Theodore Maiman, who built the first working laser, passed away on 5 May aged 79. Maiman made his breakthrough in 1960 by generating pulses of coherent light from a fingertip-sized lump of ruby ...

In the past half-century, lasers have gone from expensive physics experiments using rods of ruby to cheap cutting or engraving tools, and toys used to tease cats. Advances in physics made it all ...

Light's shadow: Researchers showed that a laser beam can sometimes act like a solid object and cast a shadow that is visible to the naked eye. In the picture, the shadow appears as the horizontal line ...