August 11th 2008

Science has now begun to discover how to make light bend around an object and so render it invisible, according to two separate papers published online today by the journals Science and Nature . It is an announcement which will be greeted with interest, if not surprise, by students of the writings of the late Dr. George King. An extraterrestrial contactee for over 40 years, in the mid-1950s he described how spacecraft had the ability to divert photons of light around themselves to prevent them being seen. It was an assertion regarded as outlandish at the time; now just 50 years later it looks as though terrestrial science is catching up.

Both scientific papers are written by Xiang Zhang of the University of California in Berkeley, who, together with colleagues has developed two materials that can divert light. These “metamaterials” are composite materials not found in nature, whose physical structure bends light in a way that normal materials do not.  They work because they respond to the magnetic field of visible light and are able to alter the direction of light’s electrical and magnetic fields and so the light itself. Because light waves are so small, the tiny scale at which researchers must operate is astounding: Zhang’s team had to construct a material whose components were engineered to within 660 nanometres (millionths of a millimetre).

There is a long way to go before this technology yields practical results, like invisibility cloaking. Xiang says that “In the case of invisibility cloaks or shields, the material would need to curve light waves completely around the object like river flowing around a rock.” According to Science News (www.sciencenews.org ) “In principle, a material that bends light backward could be fashioned into a spherical shield that would hide what’s inside by making light flow around it, researchers have suggested.”

Interestingly in the 1950s Dr. George King stated that the reason that UFOs often looked fuzzy on photographic plates was because a magnetic, protective force field around the craft reflected and refracted light waves. In the case of invisibility, he said, “this invisibility is caused by the rotation of photons in a 360 degree arc on the fringe of the magnetic protective shield itself” – “fashioned into a spherical shield”, to use the words of Science News.

Dr. King used to say that “What the metaphysician knows today science discovers tomorrow.” Not for the first time science is proving these words true.

Links:
Science News: Invisibility within sight
Telegraph.co.uk: Two invisibility cloak materials developed
Nature: Three-dimensional optical metamaterial with a negative refractive index
Science: Threading Light Through the Opaque