Mrs. Swift, hoping to take their visitor’s mind off his disappointing loss, hurriedly asked Sandy to help her set the table for dinner. An appetizing aroma of fried chicken and biscuits was already wafting from the kitchen.
Meanwhile, Tom and his father again examined the rubies with admiring interest. “Wonder how these would work as masers?” Tom Jr. remarked.
“Masers? What are those?” Ed inquired.
“Devices for generating and amplifying microwaves,” Tom replied. “But I was speaking of optical masers-or lasers, as some people call them. You pump the atoms of the maser full of energy and they give off light waves of a single precise frequency, just as an oscillator in a radio emits one frequency.”
With a maser made from a ruby rod, Tom went on, it was possible to generate a powerful concentrated light beam with the waves all in precise phase.
“Why not use an ordinary spotlight?” Ed asked.
CAPSULE EXPLOSION 25
Mr. Swift smiled. “By comparison, that would be pretty crude-like a radio signal sent from an electric spark. A ruby maser gives a beam of only one frequency.”
“It makes an ideal method of communication,” Tom added, “because a light beam, being of much higher frequency, can carry far more information than a radio channel. For instance, a maser signal of 100,000 megacycles can carry as much information as all the radio communication channels now in existence.”
Ed looked impressed. “Really efficient, eh?”
“Yes, I’ve been experimenting with it as a method of space communication up at the outpost,” Tom told his guest. “Could come in handy if an enemy ever jammed our radio signals. Of course, I’ve been using pink synthetic rubies. These natural ones contain more chromium atoms. It would be interesting to see what kind of maser action these produce.”