Word: lasered
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Welding Retinas. Taking advantage of the unerring straightness and narrow diameter of laser beams, engineers are already using them to keep bridges, tunnels and dams in line during construction. Laser light has also proved helpful in aligning jet-plane assembly operations and the two-mile-long Stanford linear accelerator. When the high energy of laser light is concentrated on a small area, it serves as a high-speed drill that can burn precision holes through materials as hard as diamonds in a small fraction of the time required by conventional methods. It can vaporize the rough edges of such microscopically...
...precision and penetrating power of laser beams have, as predicted, given them entree to the operating room, where they can cut into human and animal tissue as delicately as a finely honed scalpel. Even better, the laser knife does not draw blood. Its searing but highly localized heat cauterizes capillaries and other blood vessels as they are severed. Like ordinary light, laser beams pass through transparent substances but are absorbed by darker, opaque materials. Thus they flash harmlessly through the cornea and lens of the eyeball to weld a detached retina back into place, or puncture small holes...
Just two years later, Physicist Maiman used the Townes-Schawlow theory and built the world's first working laser, a small, hand-held instrument that shot out bursts of brilliant red light. Instead of a gas, Maiman's laser used a synthetic ruby crystal grown in a bath of molten aluminum oxide. In pure form, the aluminum oxide crystal is colorless and transparent. But a pinch of chromium added to the bath as an impurity gives the resulting crystals their characteristic ruby-red hue and supplies the chromium atoms (one for every 5,000 aluminum atoms) that cause...
American Pinpoints. Unlike ordinary "white" light from an incandescent bulb, which is a mixture of all colors, and thus of many different wave lengths traveling in divergent directions, laser light is what scientists call "coherent." It emerges from the rod in rays that are parallel; it is all of the same wave length, and it is all in phase or in step, each ray reinforcing the others, like oarsmen in a superbly trained crew...
...these coherent qualities that make laser light so narrow-beamed, so easy to focus and so powerful. Laser light can be focused into a spot with a diameter of only I/10,000th of a centimeter. Concentrated into so small an area, it burns billions of times brighter than the sun's surface. Instead of rapidly diverging...