Abstract
“Everything not forbidden is compulsory.” So writes T. H. White in his book The Once and Future King – and, if nature ever had need of a motto then surely it would be these words. For indeed, nature is the ultimate utilitarian, ever building, ever moving, never stationary, searching in all possible ways, step by small step, for a better adapted, more efficient, more successful survivor. If a process is not physically impossible, that is, against the laws of physics, nature will usually find a use for it.
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- 1.
The English translation of Veselago’s paper incorrectly states that the original Russian language article was published in 1964 – it was actually published in 1967. This being said, some of the effects relating to negative refractive index can be traced back to Russian papers published in the mid-1940s and 1950s.
- 2.
Mathematicians divide number domains into the integers, the reals and the complex. The integers are all the positive and negative whole numbers (including zero), whereas the real numbers include all the fractional and integer numbers between minus and plus infinity. The complex numbers are composites of a real number and an imaginary term that is multiplied by i, defined as being the square root of –1 (hence imaginary number). Remarkably, many physics and engineering calculations are cast in terms of complex numbers. This latter result, as physicist Roger Penrose has succinctly put it, “is a cause for wonder.”
- 3.
For those readers wishing to delve into the full-bodied mathematical details then we thoroughly recommend Leonhardt’s recent book, written in collaboration with Thomas Philbin, Geometry and Light – The Science of Invisibility (Dover Publications, 2010).
- 4.
There is a pleasing Charles Dodgson, Cheshire cat kind of irony to this design, in that an invisibility cloak is manufactured from what is quintessentially the most transparent of optical media.
- 5.
Lycurgus (circa 800 b.c.), king of the Thracians.
- 6.
A counter example to this situation is afforded by the calcite invisibility cloak described in Chap. 3. In this case, the birefringence properties of the calcite crystal are used to restore both the angle and position of the reflected ray (see lower diagram in Fig. 3.34). And, just to prove the point that it is difficult to poach from a poacher, the SMART calcite cloaking device, recall, was designed by Baile Zhang.
- 7.
In this coordinate system the location of a point in space is described according to its radial distance r from a fixed central axis, the angle ϕ measured around the central axis and z the height of the zero point for the radius above a specific reference location.
- 8.
A Möbius strip can be made from a rectangular piece of paper. The trick is to join the two shorter edges of the paper band together but adding a half-twist into it before making the ends fast. If you run your finger around the Möbius strip, so produced, you will find that it has only one edge and only one surface.
- 9.
Tachyons are entirely possible, but we have at present no idea if they actually exist. While they move faster than the speed of light they do not contravene Einstein’s special relativity, which only postulates that the speed of light is a limiting speed. No sub-light speed particle can be accelerated to the speed of light, and likewise, no tachyon can be slowed down to subliminal speeds.
- 10.
A streamed video of the 60-min lecture by McCall entitled Lies, damned lies and tricking the light fantastic, can be downloaded from the Imperial College London media library.
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© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Beech, M. (2012). The Metamaterial Revolution. In: The Physics of Invisibility. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0616-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0616-7_5
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