}Scott Kellogg sez:
>A 250MW laser would *REALLY* light up a room... You wear
>goggles to protect your eyes from lasers of less than half a
>watt. & a 0.095milliwatt laser can damage your eye if you
>stare @ it. You miss by a few meters & nobody will notice.
Metlay sez:
}Nope again. You get a lot of burnoff from laser beams going through
}crud like air & so on, & the release of heat on impact is ordinary
}incoherent scattered light. You wear goggles to prevent accidental
}coherent light impact, not scatter (although laser speckle can do
}interesting things to your retinas if you stare @ it for a long time).
}The inverse-square law for a point source of 250MW of heat energy can
}be worked out; you get a surprisingly small danger space in terms of
}watts per square meter.
My guess is that the laser speckle of a 250MW beam would do a hell of
a lot of damage to any of the nearby eyeballs. Think about it. What
would happen to your eyeballs if someone illuminated the terminal room
yer sitting in with 250MW of ordinary incoherent scattered light? Not
necessarily lethal, (unless you are sitting on it) but blinding someone
in a combat situation is as effective as killing them.
Scott 2G Kellogg
}REFERENCE: J.D.Jackson's "Classical Electrodynamics," the book that
}turns most young people off of grad school in physics.
*JACKSON*!?!!? (Excuse me while I run screaming into the night)
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!
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