Staying on the topic of of Sci Fi movis, there is another topic that is funny. Slow moving Lasers. Now I am no laser expert but that fact they they are slow moving is the fallacy here. Lasers move at the speed of light and in many movies, (star wars, independence day etc) they show the laser moving slow moving and visible. Now in some cases they could be visible I suppose (once again not an expert) but in space where there is no air particles for the laser to reflect off of, you wouldn't see the light show that you do in the movies. Now I will be the first to admit that it made the movie much more enjoyable to watch with the lasers being shown however the science behind it is not sound and just wouldn't make sense.
A little background, lasers are devices that emit light through optical amplification.
wikipedia has what seems like a good article discussing the science of lasers with some background that can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasers
A nice opportunity to link to the laser blog in class, or to ask him about the science here...
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