Handheld Laser Boils Water?

This video is submitted for http://www.wickedlasers.com and http://www.lasercommunity.com for the YouTube Challenge. I'm Laser Community member tchplant and want to show a laser doing something other than bursting a balloon or lighting a match. However, everything is not as it appears.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Laser
• boils
• water
• wickedlasers
• challenge

[VizardJinchuriki]

Can this be done without the coal?

[tchplant]

@VizardJinchuriki Yes. Neither the coal or the laser have anything to do with the "water" boiling.

[alder321]

this isnt water (bit too liquid), maybe ethanol or ether. and youve put some vacuum on the flask to bring down the boiling point to room temperature ^^

nice trick tho :)

[tchplant]

Good reasoning.

[alder321]

in fact at 0:22 you see the bottle move and pressed towards the bottom as you plug the thing (i know the word in german - scuse me ^^) in ;)

[tchplant]

What I think is the most interesting part of this is that the bubbles actually start to form on the coal which tends to make you believe it's heating the "water". You can also see some turbulence in the bottle caused by air leaking passed the stopper before the vacuum seats it well. A friend of mine also figured something was up because I chose to shoot the laser through the side of the flask, losing energy, rather than through what should have been an open top.

[RoadRunnerLaser]

Funny as heck !!!!! Nice one !

[najsbajsmedmajs]

@aVoNgfx you can boil coffee with around 1w. Probably less.

[aVoNgfx]

Neat video, but this laser (approx. 30-50 mW) will never be capable of boiling water as it is shown here. You need multiple watts of power such as 10-100+ W focussed to a small point of lets say 500 µm or less to see an effect. And then it wouldn't be that global but more locally fixed.

[mcwario13]

wicked lasers is a breeding ground for idiots

[lms0lms0lms]

Wow! What a good montage!

[canadiancanable]

requires 4J of energy to heat 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. I am guessing if that is water (probably not) there would be bout 50 grams. if he started at room tempurature 20 celsius it would take 80 more to bring it to a boiling point. 80x50x4 brings us to 16,000J or 16Kj of energy required to heat "water" to boiling point. so lets see he is using like a 200mw laster that would probably mean the battery on the laser would die before he could boil the water.

[canadiancanable]

requires 4J of energy to heat 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. I am guessing if that is water (probably not) there would be bout 50 grams. if he started at room tempurature 20 celsius it would take 80 more to bring it to a boiling point. 80x50x4 brings us to 16,000J or 16Kj of energy required to heat "water" to boiling point. so lets see he is using like a 200mw laster that would probably mean the battery on the laser would die before he could boil the water.

[mapleguy1029384756]

Wuts the output power?