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August 15, 2008
Pluto's Helmet
Bob Novella at the Rogues Gallery has more sensible information on metamaterials and invisibility than is found in the news reports, and has some disappointing words for all the nerds out there: So many stories focus on the invisibility angle and there is some beef in that hamburger. This could potentially scale up and offer some impressive visible light invisibility but an inviso-cloak like Harry Potter might be unworkable. A moving flowing cloak maintaining stealth could be impossible or orders of magnitude more difficult not to mention that the cloak may need to be a hundred times bigger than the object it is cloaking. Harry would need a big backpack to put that in.You can read more to learn more than you'd ever like to know about light refraction, or to see what the more practical applications of metamaterials might be. Personally, I'm disappointed that we'll never see Pluto's Helmet become a reality, though perhaps we can tip our own hats to the Greeks for inventing this fantasy mainstay and for prefiguring in some sense a bit of ultra-modern technology. It's most famously used by Perseus in the slaying of Medusa and escape from the Gorgons:  And truthfully, I think the coolest possible application would be one suggested by a commenter at the Rogues Gallery: a Romulan cloaking device. That should be far easier and more practical than a dumb old cloak. posted by Dennis on 08.15.08 at 11:56 AM
Comments
Ah, but Eratosthenes was a Greek. Egypt at that time was culturally dominated by the Greeks. The Ptolemies (Cleopatra's family) styled themselves as Pharaohs but were the heirs of a portion of Alexander's Hellenistic empire. By the way, here's the video of Sagan on Eratosthenes. Dennis · August 16, 2008 10:00 AM Post a comment
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The Greeks can top that at anticipating modern science. They had an atomic theory! (It's proof is a sublime feat of critical thinking.)
I used to be impressed that the Greeks knew the earth was round, until I saw an episode of Cosmos where Carl Sagan explained that an Egyptian figured out how big it is.