What would be easy or difficult to do with the power to directly control light?

Without going into too much detail, let's say someone has a superpower which gives them "control" over actual, physical light: Photons, electromagnetic radiation, what have you. This power requires more effort to move more light around or make it do more unnatural things; it's easiest to use it to basically create very convincing visual illusions by (for example) making the light coming from a certain spot look the same way it would if it had reflected off of an object that isn't actually there. With a power like this, how difficult would the following kinds of things be to do?:

• Push an object around. Photons are supposed to be capable of transferring momentum, so could a person with this kind of power concentrate a lot of photons in a small area and give them all momentum in a particular direction in order to hit an object and make it move? If so, how hard would it be to actually move something solid and "big", say even just baseball-sized, a noticeable amount?
• Laser Cooling. Assuming that the person has the basic idea of how laser cooling actually works, just how precise of control would they need to have over light to actually cool down a volume of gas substantially (say, to use it as an attack by making it cold enough to hurt skin)? For that matter, how long does real laser cooling actually take to get something from room temperature to "cold"?
• Set something on fire. If a magnifying lens can be used with sunlight to burn an ant, then a power like this seems like it should be able to concentrate light on a much larger scale and direct a pretty substantial amount of heat at a single point. Right?
• Cut through an object or person. This seems likely enough to be doable since we use highly-concentrated lasers right now to cut through steel. Unless there's something I don't understand about how laser cutting works that would make it impractical in this case?

posted about 6 years ago

User6257‭

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