As in biomedical science, pioneering industrial inventions have not been mothered by necessity. Rather, inventions for which there was no commercial use only later became the commercial airplanes, xerography and lasers on which modern society depends.
It was strange, in a way, because there were no ideas involved in the laser that weren't already known by somebody 25 years before lasers were discovered. The ideas were all there; just, nobody put it together.
The show isn't about screens, and we don't have any video content or lasers or things blowing up. I want people to come to our show to listen. I want the show to be the music.
The fundamental premise of sci-fi is not spaceships and lasers - it's that children can learn from the mistakes of their parents.
McMaster had an engineering physics program and... one of the parts of it was lasers and electro-optics and I just said, 'Now doesn’t that sound cool. I just got to do that.'
I still try to make different types of lasers that other people don’t have.
In the late 1960s, red and the low green LEDs and the infrared semiconductor lasers had already been developed, but there was no prospect of practical blue light emitters, even in the '70s.
I said, suppose you take a light - I was thinking of just light bulbs because, in those days, lasers were not yet really there - and sent a light pulse between two masses. Then you do the same when there's a gravitational wave. Lo and behold, you see that the time it takes light to go from one mass to the other changes because of the wave.
For my first album, I thought it was most important for people to hear my voice and to not let it be drowned out by too many lasers and other sounds.
When you are doing stand up, it is the most glorious hour, when you are an X-Men version of yourself, with lasers coming out of your eyes.
