Weaving magic
Material science comes of age; invisibility cloak comes out of closet
HG Wells wouldn’t have been inspired to write The Invisible Man had he lived just 100 years later. A leap in material and chemical science occurred in the naughty aughties, leading to the development of magic materials, invisibility cloaks and super-conducting devices. This year, single-atom-thick sheets of carbon called graphene took off as the hottest new thing in materials science; graphene is a highly conductive material with exotic electric properties and can outdo silicon in electronics. But the real fun was in 2003, when materials with negative refractive index, once thought physically impossible, were discovered: the oddball materials could bend light and other electromagnetic waves in the wrong direction. Soon, one such ‘left-handed’ material lent itself to the making of a flat lens, through which a photograph was taken; the lens generated far less distortion than standard optics. In 2006, a camouflaging was devised by a team of British and American scientists: a ‘metamaterial’ cloak that rendered an object invisible to microwaves. Its only drawback: Rendering an entire genre of sci-fi lit redundant.