Category: star wars

I just saw Star Wars Episode III again. I had some thoughts:

The Chosen One: Is Anakin the fabled Chosen One who will bring balance to the force? Yes – but notice the prophecy is not about ‘ridding us of the dark side’ or anything like that – the phrase is ‘balance’. And the Jedi, led by Master Yoda are arrogant, and do have too much power. Perhaps the Balance he brings to the force is both reducing the power of the ‘light’ and dark sides of the force.

Yoda: This useless fuck deserves to die. His battle with the emperor – he runs from him! Runs! What kind of Jedi is that?! Anakin comes to him with prophecies of death and is freaked out – Yoda’s counsel is to “be detached…?” Come on! You could’ve been helpful there. But you blew it with platitudes. Emperor Palpatine’s barb he throws at Yoda – calling him arrogant – is accurate.

I’m assuming Darth Plagueis was Palpatine’s master.

And finally – Anakin’s dreams about Padme – were they placed by Palpatine? Or was Padme’s death simply completely inevitable? Or was it a self-fulfilling prophecy? I don’t know.

They must not radiate heat. They’d be impossible to hold. But if they were to hit metal or something, that would radiate heat as it were being melted/cut.

The way they get swung implies that their center of gravity is not in the handle – it’s somewhere down the ‘blade’ – so the light saber blade itself must have some mass.

The blades also must have some kind of volume – they exclude each other, when Jedi or Sith swing them at each other, the blades don’t pass through one another. Also ‘blaster’ shots bounce off them, so they have both mass and volume.

Now I’m assuming conservation of mass and energy is still in effect here – but if so, a powered-off lightsaber should weigh as much as a powered-on one. I’ll take the fact that they’re not portrayed in the movies this way as a simple technical flub.

They don’t need ‘guards’ on them – perhaps the blades ‘stick’ when they hit each other so there is no risk of the blade sliding down another and chopping off an unsuspecting Jedi’s digits.

The way the blades seem to be able to cut off heads, hands, etc make them seem more like a ‘point’ of laserness, as opposed to the inch-or-so of diameter that they appear as. Maybe the force (lowercase f, not uppercase F) which excludes the other light saber (and perhaps also deflects blaster shots) is that inch, inch-and-a-half, but the cutting part is perhaps much narrower. This would have to be the case because to cut off someone’s hand or head, you’d have to burn through an inch thick of flesh, and that would take some serious effort, and once done, the heat that would come off the guy who got cut might even burn you!

Problem with this theory is that in SW ep. I, Qui-Gon Jinn jams his light saber into a shutting blast door to melt his way through, which it begins to do. He does have to wiggle it around a little to start cutting through, so maybe my theory is working after all.