Since the Sith Inquisitors can use their spinning lightsabers as handy personal helicopters, their blades must have mass, as (I would think) massless energy-only blades wouldn't generate or maintain lift. That would seem to confirm that the blades are primarily matter (plasma, I guess?), rather than energy. No?
So, lightsaber blades have mass... (minor Rebels S2 finale spoiler)
- Thread starter FredH
- Start date
If they had mass then they'd just explode as soon as the blade was shut off. Unless one would suggest that plasma is being recompressed and stored inside the hilts? That can't be the case as we've seen saber hilts cut in half before many times (including Ezra's) and they didn't detonate like a plasma grenade.
I really wouldn't expend too much thought on it though to be honest. Not much point,
I really wouldn't expend too much thought on it though to be honest. Not much point,
Well, Lucas originally conceived them as more heavy and kind of broadsword like. So, yes, I imagine they do have mass of some sort.
Wouldn't they? Maybe it's a form of electrohydrodynamic levitation, with the superhot spinning blade ionizing the air and generating a downward wind current through repulsion. And there's probably some use of the Force involved as well.
Anyway, the idea of "massless energy" makes no sense. Energy isn't a thing, it's a property that things have. When we talk about "pure energy," we're really talking about massless particles like photons. But massless particles can't stay in place; they're constrained to travel at exactly the speed of light. Any sort of "energy construct" like a lightsaber blade or an incorporeal life form would realistically (I know, who cares about realism in Star Wars) need some kind of substrate of particles with nonzero mass to contain its energy and give it a coherent shape.
I always liked Shane Johnson's explanation that a lightsaber blade was a magnetically confined positron beam, although I think an antiproton beam would've made more sense. I'm not sure what the "official" explanation is, but I tend to assume a lightsaber blade is some kind of contained plasma.
Apparently there is some confusion on whether photos have mass or not:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/photon_mass.html
Does the photon have mass? After all, it has energy and energy is equivalent to mass.
Photons are traditionally said to be massless. This is a figure of speech that physicists use to describe something about how a photon's particle-like properties are described by the language of special relativity.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/photon_mass.html
Does the photon have mass? After all, it has energy and energy is equivalent to mass.
Photons are traditionally said to be massless. This is a figure of speech that physicists use to describe something about how a photon's particle-like properties are described by the language of special relativity.
^A photon has zero rest mass, which is the minimum amount of mass/energy that a particle has before you add any kinetic or thermal or relativistic or other energy to it. If you brought a proton or electron to a complete stop and cooled it as close as possible to absolute zero, it would still have a baseline amount of stored energy that is its rest mass. But photons don't have that, which is why it's impossible for them to be at rest (or even to slow down).
