![]() Their conflict ends with a surreal and fatal game of tennis: “The blotch of shadow and the rainbow flashes, the dust rising from the invisible feet, the earth tearing up from beneath the straining foot-grips.” Jack London wrote a story in 1903, “The Shadow and the Flash,” in which a scientist paints himself perfectly black and battles a rival who achieves near-perfect transparency. A British company in 2014 announced a “super-black” coating called Vantablack that absorbs virtually all the light that strikes it. Invisibility could mean perfect blackness or perfect transparency. Extending our vision, enabling us to see the unseen, has been a long-standing program in science, so scientists seeking invisibility might seem to inhabit a backwash from the main current. Bacteria and quasars are invisible by virtue of being small or far away, until we use microscopes and telescopes. “The word ‘invisible,’” Gbur writes, “is simultaneously very suggestive, conjuring a specific image (or lack thereof) in a person’s mind, and very vague, in that it can mean many different things.” Everything is invisible in the dark everyone else is invisible when you close your eyes. Yet it’s not obvious how a scientist ought to define it. The desire to be invisible seems deeply embedded in our psyches. Gbur takes his subtitle from the famous Monty Python sketch “How Not to Be Seen,” in which a series of people hide in bushes, leaf piles, and a water barrel before being shot or blown up. For the same reason, organisms like chameleons and octopi have evolved camouflage skills. In ancient mythology Perseus, Athena, and Hermes took turns donning the helm of invisibility, aka the Cap of Hades, when they needed to evade the sight of their enemies. They are mere newcomers to the art of vanishing at will. Harry Potter has his cloak, Frodo has his ring, James Bond has a car, Wonder Woman has an airplane. It informs his research, and he collects headlines: “Invisibility Cloaks Are in Sight” “Researchers Create Functional Invisibility Cloak Using ‘Mirage Effect’” “Scientists Invent Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak-Sort Of.” His new book, Invisibility, explores the phenomenon as a catalyst for research as well as for science fiction-because across several centuries the science of light and the fiction of invisibility developed side by side, each inspiring the other. ![]() Gbur, an optical physicist at the University of North Carolina, has made invisibility something of a hobby. One automaker is now offering a “stealth” paint option-“a dark, enigmatic look,” for “an entirely new personality.” Gregory J. We know about stealth aircraft, aspirationally invisible to radar. Over the past two decades, scientists studying optics have considered invisibility not just as a fantasy but as a practical possibility. ![]() “Transparency” is a watchword and a virtue-so we are told-and the desire for invisibility might be a natural reaction. Still, we crave invisibility in response to a growing sense of ubiquitous surveillance: our images captured and displayed everywhere, our inner souls turned out for all to see. If everybody were being perfectly honest with you, they would tell you the truth, which is that they all want to be invisible so that they can shoplift, get into movies for free, go to exotic places on airplanes without paying for airline tickets, and watch celebrities have sex. People who chose invisibility imagined themselves lurking, eavesdropping, and peeping. He was disappointed that no one wanted to use their superpower to fight crime. The humorist and actor John Hodgman explained that he had been asking people this question for years at meetings and dinner parties, and that their choice revealed primal desires and unconscious fears. It was a test of character and a probe of the zeitgeist. ![]() These are “two of the superpowers which have fascinated humans since antiquity,” said the host, Ira Glass. Some twenty years ago the radio program This American Life asked listeners which of two superpowers they would choose: flight or invisibility. ![]()
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