Blowing up space with a laser? Sounds like a good idea!

When it comes to the current scientific community, bigger is better.  More powerful, more awe-inspiring, more expensive… that’s just how science is there days, and there will be no project more ambition than the £1-billion-pound laser said to be the largest in the world.  The Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility is a laser so powerful it will rip apart the very vacuum of space.  Seriously, they’re going to blast space into pieces with a laser and see what happens.  If you thought the Large Hadron Collider was going to kill us all, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

“This laser will be 200 times more powerful than the most powerful lasers that currently exist,” said Professor John Collier, one of the ELI’s project leaders and the director of the Central Laser Facility at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, Oxfordshire.  “At this kind of intensity we start to get into unexplored territory as it is an area of physics that we have never been before.”

Here’s how this weirdest weird science experiment works.  Ten different laser beams will be focused together on a single point.  The combined lasers will measure at 200 petawatts of power (more than 100,000 times the power of the world’s entire electricity production.  The blast will last for less than a trillionth of a second, then it will be over.  Researchers hope to bring the ELI Ultra-High Field to life by 2015.  You’ve been warned.

Tags: shooting lasers into space, space laser, laser to tear apart space, unusual experiments, big science, unusual ideas, weird science, Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility,  John Collier,  Centre for Advanced Laser Technology and Applications, Rutherford Appleton Laboratories, Dicot, Oxfordshire, most powerful laser ever built, 200 petawatts, world’s most powerful laser, world’s largest laser, world’s most powerful laser

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