Lucasfilm 2015

If you find yourself watching a movie about space ships duelling above CGI alien worlds and space monks fighting with light swords in the next few days, your mind might wander. Specifically, it might wander on to the question of just how possible it is that a sword whose blade comprises a burning stream of suspiciously finite plasma could actually exist.

Fortunately the internet is ahead of you on that score: the quest to build a 'real' lightsaber is fairly extensive, comprising more or less exactly the same length of time as has expired since the end of the original Star Wars' premiere in 1977.


From super-powerful laser based industrial equipment repurposed into an extreme form of cosplay, to flame throwers recklessly encased in plastic film props, there is no end to the energy with which Star Wars fans have imbued the search for a working lightsaber in a galaxy not so far away...

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Firesaber

Sufficiently Advanced is a YouTube channel which regularly dedicates itself to recreating fantastical science fiction weapons with vaguely similar modern technology. This week they have effectively won the internet, by releasing a video of their methanol/acetone flamethrower, encased within lightsaber frame with built-in Star Wars sound effects.

The team behind it even managed to create different colours of blades by mixing in various chemicals to change the hue of the flame. The result is a lightsaber-like flame weapon which is extremely dangerous, though with few of the properties of the movie lightsaber (physical strength, a cutting blade) beyond how it appears in a heavily edited YouTube clip.


Too-powerful lasers

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For a combination of visual luminescence, extreme power and potentially deadly consequences, intense lasers are one of the more obvious ways to approximate a lightsaber in the real world. Various videos exist online of such powerful handheld lasers, usually operating around 3W, which are able to burn and cut objects with bright, tightly focused beams. There are even companies dedicated to selling these handheld lasers, offering them in varying colours and with additional 'lasersaber' hilts, each of which is crafted in a suspiciously familiar but legally tolerable visual style.

The obvious point, however, is that actually owning one of these lasers is almost certainly a terrible idea unless you an experimental physicist: the potential fire risks, danger to eyesight and legal problems involved in operating such a piece of equipment outside of the lab are almost certainly not worth the risk involved.

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Such lasers are also straightforwardly not lightsabers -- these lasers are powerful enough to reach space, and do not end abruptly after a few feet.

What about the physics?

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Physicists are not trying to build lightsabers -- but they are experimenting at the edge of technologies that present some similar properties. In a recent, well-timed press release, researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems, at the University of Queensland in Australia, discussed how possible it would be to build a real light sword.

Their conclusion, perhaps quite obviously, is that the main problem is not creating a powerful beam of light but working out how to make it stop. "Light doesn’t like to interact with itself, so two beams of light would actually pass through each other -- which wouldn’t be very useful in a fight," said researcher Martin Ringbauer. "You can’t just make a laser stop without it hitting something solid or being reflected back on itself with a mirror."


As such a lightsaber would probably require some kind of levitating mirror, which would focus the beam back on itself from above. It would also require an extreme jump in energy production. "“Currently, we have very powerful industrial lasers that can cut through steel, used, for example, in car manufacturing. We also have laser weapons which companies like Boeing have developed to shoot down drones," he said. "However, these are more like the size of trucks to generate enough power to fire the laser, far from a handheld weapon."

Realistic playtime

As detailed in WIRED's recent look through the wonderful world of Star Wars merchandise, the world is full of people willing to sell you a make-believe recreation of a lightsaber. But you don't have to stick to the official channels. Sites like UltraSabers.com will sell you a full customised, well-crafted prop of a lightsaber hilt and blade built to your exacting standards, which probably surpass those required by JJ Abrams for the making of The Force Awakens.

As for Abrams himself, he recently told WIRED that building lightsabers for the movies was more 'real' than you might think. Instead of computer graphics, he decided for the first time to build "ridiculously powerful" props that actually lit up on set, enabling them to dynamically light the lightsaber battles in real time. "If you look at the first movie, they didn't have lightsabers that lit up -- so there's no interactive lighting, there wouldn't be," Abrams said. "Does it mean those scenes aren't among the greatest scenes ever filmed? No. But what an amazing thing to see our prop department created these ridiculously powerful lightsaber props that would allow us to do scenes where there was interactive lighting." "And what that did was allow us to do things we probably never could have anticipated, and we couldn't have even replicated in CG, where you literally can see the light not just on the characters' clothes and on their faces, but in their eyes. It's just an amazing thing to see. Small detail. Does it make a scene good? No. But is it a wonderful piece of reality to have on your side? Yes."