And a little child’s toy shall lead them …

Who knew that a funky children’s plaything from the 1960s could hold the answer to a question that has plagued scientists for decades?

If you’re of a certain age, you may remember the early television commercials for Lite-Brite, the toy that used a light box and colored pegs to create glowing pictures. In the commercial, the perky jingle promised: “Lite-Brite, making things with li-i-ight …”

Well, apparently physicists are now poised to begin doing just that: Making things, with light.

Scientists at Imperial College, in London, recently announced they’ve discovered a relatively simple way to create matter from light. “Relatively simple,” of course, being relatively relative. Because it’s actually a complicated process involving a photon-photon collider and something called a vacuum hohlraum.

But near as I can tell, here’s the simplified version: You take two high-energy beams of light and you smash them together. That’s it. Smash them together hard enough, and — voila! — you create matter.

By the way, it turns out that this “Smash stuff together and see what happens” technique is the physicist’s answer to just about everything in life — including the creation of the universe, the hydrogen bomb, romance and, now, creating matter from light.

“Well, yeah. Physicists like to smash things together,” admitted John Sohl, physics professor at Weber State University. “We’re just big kids, right?”

Associate professor John Armstrong, a colleague of Sohl’s, offered his take on this whole matter-from-light discovery.

“The practical applications, I give it a five,” he said, using a scale of 1-to-10. “But understanding and proving the processes that created the universe? Definitely a 10.”

Ah, bless these physicists’ pointy, balding little heads. Always more interested in the deeper scientific questions than the practical applications. Me? I just want to know if I could create an actual pot of gold from a rainbow.

It’s theoretically possible, I suppose.

See, if scientists are able to create matter from light, it’s only a matter of time before we have replicators like the ones in the sci-fi series “Star Trek.”

“Yes,” Armstrong said. “And you could save the antimatter for your warp drive.”

Ah, antimatter. Light contains both matter and antimatter, so in creating matter from light you’re basically separating it from the antimatter. Then the trick is to somehow isolate the antimatter so it doesn’t combine with the matter again and mess up the whole process.

Imagine all the good light-into-matter could do. Anywhere there’s light on the earth, you could use it to create the necessities to alleviate human suffering. Clean water. Food. Shelter. Blu-ray discs of Disney’s “Frozen.”

But where there is great promise, there is also the potential for abuse. How do we know this? Because the Imperial College research is partially funded by AWE, the British government’s Atomic Weapons Establishment. (Don’t you just love it when deadly serious organizations dealing in nuclear weapons have cute little acronyms like that?)

Gamely playing along, Armstrong speculates that perhaps the British could eventually use the antimatter from this technology to power an antimatter engine that could slam a small asteroid into, say, a rebellious former colony.

But I suspect the Brits — given their dry wit — would look to make more of a statement than a mere asteroid could provide.

Imagine this: One day, far in the future, the UK shines just the right combinations of light into the airspace above the United States, conceivably converting that light into a country-sized anvil — ooh, or an equally large grand piano — that would drop, cartoon-like, onto an unsuspecting nation below.

A frightening thought, but Sohl isn’t too worried about humanity killing ourselves by dropping massive anvils on each other.

“I think we’ll be much faster by using other methods,” he said.

Yeah, like a nuclear bomb that opens to reveal a sign reading “Boom!”

Contact Mark Saal at 801-625-4272, or msaal@standard.net. Follow him on Twitter at @Saalman. Like him on Facebook at facebook.com/SEMarkSaal.