These Blisslight “firefly lights” are a cool alternative to traditional Christmas lights. They’re cool because, unlike many similar products, they use real lasers, and everybody knows that lasers are the coolest.
But why?
“Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation” hardly sounds like the definition of cool, yet millions of middle school portraits disagree.
We know that lasers work by exciting atoms until they emit photons, then bouncing those photons between mirrors, exciting more atoms which emit more photons, then letting some of those photons leak out in a stream of pure light. Right?
But we don’t understand why lasers, when viewed after ingesting vapor from the sexual organs of plants from the genus Cannabis, are so cool. They just are.
Coolness and practicality are, almost by definition, mutually exclusive states. Try to imagine a “cool” pair of cargo shorts. You can’t. Yet lasers defy this universal law. They provide practical uses like detecting gravitational waves the length of one quarter of a proton, as well as many cool uses, like providing futuristic ambiance at a Tiesto show.
Lasers bridge the unbridgeable gap.
Maybe it’s just the name, “lasers,” that makes them as eternally cool as Ray-Bans and jeans. If they were called ALANs (Amplified Light by Atom Nudging) instead, they probably wouldn’t have gained such cultural clout. Sci-fi guns probably wouldn’t shoot Alan beams. Radio stations probably wouldn’t play club bangers from Major Alan.
And you probably wouldn’t have the coolest house on the block if you replaced your traditional Christmas lights with Alans.
