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- Brain Vitamin: The key to invisibility
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Invisibility – it’s the stuff of fantasy and Hollywood movies (we’re looking at you, Harry Potter), and now it’s a reality.
Well, kind of. Read the fine print, and you’ll find that the invisibility cloak that UC Berkeley researchers have produced can only hide extremely tiny objects – objects that are 100 times thinner than a human hair.
Still, it’s a huge step after years of research. To explain just how the science works – or the “metamaterials,” to those in the know – we sent reporter Zoe Corneli to the Cal campus for this archive edition of Brain Vitamin.
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Broadcast History
KALW 91.7FM:
August 17, 2011
Transcript
ZOE CORNELI: If you’ve ever stuck a pencil in a glass of water, you’ll know that the pencil seems to bend. That’s because the water changes the direction of the light bouncing off of it. The new materials do the same sort of thing, only they cause the light to bend at angles you would never see in nature. Guy Bartal is a co-author of the reports.
GUY BARTAL: So if you want to illustrate this example, you put this pencil – let’s assume you have some kind of liquid that has the same properties that you designed – then you will see that the part of the pencil that’s in the material is actually out of the liquid, out of the water.
In other words, it looked like the pencil was bent in half and sticking back out of the liquid. The research team achieved this effect, but on a much smaller scale. They took prisms, and shone light on them.
BARTAL: So we found out it bounced off at the opposite...
Read the full transcript
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