Arthur C. Clarke : A Great Man Leaves Us

Today is a sad day for us all.

Today, March 18, 2008, after his "90th orbit of the sun," the great author and theorist Arthur C. Clarke passed away. This brilliant man died at a hospital in Sri Lanka, his adopted home. He died of respiratory complications and heart failure that doctors linked to the post-polio syndrome that kept him in his wheelchair for years. He is the last surviving member of a group of science-fiction writers known as the "Big Three". The other two were Issac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein.

Clarke was born on December 16, 1917 in England. He served as a radar specialist in the Royal Air Force during World War Two. Trained as a scientist, he is renowned for basing his work on scientific fact and theory rather than pure fiction, hence the term science fiction. Clarke wrote great works of fiction dealing with science and technology. His most notable work is 2001: A Space Odyssey. He also worked with Stanley Kubrick on the groundbreaking film version of the same novel.

This man was well ahead of his time. He was one of the first to suggest the use of satellites orbiting the earth for communications. In the 1940s he forecast that man would reach the moon by the year 2000, which was an idea experts at first dismissed as rubbish. His writings were influential in shaping public interest in space exploration during the 1950s and '60s. When Neil Armstrong landed in 1969, the United States said Clarke "provided the essential intellectual drive that led us to the moon".

Recently, Clarke finished reviewing the final manuscript of his latest novel "The Last Theorem" just days ago. He had also been working on the idea of a "space elevator".

"The golden age of space is only just beginning," Clarke forecast. "Over the next 50 years, thousands of people will travel to earth orbit and then to the moon and beyond. Space travel and space tourism will one day become almost as commonplace as flying to exotic destinations on our own planet."

Let us remember this superior man today for his wonderful mind that was filled with such intellect, complexity and beauty. His last wishes were:
For E.T. to call
For man to kick his oil habit
For peace in Sri Lanka

Incredible Invisibility Technology

This is incredible stuff indeed!

Invisibility might one day in the future no longer be just an optical illusion only for magicians and tricksters. Scientists and engineers in different parts of the world are working on developing fabrics and materials that can be seen through, much like the Invisibility cloak in Harry Potter.

Electronic engineers at the University of Pennsylvania are working on a real invisibility shield called a "plasmonic cover".The development works by preventing objects from reflecting and scattering light, could have widespread use in the military as it would be more effective than current stealth technology.

Similarly, researchers in Tokyo are developing a camouflage fabric that uses a comparable principle where the background is projected on to light-reflecting beads in the material. Such systems are, however, dependent on the viewer from which the object is being concealed being in the right position.

According to Dr Andrea Alu and Dr Nader Engheta, the engineers behind the project, the key is to reduce light scattering. Objects are visible because light bounces off them; if this can be prevented and if the objects did not reflect any light, they would become invisible. The "plasmonic screen" achieves this by resonating in tune with the illuminating light."Plasmons" are created when the electrons on the surface of a metallic material move in rhythm. The developers claim a shell of this material will reduce light-scatter to the extent that an object will become invisible, if the light’s frequency is close to the resonant frequency of these "plasmons". In this way, the scattering from the shell effectively cancels out the scattering from the object.

Experiments have shown that spherical or cylindrical objects coated with such shields do produce very little light scattering, which renders them nearly invisible. However, the cloak would have to be delicately tuned to suit each object it hides. Also, a specific shield may only work for one wavelength of light, rendering it invisible in, say, red light, but not in multi-wavelength daylight.

Another problem which has to be solved is that the effect would only work in daylight when the wavelength of the light being scattered is the same size as the object - meaning only tiny things can so far be hidden.

One of the labs in the University of Tokyo uploaded some interesting videos of their "quasi-invisivility" using a specific fablic and projector: