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While we're on the subject of three-d printing and "teleportation"(see yesterday's blog), we might as well talk about another thing that it is enabling to take one step closer to reality: invisibility through meta-materials engineering. This one is near and dear to my heart, because way back in my very first book, The Giza Death Star, I speculated on the possibility that special kinds of crystals could be grown, perhaps through the use of nanotechnology, which would effectively trap light inside the crystal, through a special kind of negative refraction, imagining a whole series of "dark crystals" - dark rubies, dark garnets, dark sapphires, and so on - that were brighter on the inside than they were on the outside, so to speak. And in the Giza Death Star Destroyed, in spent some time with the Bablyonian Enuma Elish epic, and Marduk's "invisibility" cloak.
It should come as no surprise that materials engineers and technicians are now entertaining very similar ideas:
Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak is a step closer to reality: 3D printed device that bends light could make objects disappear
While we're on the subject of three-d printing and "teleportation"(see yesterday's blog), we might as well talk about another thing that it is enabling to take one step closer to reality: invisibility through meta-materials engineering. This one is near and dear to my heart, because way back in my very first book, The Giza Death Star, I speculated on the possibility that special kinds of crystals could be grown, perhaps through the use of nanotechnology, which would effectively trap light inside the crystal, through a special kind of negative refraction, imagining a whole series of "dark crystals" - dark rubies, dark garnets, dark sapphires, and so on - that were brighter on the inside than they were on the outside, so to speak. And in the Giza Death Star Destroyed, in spent some time with the Bablyonian Enuma Elish epic, and Marduk's "invisibility" cloak.
It should come as no surprise that materials engineers and technicians are now entertaining very similar ideas:
Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak is a step closer to reality: 3D printed device that bends light could make objects disappear
"These objects are put together in precise geometrical patterns to bend waves of energy in unnatural ways."In particular, they reveal a property called 'negative refraction', meaning they can bend a wave backwards.
Thus far the problem with negative refraction is the weakening of the wave of light so refracted:
"But metamaterials with this negative refraction have presented a vexing physics problem: They reduce the strength of the wave."'One of the biggest problems with metamaterials is that they produce energy loss,' Professor Xin said."'The waves decay as they pass through the artificial material. We have designed a metamaterial that retains negative refraction but does not diminish energy.'"In fact, the synthetic material not only prevented energy loss - it caused energy gain, with the microwave intensifying in strength as it passed through the material."Professor Xin achieved this by embedding battery-powered tunnel diodes – which is a type of semiconductor device - and into the new material."'Many people did not think it was possible to achieve energy gain along with negative refraction,' Professor Xin said."He first showed it was possible, with one-dimensional metamaterials, in a paper published in Physical Review Letters in 2011."His new findings, reported in Nature Communications, have broader implications, because they involve 3D metamaterials."
What bothered me then about my speculations, bothers me even more now, with this revelation, for note that Professor Xin's technique has resulted in an energy gain of the microwave so negatively refracted. Now imagine what they've probably already thought of at the Diabolically Apocalyptic Research Projects Agency(or DARPA as it is otherwise known[and a thank you, again, to Mr. J.B. for coining that version of the agency's name and allowing us to use it here on this website): with such a technique, one could conceivable design some version of my speculated "dark crystals," as a kind of optical or cohering cavity for various wavelengths of the spectrum: invisibility, in other words, meets the maser, laser, and graser. Couple that with phase conjugation and... well... here the high octane speculation runs into all sorts of apocalyptic implications that only a Hans Kammler could appreciate.
And another super-duper-high octane speculation, while we're at it. I've long entertained the idea that perhaps the proverbial "they" were secretly scratching around the sands of the Middle East, looking for some of those lost "Tablets of Destinies", you know, the ones that the "Epic of Ninurta" indicated could not be destroyed. Perhaps they have not been found, because they might be invisible. One wouldn't know they were there, until one quite literally ran into them. And then(while we're still at it), there's all those stories of people just suddenly appearing or disappearing out of, or into, thin air. It does make one wonder...
Ok.. I've returned to Earth now.
