Sci-Fi Storm

A while back I came across this fan theory that Supreme Leader Snoke in Star Wars: The Force Awakens is in fact Mace Windu, the former Jedi Master who fought the soon-to-be-Emperor and lost, being flung Palaptine’s office window in a high tower on Coruscant. But we didn’t see him die – it is only implied, and if anything is true in science fiction (or Hollywood), if you didn’t seem them die, they can always come back – and sometimes, even if you did…and Samuel L. Jackson believes he’s still alive.

Now, this fan theory seems to stretch quite far on a number of things – I don’t believe the Finn is related theory at all – but it does raise some interesting points. But there’s one in particular that I want to debunk…that of the lightsaber color.

The theory puts forth that Windu’s lightsaber, being purple in color, shows that he straddles the line between the Light and Dark Sides of the force, since in the movie canon we only ever see Jedi use blue or green lightsabers, while the Sith always use red, and if you mix blue and red light, you get purple.

That is true, in a sense…strictly speaking, purple isn’t a color of light at all. However, when the rod and cones of our eyes get stimulated by both red and blue light, we see it as purple. However, there is a color of light that is sort of like purple, called violet – but it is very different in nature.

First, a lightsaber, at least what we can see, contains light of a specific color. Regardless of what actually makes a lightsaber work – magnetically contained plasma, frozen light, whatever…I’m actually a fan of the idea that is something like Larry Niven’s variable sword where the stasis field induces a vibration that causes light to be emitted, and the frequency of the vibration, dependent on the focusing crystals, determines the color of the light.

Now the thing is, violet light is nowhere near red on the spectrum.

In fact, it is at the complete opposite end. In the visible light section of the electromagnetic frequency spectrum, as the frequency increases (and wavelength decreases), the color shifts from the red end, through orange, yellow and green to blue and ultimately violet. Violet would indicate a higher energy and perhaps more of a focused crystal, which might be extremely rare since we’ve only seen one such lightsaber, than all the Sith sabers that stay at the red/orange end of the spectrum. If the Sith had less of a choice of prime crystals, they may have had to settle with less energetic sabers – although their destructive nature seems to be affected very little. It might explain Kylo Ren’s lightsaber…if the crystals the Sith use are lower power, perhaps to compensate the source power was increased, resulting in a less stable blade.

But anyways, in the end, Mace Windu’s blade doesn’t mean he had a tendency to the Dark Side – if anything it was quite the opposite, and he was the ultimate Jedi…