Have you ever thought science is boring? My answer is, “NO WAY!” The word science describes a way to explain things around us and how they work. For example, do you know what Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation stands for? I bet you do but you never thought about it. Like many scientific ideas the name we know is actually an acronym. An acronym is an abbreviation. If you take the first letter of each capitalized word in Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation you can spell the word LASER. Now do you know what I am talking about? We pretty much all know what a laser is, but how do lasers work?

Lasers were something out of science fiction. Something conjured up in the imagination of authors. H. G. Wells wrote about a super weapon called the heat ray a hundred years before lasers became real. Superheroes like Superman had laser vision. Not to mention Star Wars light sabers. Those would be nothing without lasers. The first scientist to picture how a laser works was Albert Einstein. He figured out how electrons work in an atom and how they put out energy. 

It took 43 years for a scientist to take Einstein’s ideas and make a laser that could be used. Theodore Maiman from California was able to develop what other people could only imagine. Maiman figured out how to excite atoms enough to put out light. If the light from the excited atoms is bounced back and forth fast enough you can get a very focused beam of light. This long narrow beam of light can travel very far and the light never spreads. Think about a flashlight. Its light doesn’t travel very far but spreads out. 

Teasing cats with lasers is fun, but that isn’t the only use for lasers. The military was the first to use lasers by pointing the light to find a target. That would tell bombs exactly where to land.  Lasers are still used by the military, but they are also used in medicine, for entertainment, and now phone companies use fiber optics to send information at the speed of light. Every time you go shopping, lasers scan the barcode and it tells the computer how much to charge you. 

Technology is amazing! Scientists point lasers into space to measure how far away an object like planets and moons, and meteors are from the Earth. One of the newest ways to use lasers is LIDAR. This uses laser beams pointed at the Earth from the air to make maps. The laser hits the surface and sends a message back to a computer. . The computer uses that information to make very detailed maps. The information is so good and so focused that maps can be made of the ocean floor. Lidar is also used to make it possible for self-driving cars to “see”.