36
PHYSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
ious teams of scientists have tried to duplicate this feat with differing
results.)
Ray guns burst onto the science fiction scene in 1889 with H. G.
Wells's classic War of the Worlds, in which aliens from Mars devastate
entire cities by shooting beams of heat energy from weapons mounted
on their tripods. During World War II, the Nazis, always eager to exploit the latest advances in technology to conquer the world, experimented with various forms of ray guns, including a sonic device, based
on parabolic mirrors, that could focus intense beams of sound.
Weapons created from focused light beams entered the public
imagination with the James Bond movie Goldfinger, the first Hollywood film to feature a laser. (The legendary British spy was strapped
onto a metal table as a powerful laser beam slowly advanced, gradually melting the table between his legs and threatening to slice him in
half.)
Physicists originally scoffed at the idea of the ray guns featured in
Wells's novel because they violated the laws of optics. According to
Maxwell's equations, the light we see around us rapidly disperses and
is incoherent (i.e., it is a jumble of waves of different frequencies and
phases). It was once thought that coherent, focused, uniform beams of
light, as we find with laser beams, were impossible to create.
THE QUANTUM
REVOLUTION
All this changed with the coming of the quantum theory. At the turn of
the twentieth century it was clear that although Newton's laws and
Maxwell's equations were spectacularly successful in explaining the
motion of the planets and the behavior of light, they could not explain
a whole class of phenomena. They failed miserably to explain why
materials conduct electricity, why metals melt at certain temperatures,
why gases emit light when heated, why certain substances become superconductors at low temperatures-all of which requires an understanding of the internal dynamics of atoms. The time was ripe for a
PHYSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
ious teams of scientists have tried to duplicate this feat with differing
results.)
Ray guns burst onto the science fiction scene in 1889 with H. G.
Wells's classic War of the Worlds, in which aliens from Mars devastate
entire cities by shooting beams of heat energy from weapons mounted
on their tripods. During World War II, the Nazis, always eager to exploit the latest advances in technology to conquer the world, experimented with various forms of ray guns, including a sonic device, based
on parabolic mirrors, that could focus intense beams of sound.
Weapons created from focused light beams entered the public
imagination with the James Bond movie Goldfinger, the first Hollywood film to feature a laser. (The legendary British spy was strapped
onto a metal table as a powerful laser beam slowly advanced, gradually melting the table between his legs and threatening to slice him in
half.)
Physicists originally scoffed at the idea of the ray guns featured in
Wells's novel because they violated the laws of optics. According to
Maxwell's equations, the light we see around us rapidly disperses and
is incoherent (i.e., it is a jumble of waves of different frequencies and
phases). It was once thought that coherent, focused, uniform beams of
light, as we find with laser beams, were impossible to create.
THE QUANTUM
REVOLUTION
All this changed with the coming of the quantum theory. At the turn of
the twentieth century it was clear that although Newton's laws and
Maxwell's equations were spectacularly successful in explaining the
motion of the planets and the behavior of light, they could not explain
a whole class of phenomena. They failed miserably to explain why
materials conduct electricity, why metals melt at certain temperatures,
why gases emit light when heated, why certain substances become superconductors at low temperatures-all of which requires an understanding of the internal dynamics of atoms. The time was ripe for a