Laser Trivia
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49 free Laser trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This laser trivia quiz covers the beam from Einstein's 1917 theory to the fusion shot that finally broke even in 2022. The easy questions ask what the acronym stands for, who built the first working laser and in what year, what the maser amplified before light, which gemstone crystal made that first beam and which James Bond villain aimed one at 007. From there it moves through the people who fought over the credit, the gas and diode lasers that followed, and the everyday machines that quietly rely on lasers: barcode scanners, CD players, printers and eye surgery. The hard end is for people who know their population inversion from their optical pumping: the graduate student who had his notebook notarised in a candy store, the journal that rejected Maiman twice, the supermarket that scanned the first pack of gum, the mirror Apollo 11 left behind, the 192 beams of the National Ignition Facility, the Nobel for cooling atoms with light and the wavelength of the light inside every CD player. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on the laser, maser, Theodore Maiman, Charles Townes, Gordon Gould, the ruby laser, LASIK, laser printers, lidar, LIGO, the National Ignition Facility, barcodes, compact discs and Goldfinger before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our inventions, physics and light quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the acronym 'laser', what do the letters S and E stand for?
Stimulated emission
Stimulated emission: a passing photon triggers an excited atom to release an identical photon, so light bouncing between two mirrors multiplies in perfect step.
Q 02Who built the first working laser, in 1960?
Theodore Maiman
Theodore Maiman: when the feat was announced in July 1960, one Los Angeles newspaper headlined it as the discovery of a science-fiction death ray.
Q 03The first working laser used a synthetic crystal of which gemstone as its lasing medium?
Ruby
Ruby: a leading laser theorist had publicly said pink ruby would take too much energy to work as a laser, yet a flash-lit pink ruby rod gave off the first laser light.
Q 04The maser, the laser's predecessor, amplified what kind of radiation?
Microwaves
Microwaves give the maser its M, and the name 'laser' was made simply by swapping that first word for 'light'.
Q 05Which physicist laid the theoretical foundations for the laser in a 1917 paper on the quantum theory of radiation?
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein worked out the idea more than 40 years before anyone built a laser, and his own Nobel Prize honoured quite different work, on the photoelectric effect.
Q 06Charles Townes shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with two scientists from which country?
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union: Nikolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov, in Moscow, had reached the same idea independently and at the same time as Townes in New York, on opposite sides of the Cold War.
Q 07What did Gordon Gould do with the 1957 notebook in which he coined the word 'laser'?
Had it notarised
Had it notarised: the stamped pages became his main evidence in a patent battle that dragged on for decades, until he finally prevailed in 1987.
Q 08Astronomers at giant telescopes fire lasers into the night sky to create artificial versions of what?
Stars
Stars: the beam makes a spot glow high in the atmosphere, and the telescope watches that fake star to measure the air's blurring so a flexible mirror can cancel it out.
Q 09Gordon Gould delayed patenting his laser design, and lost decades in court, because he wrongly believed he first needed what?
A working prototype
A working prototype: no such rule existed, and by the time he applied in 1959 a rival application was already in. His first laser patent did not arrive until 1977.
Q 10Which journal published the report of the first working laser in 1960, after Physical Review Letters turned it down?
Nature
Nature printed the short report on 6 August 1960. Charles Townes later judged it perhaps the most important paper per word that the journal published in a century.
Q 11The first gas laser, built at Bell Labs by Ali Javan's team, ran on a mixture of which two gases?
Helium and neon
Helium and neon: the first laser could fire only in brief pulses, but this glowing gas tube produced the first continuous beam.
Q 12The earliest semiconductor lasers, demonstrated by rival American teams in 1962, were made of which material?
Gallium arsenide
Gallium arsenide: unlike the silicon of ordinary chips, it turns electric current into light efficiently, which is why the rival teams at General Electric and IBM both chose it.
Q 13Kumar Patel's 1964 laser, long the factory workhorse for cutting and welding, gets its beam from which gas?
Carbon dioxide
Q 21Which type of laser is by far the most commonly made, found in barcode readers, pointers and disc drives?
Diode
Diode lasers are semiconductor chips that turn electric current straight into light. Small and cheap to make, they also drive the world's fibre-optic links.
