• Question: Why are lasers so dangerous for your eyes? Would it be as dangerous with different coloured lights? Or different intensities?

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      Asked by to Kate, Kieren, Rowena, Roy on 19 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
      • Photo: Rowena Fletcher-Wood

        Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 19 Mar 2014:


        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.

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