Lasers are high energy beams that are really tightly focussed. This allows them to get a lot of energy into a really small space and they can be used to etch things – you wouldn’t want them to etch at your eye! The eye is more at risk than other parts of your body because its job is to focus all the light entering it using its own sets of lenses. This then strikes the back of the eye where the rods and cones are for detecting colour and light and dark. If the eye focusses a beam already as powerful and focussed as a laser it can do a lot more damage and destroy some of those rods and cones that let us see.
A higher intensity laser would definitely do more damage as more energy is being concentrated into that slim laser beam. Different coloured lasers are different wavelengths, so a green laser has twice the frequency as a red laser, as if it were a more high pitched sound. I don’t think this means it would do more damage, but it might damage specific components which are sensitive to different frequencies.
We classify lasers according to their power, so the higher the number on the class the quicker they damage your eye. The ones in CD players (class 1) are not as harmful as those in a blu ray (class 2) because of the difference in power, not colour.
The most dangerous lasers are the ones you cannot see, such as infra red because they can burn your retina from a stray reflection you didn’t even know was there. This is why when we work with lasers you wear a set of glasses that filter out that particular colour (wavelength) of light.
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Kate commented on :
We classify lasers according to their power, so the higher the number on the class the quicker they damage your eye. The ones in CD players (class 1) are not as harmful as those in a blu ray (class 2) because of the difference in power, not colour.
The most dangerous lasers are the ones you cannot see, such as infra red because they can burn your retina from a stray reflection you didn’t even know was there. This is why when we work with lasers you wear a set of glasses that filter out that particular colour (wavelength) of light.