Q 22Which technology maps its surroundings by timing laser pulses as they bounce back?
Lidar
Lidar: the word was modelled on 'radar', with light doing the job of radio waves, and dictionaries date it to the early 1960s, just after the laser itself appeared.
Q 23The first reflector for bouncing laser beams off the Moon was left there by which mission?
Apollo 11
Apollo 11: the crew left a panel of 100 small mirrors in the dust, and observatories were still bouncing laser pulses off it half a century later.
Carbon dioxide: it turns up to a fifth of its input power into beam and can run continuously at many kilowatts, which made it the obvious tool for slicing sheet metal.
Q 14Laser hair removal works best on which combination of hair and skin?
Dark hair, light skin
Dark hair, light skin: pigment soaks up the beam's heat, so a dark hair cooks at the root while the pale skin around it stays cool. Blond, grey and white hairs hold too little pigment to heat up.
Q 15When it was first invented, the laser was famously described as what?
A solution looking for a problem
Gould's notebook had already listed telecommunications, radar, spectrometry and nuclear fusion as possible uses.
Q 16The seabed cables that carry the internet as pulses of laser light are mostly about as thick as what?
A garden hose
A garden hose: nearly all data crossing the oceans squeezes through cables that slim, and the fibres inside, where the laser pulses actually travel, are no wider than a human hair.
Q 17The first product ever scanned with a UPC barcode at a supermarket checkout was a pack of what?
Chewing gum
Chewing gum: a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit, scanned just after 8 a.m. on 26 June 1974 in Troy, Ohio, a town chosen because the maker of the checkout equipment was based nearby.
Q 18Which two electronics companies jointly developed the compact disc, read by a laser instead of a needle?
Philips and Sony
Philips and Sony: the Dutch and Japanese firms agreed a single shared standard in 1980, so every disc would work in every machine, and sales began two years later.
Q 19The laser printer was invented by Gary Starkweather while he worked at which company?
Xerox
Xerox: Starkweather rigged a laser onto one of the firm's office copiers so it could 'draw' pages straight from a computer, and the printers that followed earned the company billions.
Q 20Which type of laser reshapes the cornea in LASIK eye surgery?
Excimer
Excimer: its ultraviolet pulses break down only an extremely thin surface layer, so the cornea can be shaved a sliver at a time with almost no heating of the tissue beneath.
Q 24Lasers bounced off the Moon show it drifting away from Earth about as fast as what grows?
Fingernails
Fingernails: about 3.8 centimetres a year. Timing a laser pulse's two-and-a-half-second round trip fixes the Moon's distance to within a few millimetres, so even that slow drift shows up.
Q 25In which US state do the 192 laser beams of the National Ignition Facility converge on a tiny target?
California
California: the facility sits at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where its beams recreate in miniature the conditions inside an exploding nuclear weapon.
Q 26On 5 December 2022 the National Ignition Facility achieved what long-sought milestone?
Scientific breakeven for fusion
Scientific breakeven for fusion: after six decades of trying, the fuel at last gave out more energy than the laser pulse put in, about 3 megajoules for 2, by copying the reaction that powers the Sun.
Q 27LIGO's laser beams can detect its 4-kilometre arms changing length by one ten-thousandth of the width of what?
A proton
A proton: to reach that precision, mirrors bounce each beam back and forth along the arms hundreds of times, stretching the light's path to more than a thousand kilometres.
Q 28LIGO's first detection, on 14 September 2015, came from the merger of two of what?
Black holes
Black holes: the pair collided about 1.3 billion years ago, and the ripple they sent through space took all that time to reach LIGO's laser beams.
Q 29The 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Steven Chu and two colleagues for using lasers to do what?
Cool and trap atoms
Cool and trap atoms: light normally warms things, but beams tuned just right slow atoms from thousands of kilometres an hour almost to a standstill, which is the same as chilling them.
Q 30In the film Goldfinger a laser creeps towards James Bond, but what threatens him in Ian Fleming's original novel?
A circular saw
A circular saw: the novel came out in 1959, a year before the first laser was built, so the film-makers swapped in the brand-new invention to make the scene feel fresh.