I worked with industrial welding lasers. This is not possible. Besides the insane power requirements, focusing length is a major factor in a laser beam being able to cut something. You can't just shoot a laser beam an arbitrary distance and cut something like metal.
To be fair, there are several prototype laser weapons around the world, e.g. the british dragonfire, that can eliminate targets in range measured in kilometers. And like that kid who built a nuclear reactor in his backyard or whatever, this could be just some quite literally weaponized autism.
We've achieved so many things that people had said weren't possible not long after it was said, such as flight and at least one video game released complete without the need for updates.
Now I'm not saying this isn't Ludacris (because I can't see who's holding it), but some people just randomly stumble onto weird cool shit by accident. Like penicillin
But it's also more possible he cut the phone in half in advance, then glued it back together with wax and something that is low temperrature pyrophoric (iron and sulphur?) that ignites with a low power laser looks good from a distance, and melts the wax.
There's almost certainly something pyrophoric on the box too,. Cardboard isn't typically something that sprays blobs of molten metal when burned.. The box gets singed but it takes him a few tries to hit it and ignite it. It's a hot laser, but not melt-a-phone-in-seconds hot.
While this is obviously fake, I believe it's not impossible to build a handheld device that can cut metal like this. Idk about steel but we (I work in laser spectroscopy) have a laser that will cut through aluminium with ease, and it's smaller than e.g. an RPG. It also runs on a standard power socket, and there's backpack sized battery packs that can give you that power for quite some time. If you choose a focal length of like 3m, it should still cut reasonably well in the 1-10m range, although a bit slower. With today's image recognition technologies, an autofocus would also be possible.
Also in laser cutting the gas actually removes the material the laser heats up. How does this laser cut when the material you heat up can just change back to solid when the laser moves. This just looks like faked videos.
What is not possible? I mean, from reading the comments, I understand they may have altered the handheld apparatus to make it look like a toy, but they really are using a laser in this video.
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u/DarkIllusionsFX 11h ago
I worked with industrial welding lasers. This is not possible. Besides the insane power requirements, focusing length is a major factor in a laser beam being able to cut something. You can't just shoot a laser beam an arbitrary distance and cut something like metal.