Word: lasered
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...problems and powerful potential of the split atom already seem old hat; laser is now the word for the future in half the world's laboratories. The almost magical optical-electronic devices are said to be sparkling with more possibilities than scientists can begin to count. But Austrian Physicist Hans Thirring gets particularly exasperated when loose talk conjures up images of long-distance death rays capable of killing incoming missiles, or of laser light broiling earth-side cities from bases on the moon...
Familiar pictures of lasers burning holes in diamonds (TIME, April 20, 1962) are no proof at all of death ray capability. Such feats, Thirring protests in Britain's New Scientist magazine, are accomplished by concentrating a powerful flash of laser light on a tiny area by means of a lens. It is a nice trick in a laboratory, but warheads plunging down from space hardly can be expected to carry lenses to expedite their own destruction. To fuse a steel casing weighing 100 Ibs. would require a laser light strong enough to deliver 807 kilowatts of energy...
...Laser death rays would need even more power if they were based on the moon-where power is in short supply. Dr. Thirring figures that after traveling from the moon, even the best-focused laser beam would cover a circle on the earth two miles in diameter. Even the light of a 1,000,000-kilowatt moon-based laser would increase the natural sunlight on this large area by only 10% . To do appreciable damage to one earthly city would call for a lunar powerhouse many times larger than any that has ever been built on earth...
...years, electronics has leaped from the vacuum tube to the transistor to the maser and laser. In less than a generation, aircraft engineering has jumped from piston to jet to rocket and next to nuclear propulsion. So fast is all technology moving these days that by one estimate new engineering graduates can expect a professional "half life" of only about ten years. Half of what they now know will be obsolete in 1973, and only half of what they will need to know is available to them at this time...
...figure that only a dozen photons from each flash completed the round trip. But they arrived after the proper time interval (about 2.5 sec.), which proved that they had actually gone to the moon and back. This was the first time a segment of space had been spanned by laser light. And it may well mark a milestone in space communication. When they learn to beef up their lasers, scientists hope to use them to talk between planets...