa Theater in Waupaca for nostalgic reasons; a classic downtown movie house, the smell of popcorn on the street of a snowy winter night.
The box office where it belongs, facing the sidewalk, included the R-rated warning requiring proof of age.
As for Star Wars I’m glad to see it end. Its $65 billon juggernaut worth almost exactly what Bayer AG paid for Monsanto Corp, which bothers me, if I’m not sure why.
Star Wars came with its own science, the explosive scripts, light sabers, galactic battles with no concept to what power cord this was connected. It’s one thing to script and equip the Millennium Falcon with hyper-light speed, when what is lacking is how.
In Star Wars we get to watch the Death Star at close range, when science puts 60 light years between your house and the nearest safe distance to a supernova.
I don’t recall seeing Luke Skywalker plug in his light saber to recharge it, what a good science script might do. Where and what the extension cord is the science question.
Osaka University recently tested a two quadrillion watt laser, whose pulse lasts a trillionth of a second while using only 200 joules of power, about what an average microwave uses in two seconds. As it turns out there is a real Star Wars saber.
The Chinese, not to be outdone, at Shanghai have a research laser in the 10 petawatt range; in English, this translates as 10 million billion watts – about 1,000 times the output of all the world electrical grids. The reason they don’t blow a fuse is because the laser pulse is that same trillionth of a second range.
On the theoretical table is the 100 petawatt laser some believe could pulse a beam capable of tearing electrons and positrons (anti-matter) from empty space, in essence the reverse of E=mc2 . Using immense power to make matter or anti-matter, as includes the Biblical phrase “creation out of nothing”, though 100 petawatts isn’t exactly nothing.
The practical aspects of such lasers for medicine, touchless tumor surgery, new chemistries, industrial processes, include a practical means to ignition temperatures for nuclear fusion (100 million Kelvin), and maybe self-sustaining fusion and a shortcut to the carbon-less economy.
A Romanian laser in the summer of 2019 generated a 10 petawatt pulse, what one observer described as one tenth the power of the sun hitting the earth in that same trillionth of a second – just maybe in the Death Star category.
Perhaps here to forgive Lucas Films and Star Wars, the light saber is not such a far-fetched thing after all. Petawatt power doesn’t take that much of a battery. If still, not the kind of thing you leave on and wave around like a Musketeer.
To admit a trillionth of a second light saber battle might be hard to film.