Do lightsaber blades have mass?

When you think In Star Wars, you think of lightsabers. right? What could be better, from a filmmaking point of view, than a futuristic sword that allows you to create fantastic fencing duels like in the old swashbuckler of Errol Flynn. (Much better than watching Stormtroopers fire their blasters at walls, ceilings, and anything else but their targets.)

Lightsabers come in a cosmic rainbow of colors (blue or green for the good guys, red for the bad guys) and a variety of shapes. There is even a double-bladed version The imaginary threat. (I don’t want to start a geek battle – yet – but the best lightsaber battle in a movie has to be this movie’s “Duel of the Fates,” thanks to the skills and fearlessness of Darth Maul actor Ray Park.)

So…what exactly We are Lightsaber? Of course, they are not real, so no one really knows how they work. Even the characters in the movies seem a little confused about this. in The imaginary threatAnakin calls him a “laser sword.” Yes, it was a baby, but both Din Djarin (The Mandalorian) and Luke Skywalker also refer to it as a laser saber – although I suspect Luke was being sarcastic.

However, that’s completely wrong: it can’t be a laser. For starters, lasers are not visible from the side, so you won’t see anything unless you stage duels at a disco using fog machines to scatter the rays. Second, packages last forever; They have no end. Third, lasers can’t sound together like swords, they pass through each other when they try to counter.

But what is it then? We can narrow down the possibilities considerably by asking whether the code has a mass. if it was some A type of light (as you might guess from the name “light saber”), the answer is no – light, or electromagnetic radiation, has no mass. If we can determine that it has mass, then it is not light.

This is our question He can The answer is, by analyzing how lightsabers move when you swing them. In other words, time for some physics!

Mass and motion

Do not confuse mass with weight. Mass is a measure of the amount of “stuff” such as protons, neutrons, and electrons in An object’s weight is the amount of gravitational force acting on it on object. Here we want to see how the mass of the lightsaber affects its movement. But let’s start with something simpler.

Instead of a lightsaber, let’s say we have a “lightball” made of the same buzzy material. Since it is symmetrical, we can describe its motion without worrying about rotation. If we wanted to move this ball back and forth, we would use Newton’s second law of motion. This says acceleration (A) of an object depends on its mass (M(and the amount of force)F) applied to it.