Art,
IMO it's the whole J.K.Rowling B.S., It's all over the place....Like a "Leaky Calderon" [
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Xiang Zhang remembers the day he recognized that something extraordinary was happening around him. It was in 2000, at a workshop organized by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to explore a tantalizing idea: that radical new kinds of engineered materials might enable us to extend our control over matter in seemingly magical ways.
The goal at hand, changing how objects interact with light, seemed at first blush to be routine; people had been manipulating visible light with mirrors and lenses and prisms nearly forever. But Zhang, a materials scientist then at the University of California at Los Angeles, knew those applications were limited. Based overwhelmingly on a single material, glass, the technologies were restricted by the laws of optics described in standard physics texts. The engineers in the room hoped to smash through those barriers with materials and technologies never conceived of before. The proposals included crafting what amounts to an array of billions of tiny relays; in essence, the relays would capture light and send it back out. Depending on the specific design of the array, the light would be bent, reflected, or skewed in different ways.
What could you do with a tool like that? An amazing amount, Zhang soon discovered. For one thing, you could render objects invisible. You see something, after all, when light bounces off it, creating the reflections that enter your eye and form an image on your retina. If you could direct light to flow smoothly around the object like water flowing past a rock in a stream, there would be no reflection, no rays entering your eye, and nothing to see—not even a shadow.
Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak inevitably arises as an example of the power of such materials, but invisibility is just the start. Every tool based on the interaction of electromagnetic waves with objects, from modems and MRIs to radios and radar, could have their powers extended, altered, enhanced.
~Discover Magazine~ -~
Actually the site is pretty "sparkly","Teeming" with words like Guildford [8D]