The most powerful laser in the US recently produced 2 quadrillion watts of power

The laser produced power? How do we harness that so we can power the world with lasers? 🤔

It's no different than an engine producing power. I think you are confusing it with "energy".
- No the laser didn't produce anything the laser is powered by a power source, and that power source produced that much energy.
  It's like saying that an ultrasonic saw produces power, no it doesn't, you already have to have that power to feed into the ultrasonic saw.

Edit 2: Eheran pointed out I screwed up the math. Correct total energy output is 13μWh. A very, very, very small amount of energy.

(2x10¹⁵ W) * (25s/1x10¹⁸) * (1 h/ 3600 s) = 13μWh

Previous bad math:

You multiply seconds with seconds per hour and somehow get "per hour" as the final result? But even ignoring that error, what is W/h supposed to be? Rate of change of power?
- You multiply seconds with seconds per hour and somehow get "per hour" as the final result? But even ignoring that error, what is W/h supposed to be? Rate of change of power?
  Also, it is a small k for kilo and you don't write it as 4.310¹⁸[unit]. Just 4.310^18 [unit]. Or 4.3E18 [unit].
That's 25 attoseconds, no?... If so, that's impressive.
The power record holder right now is the Măgurele laser in Romania, at 10 PW, but it lasts a thousand times longer, at 25 femtoseconds I believe. I can't find clear info on pulse duration anywhere. They do intend to decrease pulse durations it seems.
could this boil one molecule of water?

I have a decent grasp of physics but I understand nothing at all about this article. Melp me out, please?

What use is a high energy beam that last for an almost immeasurably short period of time? How can it even be said that it has this power output, in such a short time?

"Zero-POW!-zero" sounds unbelievable to normal humans. No ramp-up? No sizzling out?

On such a short time scale, what's the actual Wh used? It can't be very much, so the actual energy delivered can hardly do anything at all, either.

And finally, what's even the point of this? What's the purpose? What's the end goal? Why?

many possible applications, including better imaging methods for soft tissues and advancing the technology used to treat cancer

I don't see how that works out.

Thank you for indulging me. I appreciate any responses.

It has a lot of value.
Firstly, we use lasers to measure chemical reactions, this one could increase resolution and potentially be used to trigger or shape the reaction.
Secondly, it could be a path towards laser-induced fusion which is kind of important.
Finally,, modrrn chips are fabricated using something called an extreme-UV process, that uses sputtered tin hit with a multiple precision laser pulses. This could be used to refine that process further.
The article linked to a list of applicable research. https://news.engin.umich.edu/2019/09/most-powerful-laser-in-the-us-to-be-built-at-michigan/
The laws of physics are best understood at standard temperatures and pressures, where we have loads of data. To understand how physics works in more extreme circumstances, we have to create those circumstances and then measure what happens. At CERN, they accelerate particles very fast, smash them together, and record and analyze what happened. This is how they observed the Higgs boson and measured its properties.
From the article, it looks like one of the experiments is to shoot the laser into an oncoming high speed beam of electrons. One of the things they're looking for is if this high amount of energy causes matter and anti matter pairs to spontaneously form and annihilate. Our theories predict this but the more ways we can measure it the more we can learn, for instance about what happened right after the big bang, and why we were left with matter instead of everything annihilating symmetrically.

Aim it at Epstein island

…on a drum kit?!?!?!!!

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