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The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas. -
Category Archives: Optics
Physics demonstrations: invisibility on the cheap!
I spend a lot of time talking about invisibility on this blog, and it really has become a fascinating and vibrant area of optics, with lots of remarkable results. However, most of those results are theoretical, and the experimental results … Continue reading
Posted in Invisibility, Optics, Physics demos
4 Comments
How to become invisible by “hiding under the carpet”
Since the first theoretical cloaking papers in 2006, the topic of optical invisibility has just gotten stranger and stranger. There have been proposals of optical wormholes, perfect optical illusions, space-time cloaks, and more. Perhaps even more surprising, however, is the … Continue reading
Posted in Invisibility, Optics
4 Comments
Phantasmagoria: How Étienne-Gaspard Robert terrified Paris for science
Scientists are so often imagined to be bland and unimaginative, slaving away at research and taking away the joy of nature. I’m no longer so irritated by this perception as I used to be, but rather surprised by it: going … Continue reading
Posted in History of science, Horror, Optics
15 Comments
Optical wormholes: punching virtual tunnels in space via metamaterials!
Though the introduction of optical invisibility cloaks in 2006 caused a huge sensation around the world in both the media and the general public, arguably even more significant to the optical science community is the technique used to design cloaks. … Continue reading
Posted in Invisibility, Optics
5 Comments
Illusion optics: the physics of making things look like other things!
The idea of optical cloaking, or more generally the concept of invisibility, has gone from science fiction trope to serious topic of physics research to subfield of optical science in its own right in a remarkably short period of time. … Continue reading
Posted in Invisibility, Optics
1 Comment
Light “tying itself in knots,” at Aeon Magazine
Those who are familiar with my blog know that one of my fields of specialty is so-called “singular optics,” the study of the behavior of light in regions where the light intensity is zero and the phase is singular. I’ve … Continue reading
Posted in Optics, Science news
1 Comment
Invention of the “perfect” invisibility cloak?
In 2006, a number of researchers made international headlines with the announcement that they had laid the theoretical foundations for the construction of an “invisibility cloak,” a device that has been a staple of horror, fantasy and science fiction for … Continue reading
Posted in Invisibility, Optics
5 Comments
“Hairy balls” in optics?
The title of this post certainly got your attention, didn’t it? Don’t worry — the topic of the post is not quite as bad as it sounds! The “hairy ball” theorem is in fact a mathematical theorem that states, in … Continue reading
Posted in Optics
3 Comments
What’s the difference between “transparency” and “invisibility”?
In writing my previous post on The Murderer Invisible, I started thinking again about the relationship between something being “transparent” and something being truly “invisible”. Most of us can appreciate that, under the right circumstances, a transparent object like a … Continue reading
Posted in Invisibility, Optics
8 Comments
Optics basics: refraction
In all of my discussions of basic principles of optics, I’ve so far neglected to talk about one of the most fundamental and important: refraction! In short, refraction is the bending of a ray of light when it passes from … Continue reading
Posted in Optics basics
6 Comments
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