Thru The Looking Glass With Lenses That “Break The Laws of Nature”

Ever wonder why there’s all these Hubble Space Telescope pictures but not one of them is of footprints on the moon? Answer: a little thing in optics called the diffraction limit (kinda like The Outer Limits, only real). Now physicists are creating new types of lenses that “break the laws of nature” and can do the (previously) “impossible”. Canadian George Eleftheriades has developed a flat lens made of “metamaterials” which he describes in the March 24 issue of Applied Physics Letters. Under normal electromagnetic conditions, light passing through a flat lens will diverge; light passing through a lens made of metamaterials, however, will bend the “wrong” way and become focused. “This is new physics,” he says. “These findings provide an opportunity to resolve details in an object smaller than a wavelength.” This, in turn, could lead to smaller and more effective antennas and devices for cell phones, more complex electronic circuits, and (yeah, what the world REALLY wants) increased space for music storage on Compact Discs.

Metamaterials were proposed in the 1968 and were immediately scorned because some physicists thought that if they existed, they would be a medium in which one could go faster than the speed of light. New calculations show that sorry, metamaterials aren’t dilithium. “These calculations are an important confirmation that the speed of light is not violated by negative refraction,” John Pendry, a theorist at Imperial College in London who did much of the early work on negative-index materials, told Physics Web. “It is time to move on and start making use of these amazing new materials.” Starting in 2000, physicists have done just that.


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