Lasers are coherent, I think you need a lasing medium for that.
You could focus the light into a single point, sure, but that's not really a laser in the technical sense.
this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
34 points (88.6% liked)
Showerthoughts
42184 readers
1416 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Not a point, but an area resembling a scaled image of the sun (if optimally focused).
You could focus the light into a single point, sure, but that’s not really a laser in the technical sense.
They actually do this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power
Also, you can only get as hot as the photosphere due to the reversibility of light. We can get far hotter other ways, eg fusion plants.
Look up "mythbusters solar death ray" I think you'll enjoy it
They did everything wrong in that video. On of their assertions was that soldiers wouldn't be able to keep their mirrors properly polished. I don't know about now, but even 40 years ago, polishing brass was a common punishment detail. I imagine it was moreso in Archimedes' day, when brass and bronze were the thing to use. Also, there are techniques for using a signaling mirror to hit a specific location which aren't that complicated, would certainly be something that Archimedes could figure out, and would work better for aligning the mirrors than "try really hard to aim at that spot." The ridiculous assumptions they make besides those also detract from the goal of a best effort to test the heat ray, and seem to stem from the idea that people back then were stupider than we are rather than just not having accumulated as much knowledge as we had.
It was entertaining, but not as informative as I would have liked.
My bad, I forgot there were two episodes on this, I think maybe you only saw the first one or parts of it. There was a huge wooden structure with hundreds of mirrors arranged in a concave shape that almost perfectly aligned all mirrors' reflections into one spot and absolutely nothing happened. Even with perfect mirrors and modern construction tools and techniques we couldn't recreate it.
Our death ray doesn't seem to be working right. I'm standing right in it, and I'm not dead yet.
Jamie Hyneman
It is one of my favorite quotes from the entire series. Never before has a man painted a picture of himself as vivid as Jamie did when he delivered this line.
Ah, that could be. Probably due to responses to their first one where they had a bunch of college students holding little mirrors and trying to aim them, and I've never watched Mythbusters regularly.
To be fair, they did build a customised rig to aim, using real mirrors to simulate a perfect case scenario, and still failed. While they did mention those issues, they did try to replicate the results pretty faithfully IMO.
Light Amplification Through Ztimulated Emission of Radiation.
Lazer.
Wasn't that the plot of the Bond film Die Another Day?
Also Man with the Golden Gun 😃
(we don't get to see the sun lazer actually shoot in it tho)
Then there was Diamonds are Forever but with diamonds not mirrors.
You might enjoy this relevant "What If".
I think his argument only holds for lenses, not mirrors.
Read the "What if", it is really interesting!
It explains why this holds for any optical system, including mirrors, showing it with a whole bunch of wildly different explanation approaches.
I even understood one or two of those... ;-)
Laser light is collimated. Solar light is not since the sun is so close.
That’s what pedo musk is trying to do with his 1 mil satellites. He just needs a gold phantom of opera mask for half his face to complete his identity.
Or maybe a fluffy white cat to pet while pretending to be menacing.
There's a solar farm type that is literally that. Thousands of mirrors focussed onto one photovoltaic cell.
So you've been reading John Ringo books them?
And if you directed most of that beam away from the sun and a smaller portion toward the sun (to keep your beam splitter in place) you could move the whole solar system
The world should all agree that laser needs to be spelled with a Z. Lasers are cool, Zs are cool. It's a s simple as that. The world could use this sort of unifying cause
Light Amplification by Zapping Emission of Radiation
You spelled it with an S though... Maybe take a look in the mirror before judging others.
If you're not brave enough to take part in changing the world, how can you expect others to do it for you?
Solomon doesn't stand a chance.
Calm down Archimedes!
Okay…where is the rest of the post?