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Dawn of the cantilaser

Jul 1, 2003

For those of us who grew up in the 1960s, the ubiquity of lasers in modern physical science is astonishing. For the year 2000, for example, the physical science database INSPEC catalogued more than 20,000 entries - about 6% of all abstracts - that contained the word "laser". Furthermore, for the past 30 years this figure has been increasing at a steady linear rate, such that we can confidently foresee that 100% of all scientific research will be laser-based by the year 2900! Yet it was not so long ago that lasers were deemed a solution in search of a problem.

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