BBC Radio 4 LW

The Unseen - A History of the Invisible

The Unseen - A History of the Invisible: Becoming Invisible

Becoming Invisible

BBC Radio 4 - The Unseen - A History of the Invisible, Becoming Invisible

Writer Philip Ball meets the physicists who are making real life invisibility cloaks.

In the final episode of his series, science writer and broadcaster Philip Ball meets the contemporary physicists who are making real life invisibility cloaks.

Science writer and broadcaster Philip Ball sets out on a quest to explore the peculiar world of the invisible. 

Our fascination with achieving invisibility stretches back over thousands of years. In ancient myths, invisibility used to be a gift of the gods and the goddesses. Now, after millennia of dreaming about it, science might be on the threshold of letting us master invisibility for real.

While the earliest scientific proposals for invisibility cloaks appear in fiction, today it’s not just storytellers and folklorists who speak of them, but physicists and engineers. And they’ve made them too. Over the past decade there have been scientific reports of cloaks, shields and other devices that can make things seemingly vanish – from humble pieces of paper to fish, cats, people, even entire buildings.

Philip hears from Sir John Pendry, the pioneering physicist who hit the headlines when he published a paper detailing the first working invisibility cloak. In order to see a cloak in action, Philip travels to the University of Birmingham to meet Dr Jensen Li in the Metamaterials Lab. Jensen’s cloaking device proves to be nothing like the cloaks of myth and fantasy, leaving Philip to question whether we should be discussing the real and fictional invisibility cloaks in the same breath.

Presenter: Philip Ball
Producer: Max O’Brien
A Juniper production for BBC Radio 4

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Science writer Philip Ball explores the invisible - a space where magic and science meet.

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