how the laser happened

Wasn't that where Jane Mansfield used to go out bathing?

Keep your mind on electronics, young man.

The Getty Museum is in Malibu. Go there if you can. Hearst Castle, too, up the road a bit.

My apologies, John. A rather obscure British cultural reference which you wouldn't understand. Perhaps some British posters will recognize it; we'll see.....

I was in New Orleans, an EE student at Tulane, when Jane died on US highway 90 in New Orleans East. It was ugly.

Did you see Jane? What about lobsters? Any lobsters around?

Argh! Never mind. I believe Jane had terrible problems with lobsters when she went out bathing in Malibu. But you don't know anything about that, clearly. It obviously wasn't publicised in Holland.

This thread is about lasers, not lobsters.

I know, John. My apologies. It's just that Jan keeps banging on about lobsters and I got side-tracked.

I never knew that California had lobsters. It seems to, down south, below about Monterey.

We get the big Atlantic lobsters at Safeway. We have crawfish here too, and they are terrible. Good crabs and salmon and petrale sole, which is an especially ugly sort of bottom-feeder flounder.

Well, Schawlow famously said, “Anything will lase, if you hit it hard enough.”

I expect that includes lobsters.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

But no, seriously, there must be some laser action, or at least some sort of stimulated emission, some sort of super-fluorescence, in nature somewhere.

Sure. Cosmic masers occur in interstellar giant molecular clouds, for instance.

The lifetime of suitable upper states drops steeply with increasing energy, which means that visible laser action requires much stronger pumping.

While that can in principle happen naturally, it would be in places with a lot of other stuff going on, so it would be less noticeable.

You don’t have resonators in interstellar space, so it wouldn’t be highly directional.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I was thinking about a biological laser too.

I could imagine an eyeball with some sort of stimulated emission effect, in the vitreus humor or in the retina, to improve night vision, basically a photon amplifier.

Nature seems to use any effect that's not flat impossible, whether biologists approve or not.

Difficult. For a start, you need a pump source of high intensity and narrowish bandwidth, and there are no biological examples that I know of.

There are chemical lasers.

As Phil Hobbes has mentioned. It's not all that local.

And nuclear ones!

Cheers

Phil “certified laser jock” Hobbs

Living things can certainly pump up molecular energy states to make visible light. Why couldn't they produce the population inversions that enable stimulated emission and optical gain?

Why wouldn't they?