this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Lasers. They seem to have endless uses from playing with cats, scientific measurements, military, construction, heating, cooling, even used for space-based internet communications. There’s so many more uses that I’m not using.
A fucking laser gave me what I still maintain is my weirdest memory ever.
I was in my upstairs bedroom, shining my little handheld laser into the park across the road from my house. Since it was so dark, the laser dot seemed to travel an extreme distance compared to what I was used to during the day, so I was just enjoying pointing it at anything interesting - just random shit like reflective signs, trashcans, anything shiny or metallic.
After about five minutes, I decided to start toying around with the dot on a little sign that was sitting next to a small lake in the middle of the park, when all of a sudden, and I'm not really sure how to explain this, but I'll try; for a split second, the red light from the laser reflected off EVERYTHING in the vicinity for about 700 meters in all directions - all the reflective signs, any water surfaces, all the houses on the other side of the park, car windows, metallic objects, etc. I was so fucking taken aback, that I stopped and tried to contemplate what the hell had just happened. I was wide awake and this happened clear as day right in front of me.
To this day, I've still found no way of explaining how such a weak laser was able to a) reflect so much light off so many (hundreds) of surfaces simultaneously, if only for a fraction of a second, and b) if this is somehow a physical possibility, how perfectly everything in that park, alongside my own positioning from my house, would have had to align for each object to then perfectly - and without losing any luminosity - reflect the light into the next surface hundreds of times.
It's this shit that makes me think that just maybe those 'glitch in the matrix' people are onto something.
EDIT: So I guess to stick to the topic at hand, another use case for lasers is making me question the laws of physics.