But chip makers are having trouble making more precise beams, and the Global Positioning System, which allows people to locate themselves to within a few metres on the surface of the earth, is limited by the performance of its atomic clocks.
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Moreover, engineers have worked out how to make laser beams more intense by using short lengths of optical fibre to narrow the beam.
The more that the light passing through the sample is slowed down, however, the more the two beams will be out of phase.
Even the Audi S8, which looks relatively conservative despite that grinning front grill and LED beams, comes off more elegantly aggressive than the CTS-V.
True, they don't shoot enemies out of the sky, but that, at long last, is coming--along with dozens of new applications for lasers as researchers develop new materials and techniques to generate different types of beams that can be more powerful and precise.
Even if experimenters bounce the beams to and fro to increase the effective length of an interferometer's arms to more than 100 kilometres, the expected difference in length between the two beams' paths still amounts to less than a hundred-millionth of the diameter of a hydrogen atom.
In science fiction programmes such as Star Trek, tractor beams are used to move much more massive objects.
For years beams of ordinary visible light were more than precise enough to create the tiny transistors and connectors that make up the guts of a chip.
Though there was cheering and champagne in the control room when the first high-energy beams collided, sighs of relief are more the order of the day.
In the meantime, scientists will stay busy analysing plenty of data from the 2012 data run, which thanks to improvements to the focusing of the LHC's beams as well as the slightly higher energies, provided more than twice as much data as the 2011 run.
The beams would collide at the centre of the device with far more energy than can be imparted by any other machine.
For now, astronomers will use Friday's fly-by to bounce radar beams off 2012 DA14's surface, hoping to learn more about its motion and structure.
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The experimenters discovered that adding additional laser beams to fire at the quantum fluid, they could create ever more complicated quantum states, right before their eyes.
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