Lasers celebrate 51 years of sheer awesomeness
It's the anniversary of the laser, that amazing little bit of technology that can burn your eyes out while enabling everything from CDs to LIDAR. The very first laser was invented by a physicist named Theodore Maiman, who used a synthetic ruby crystal to produce pulsed red laser light 51 years ago today.
We've come a long and dangerous way since then, and in the gallery below, check out some of the many ways that beams of coherent light can be used to do amazing things.
Via Wired
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The PHASR rifle only uses lasers to blind, not vaporize, but it's a real live laser gun
The Apollo astronauts left laser reflectors on the surface of the moon, which NASA shoots with lasers to measure how far away the moon is. As it turns out, the moon is receding from Earth at a rate of about an inch and a half per year
Sometimes the moon shoots back, and when that happens, it's no moon, it's a space station
Need to shoot down some missiles? Boeing's Airborne Laser can get the job done, some of the time at least
For some serious firepower, check out the Navy's free electron laser, which will be chewing through 2,000 feet of solid steel every second by 2020
Swatting mosquitoes is such a primitive way to go nowadays, especially when you can just zap them with lasers from a hundred feet away
If that's not enough energy for you, Europe is working on a laser that will be able to blast holes in space itself
Need to shoot down some airplanes? This Soviet laser tank from the early 1990s was happy to oblige
