I hope you're ready for the admissions exams.
Tractor Beams In sci-fi, tractor beams often consist of exotic-sounding particles and energies. In our day and age, using regular ol' light to hold and manipulate objects tractor beam-style is already a reality, albeit on very tiny scales.
Biologists, for example, have used "optical tweezers" to study cells, DNA and other small bits since the late 1980s. "Optical trapping has been around a long time," said Paul Stysley, a laser engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
Stysley's organization, among others, would like to see tractor beam-like technologies graduate to bigger tasks. Light could be used, NASA researchers think, to collect large dust particles on Mars or from the tail of a comet with better results than typical contact-based methods.
In theory, continued improvement could someday lead to tractor beams not all that dissimilar to that deployed on the Starship Enterprise. "There seems to be no basic reason why you couldn't have a tractor beam," said Sidney Perkowitz, a physicist at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga.
The researchers also suggest the findings may benefit more exotic undertakings, such as power generation for interplanetary exploration...
