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Q&A

Science of Green Lantern and solid light constructs

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Many know that the Lantern Corps of DC Comics are capable of constructing objects of any shape or size out of hard light using their power ring fueled by their emotions. However, I'm wondering what the science could be behind this. Not exactly how they do it through their ring, but rather what actually happens when they make a solid light construct.

Light is a weird phenomena. It is both a particle and a wavelength with no mass. Surprisingly though, scientists have recently discovered a way to make light solid to an extent: http://news.mit.edu/2018/physicists-create-new-form-light-0215. As you can tell by this article, they were able to make light behave like regular matter by shining a laser through a cloud of ultracool rubidium atoms.

So tying this back to the Lantern Corps of the DC Universe, it seems most of the time they create a structure, they do it almost instantaneously in just about any shape or size they can imagine. And unlike in this experiment, temperature doesn't seem to be a factor in the creation of these constructs, as they've formed them in both the vaccuum of space and the core of planets before. Is it therefore possible their rings allow them to somehow entangle and solidify the photons in their area?

I know I'm dissecting the science of a comic book-based setting, but this is quite interesting to think about. So the main question is: What could be a plausible scientific explanation for how the Lantern Corps is able to form these solid light constructs? Could this ever be something we could achieve in our reality?

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/174438. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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