Unless you’re on a desert island, chances are there’s a laser within just a few feet of you. In fact, there’s a pretty good case to be made that our lives wouldn’t be the same without them. If you’ve got a cat or a dog, you’ve probably used a laser pointer to entertain yourself by having your pet chase the beam around the floor or up the walls. If you’ve got a CD, DVD, Blu-ray player, or an optical mouse, you’re using lasers. If you’ve had hair or a tattoo removed or had Lasik surgery on your eyes, that’s lasers again. We use lasers to scan barcodes on packages at checkout lanes, to align machinery, measure distances, and even aim weapons. Lasers are cheap, easily accessible, and do wonderful things. But they can also do serious and sometimes permanent damage to our eyes or those of the people around us.
Click here to read the rest of this article.
