Laser Pointer? I hardly know 'er! (2/5)

I had a very busy day and today was very difficult (both w/r/t time and emotional investment) to get 1,000 words on a page. But I did!

Not sure what this is supposed to be, or be "about", or why I wrote it. But I'll definitely do something with it.

         A vibrant purple beam pierced the darkness of the lecture hall, quiet as snowfall. The steel cube, two feet thick to a side, fizzled without noise as brilliant technicolor sparks shot from the surface as the beam traced its way across the surface. Smith flipped another switch, and the beam evaporated. The lecture hall went dark. Thin lines, still glowing red-hot from the beam, zig-zagged across the surface of the target. Each mark was almost ten inches deep from only momentary contact with the beam.

Buzzing fluorescents clicked on, the stern men in the room blinking against the sudden change.

The scientists flitted about mumbling equations and the names of long dead scientists, attempting to pull themselves back to the world they knew before. No such luck. The scientific community, nay the world, had forever changed.

Doctor Alistair Smith had uncovered an underlying misconception in the field of quantum physics. A misunderstanding of the interaction between particles and energy that informed centuries of scholarly research, research that was pointing in the wrong direction. Smith had corrected that misconception and proved it with panache; a laser more powerful than anything built before it, more energy efficient than science fiction could dream of, and less expensive than one you’d buy your cat.

Smith made his way to the lectern, grinning from ear to ear. His machine was perfect. It could do anything. Its applications put its uses somewhere in the low millions. Surgery, quantum computing, laser propelled spacecraft, green manufacturing, pollution-less mining. Smith saw the world before him, and accepted his responsibility as its caretaker. All that stood between him and eternity besides Newton and Einstein was the funding to make it all a reality.

He cleared his throat.

“Questions?” his grin grew wider, three decades in academia justifying their expense on the table behind him.

Silence. The fluorescents thrummed.

A cough.

A fly tinked against the lights.

“Um, yes, Doctor Smith, if I may,” a man at the back stood, pushing glasses further up the bridge of a flat nose, “I was curious why it sounded like that?”

Doctor Smith’s brow furrowed slightly, his grin diminishing in turn.

“Whatever do you mean? My machine is entirely silent,”

“Yes, that’s correct Doctor Smith,” the man continued, “That’s what I’m curious about. That’s not what lasers sound like,” Smith opened his mouth once or twice as he took in the assembled faces in the room. All of them stared intently at him.

“My device completely reinterprets the way we understand how light interacts with matter,” Smith began, eyes darting between the stern faces, “And you’re concerned about the sound? Shall we move onto the real questions?”
“Answer the question Doctor,” another voice called, a senior adjunct professor from Oxford this time.

“This is ridiculous. What do you mean?”

“That’s not what a laser sounds like. Yours doesn’t sound like anything. It doesn’t even hiss on the steel when it cut it,”

“Yes, because the beam is based on principles so fundamentally contrary to mainstream physics that no sound is produced. It is an entirely silent machine,”

“But why?” a voice, nearer the front. Smith saw the flash of an orange and black Princeton tie.

“Well if you’d like, we can get into the lecture on the basic misinterpretations of the physical laws that lead to-”

“No, why would you make a laser that doesn’t make any noise?” The Princeton man turned to the other observers, all of whom nodded.

“I didn’t invent a laser that doesn’t make any noise, I invented the most singularly important leap in human technology since the first ape sharpened a rock,”

A raspberry was blown from the back of the room.

“Who would want a laser that doesn’t make sound? That’s the whole reason you have a laser,” a snickering Yale man said, wiping his glasses on his sweater.

“I’m sorry?” Smith’s mouth had gone completely dry.

“It should go PEW-PEW or something Doctor. Goodness, are you an undergrad? All this posturing about radically altering the realm of human understanding and you don’t even get the basics of lasers,” Stuffy and educated men grunted their agreement.

“It doesn’t sound cool at all,” came a voice from the Technical University of Munich

“My laser,” Smith began, steadying himself against the lectern, “could revolutionize medicine, manufacturing, space exploration, energy and ecology, and you’re willing to scrap it because it doesn’t go ‘PEW-PEW’?”

“I’m sure it could still do all of that and still go PEW-PEW,” he replied. Nearby, another scientist slapped his head, overcome with the same genius as Socrates in the bath.

“Or BZZZZZZZZ!” another scientist shouted from the rear of the hall, drawing enthusiastic agreement.

“Or BYAOUW if it were a big laser or something,”

Smith teetered where he stood. He fumbled for a glass of water, which shattered noisily on the tile below. Men of learning, men of numbers, shouted onomatopoeia with the intensity of a schoolyard game of pretend. He swallowed once to steady himself, the second to fight the bile rising in the back of his throat.

“You expect me to rebuild my entire laser from scratch so that way it sounds like a laser?”

“No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!” the chorus of academics howled with laughter, slapping backs. A scientist at the rear, an Oxford man of some repute and standing, began bawdily singing the horn opening from Goldfinger. Smith left before they got to the lyrics.

Smith toiled for days in the lab, tweaking and breaking his machine. Sleepless nights passed silently, sunken eyes illuminated purple in the laser’s glow. After a week of effort, he presented his next iteration.

The machine was no longer as compact as it had been. The angling of mirrors and alignment of internal components meant its energy needs were no longer so paltry. Four car batteries lay daisy-chained under the table, covered by a sheet. It was no longer good for space exploration, and the bulk made it impractical for medical use but it was not in vain. The purple beam now emitted a high oscillating whistle as it carved through the target. It hit the eardrum in the same way a bird does a window, the entire lecture hall wincing as the machine cut through another steel cube. Glowing orange seams, six inches deep, still glowed as the lights came back on.

“What the hell was that Doctor Smith?” called Professor Armitage of the University of Pennsylvania, “That’s worse than the quiet bullshit you showed us last time!”

“Hear hear!” rose the cheer from the crowd. Overlapping suggestions crowded the room, each voice trying to articulate the proper sound it should make. It was ten minutes of shouting before they realized Smith had left the room