Question: Are light sabers real?

Jonathan Jackson answered on 26 Apr 2016:

This is a little outside of my area of expertise, but I’ll try to answer at least part of the question. Sadly, I don’t think light sabers, the way we’ve seen them on the movie screen, are real. Lots of science and thinking and hard work went into to making light sabers look real, which should not be forgotten.

But don’t be discouraged! We have learned to do incredibly exciting things with light and lasers in recent years. We can “slow down” the speed of light (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-30944584 or https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23925-light-completely-stopped-for-a-record-breaking-minute/), or use laser weapons (video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLwqWBtmUEc). We are still learning what we can do with light, how we can play with optics, and many of those ideas came from the science fiction stories that we love. And hey, Christian, maybe someday you’ll be a scientist who studies light and tries to bring the concept of a light saber closer to reality. It has to be someone – why not you?

Someday, probably not soon, we may have handheld weapons that use light or lasers. But for now, we’ll just have to leave it to computer scientists and animators to bring it from their imaginations to the big screen.