On Sunday, December 3 at 3 pm Eastern Time, Professor Gregory Gbur will be with us for a Casual Conversation. He is Professor of Physics And Optical Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Professor Gbur is the author mist recently of Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen (Yale University Press 2003).
Professor Gbur’s book came to my attention through a very positive review by Richard Dunn, Keeper of Technologies and Engineering at the Science Museum, London, in the Times Literary Supplement (28 July 2023):
"Ten years ago, a Chinese team of scientists announced the creation of a calcite “cloak” large enough to make a cat invisible. It wasn’t quite Harry Potter, but it was a big step away from make-believe. This is home territory to Gregory J. Gbur, a professor of physics and optical science, who makes an informed guide to the history of invisibility from fantasy to active research-field. His book, Invisibility: The history and science of how not to be seen, is not about camouflage or simply not being visible – sitting in the dark, say, or hiding behind a sofa. Rather, it explores the possibilities of manipulating light to make an object harder to see, and of rendering visible things that are normally hidden, such as the insides of our bodies.
. . .
Gbur is also interested in how works of fiction have featured invisibility (he includes an “invisibibliography”). He favours stories that attempt some scientific explanation, using them as snapshots of the popular understanding of their time. . . . Gbur likes writing that can be read as prophetic. A perfectly black paint that reflects no light in Jack London’s “The Shadow and the Flash” (1906) seems to prefigure Vantablack, announced in 2014 as the world’s blackest material. And a piece by Hugo Gernsback for Science and Invention in 1921 imagines future doctors being able to image a patient’s internal organs, seemingly a foretaste of today’s CT scans."
It is this bringing together of the human imagination as expressed through science fiction and science exploration that fascinates Professor Gbur, and ought to intrigue us. The horror movie of H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1933) with Claude Rains as the man who appears only as a voice until the very end of the film, imagines Rains as invisible without a road back to being seen, a scientist driven mad by the potion he has imbibed and imagining the supreme power that he will exercise by being able to act in the world without being seen. He is, of course, careful to explain to his assistant that he is not to be seen for several hours after eating because the food in his GI tract will be visible while his skin, bones, and organs will not.
Professor Gbur’s book starts with a definition of his subject: “[W]e will consider objects invisible if they manipulate light in an unusual way to make an object harder to see than we would normally expect.” In telling his tale, the author tells the stories of the many scientific explorers who probed the nature of light, in both its visible and invisible forms of waves and particles. Professor Gbur explores the use of X-rays, a form of electromagnetic radiation not visible to eye, to take pictures inside the human body, rendering skin invisible so that organs can be available for medical analysis. And of the magnetic fields whose waves also peer into the body to aid in curing before cutting. CAT and MRI. Not as easy to develop as we, the beneficiaries of these tools, might believe.
Toward the end of the book, Professor Gbur expands his focus, and takes the scientific principles, like destructive interference, that have developed in connection with electromagnetic radiation, and finds the exciting application to such phenomena as earthquakes and giant waves. And along the way he discusses the work-a-day concerns of scientists, from travails of publication to the simultaneity of invention.
Professor Gbur also runs a blog that you might find interesting. But let’s let him tell you about it, from his website, https://pages.charlotte.edu/greg-gbur/ : “Skulls in the Stars: The intersection of physics, optics, history and pulp fiction.”
Come if you dare to the Casual Conversation. You may confront Things That Go Bump In The Night, even if you can’t see them.
Peek-a-boo!
Usual rules apply. Email me with your RSVP by this Friday if you plan to attend: arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com .
Arthur Fergenson