Search Google for “mace windu lightsaber” and you’ll get over 2.1 million results. Most of them will point out that his light saber is purple. Legend has it that’s because the actor portraying him, Samuel L. Jackson, personally asked George Lucas for a purple light saber so that he could easily be spotted in a big fight scene.
But what if Mace Windu had a more common light saber color? What if Mace Windu’s light saber was red or green?
Like any great conspiracy theory, there’s a few reasons that makes some sense:
He could have just liked it better that way. He might have just felt more powerful when swinging a red saber. The Empire might be too stupid to even recognize it. He was simply standing at the right height or angle of attack and his opponents had their backs to the sun.
That’s because his color wasn’t “purple”. It wasn’t any color on the visible spectrum at all. Mace Windu’s “color” is the “color” of plasma.
“So how did that work, then?”, you might ask.
A Little Bit About Light
Like all of the other visible wavelengths (reds, oranges, yellows, blues, greens, browns), light starts out as packets of energy called “photons”. The electrons in each individual photon have a well-defined frequency.
Atoms themselves, made up of positively charged nuclei, negatively charged electrons, and negatively charged atoms called “protons” all positioned next to each other, have a more random structure that results in lower energy orbitals called the “valley” of lower energy. Electrons will “tunnel” from a higher energy orbital (the “peak”) of an atom all the way down to a valley orbital of a different atom. When a photon hits an atom in this configuration, the atom loses an electron to the photon’s high energy state. That freed electron makes for a more unstable atom in an overall neutral configuration. A molecule in that configuration is more likely to ionize, that is to lose another electron to a high energy photon. When a neutral molecule does ionize, we have a reactive intermediate, but also a strong absorption of light and a creation of heat.
So if a photon hits an atom right in its peak, the atom remains in its peak, the molecule becomes ionized, and the photon gets absorbed by another molecule. In a chain reaction, the same process is repeated through all of the other molecules until eventually all of the photons absorbed and turned into heat energy. If an energetic photon happens to be absorbed right on an orbital transition from peak to valley, or vice versa, the newly created positive or negative charge can “jump” the empty orbital gap and result in another photon being produced with exactly the same frequency, and energy, of the initial one. This process, where one photon splits into two photons that are exactly in phase, is called “fluorescence.” In other words, light with energy.
Of course, this is very technical and not much about Mace Windu’s light saber color, or why it might be red or green instead of purple.
But it should give us a good idea of how light works. It’s still just packets of energy. It doesn’t matter what color those packets happen to be. The color of something isn’t intrinsic to how that thing actually appears to us.
Mace Windu’s lightsaber probably was made to look purple. But it’s really the color of plasma. And that’s awesome.
Later High 