{"id":75659,"date":"2018-01-30T15:42:52","date_gmt":"2018-01-30T23:42:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/01\/we-could-soon-get-lasers-powerful-enough-to-literally-rip-emptiness-apart"},"modified":"2018-01-30T15:42:52","modified_gmt":"2018-01-30T23:42:52","slug":"we-could-soon-get-lasers-powerful-enough-to-literally-rip-emptiness-apart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/01\/we-could-soon-get-lasers-powerful-enough-to-literally-rip-emptiness-apart","title":{"rendered":"We Could Soon Get Lasers Powerful Enough to Literally Rip Emptiness Apart"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/we-could-soon-get-lasers-powerful-enough-to-literally-rip-emptiness-apart.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Lasers powerful enough to tear the fabric of matter itself are being developed in a special laboratory in China, potentially giving scientists the chance to create and study experimental environments unlike anything we have on Earth.<\/p>\n<p>The stats behind these lasers are impressive: One has already reached a peak of 5.3 million billion watts or petawatts (PW), which is around 500 times the power of all the world\u2019s electrical grids combined. There are plans to double that figure before 2018 is out, and yet these intense bursts of light last less than one trillionth of a second.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile a new 100-PW laser is on the drawing board that could produce a pulse of light capable of ripping <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Electron\">electrons<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Positron\">positrons<\/a> (the antimatter counterparts to electrons) right out of empty space, showing that matter and energy are interchangeable \u2013 as Einstein so famously proposed with E=mc^2.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/lasers-powerful-enough-to-rip-emptiness-apart-break-vacuum\">http:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/lasers-powerful-enough-to-rip-em...eak-vacuum<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lasers powerful enough to tear the fabric of matter itself are being developed in a special laboratory in China, potentially giving scientists the chance to create and study experimental environments unlike anything we have on Earth. The stats behind these lasers are impressive: One has already reached a peak of 5.3 million billion watts or [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75659\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}