Blasters
One thing you see all the time in Star Wars movies is blasters. Most of the bad guys and a lot of the good guys carry them. The spaceships all have them. The Death Star has the biggest one in the galaxy. When you see a blaster fire, it shoots a pulse of light out of the gun. When the pulse hits something, that something usually explodes (if it is a spaceship) or it dies (if it is a person). The Death Star's blaster has enough power to blow up an entire planet. Han Solo's blaster can kill someone and blow up small objects.

So the question is, "Will police officers ever carry blasters instead of bullets?"

The answer is, "Maybe"-- but not any time soon. And if blasters do become available, they won't be shooting pulses of light that seem to travel through the air at a slow speed.

Bullet Time If you ever watch Star Wars, or any of the other sci fi shows like Star Trek and Stargate SG-1, you will notice something funny about the blasters. The bolts of energy that come out of a blaster move through the air at a very slow speed -- slow enough for your eyes to see. Have you ever seen a bullet traveling through the air? No. Bullets move so fast that you cannot see them. That shows you how incredibly slowly blaster bolts are moving. If we ever create real blasters, the beam will either be invisible, or it will move so fast that it will create one long streak. There is no reason to create a weapon where the ammunition moves at only 50 MPH.

The closest thing that we have to a blaster right now is a laser beam. A laser is like a flashlight with one big difference. The light from a laser comes out in a very tight beam that concentrates all of its energy on a small spot. There are lots of lasers available today that can cut things. The lowest-power cutting laser might be 10 watts, and it can cut a sheet of paper. If you want to cut metal, you need to move up into the 1,000-watt range or more. But a laser like this might take a second or two to penetrate the metal.

Photo courtesy © Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved. All Digital work by ILM.

To be able to shoot at someone through the air at any distance with a laser, and have it do any cutting, you need to be thinking in the 100,000-watt range minimum. The problem, as with spaceships, comes from power. There is no easy way today to put 100,000 watts in the palm of your hand. It would take thousands of conventional batteries to handle that kind of power. And there would be a lot of heat to dissipate.

The other possibility for a blaster is a particle beam. With a particle beam, the gun accelerates atoms (or parts of atoms) to speeds approaching the speed of light and then shoots them out of the gun. Right now, the way you do the accelerating is with a particle accelerator. The technology is still young. And, particle accelerators are very big, and require a lot of energy. Maybe a weapon like this could fit in a spaceship, but probably not in a pistol any time soon.