Physics demonstrations: invisibility on the cheap!

Posted on March 15, 2013 by skullsinthestars

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 which do exist are very limited, and not typically done for visible light (with a few notable exceptions).

While we wait for our own personal invisibility cloaks, however, we can do some cute invisibility tricks at home to demonstrate some nice optics!  In the video below, I show versions of the same disappearing act, each of which is quite inexpensive and can be done with very simple ingredients.

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Posted in Invisibility, Optics, Physics demos | 4 Comments

The Science Online 2013 official music video is out!

Posted on March 4, 2013 by skullsinthestars

… and, like last year, I make a couple of silly appearances!

A little background about the video from its creator, the awesome Dr. Bondar, can be read here.  In short, Science Online is a yearly conference for those science communicators like myself to show up, share ideas, and act really silly.  I’m totally happy that I got to participate again, both in the conference and the video!

Posted in ... the Hell?, General science, Personal | Leave a comment

How to become invisible by “hiding under the carpet”

Posted on March 2, 2013 by skullsinthestars

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 speed at which practical implementations of a number of ideas have been achieved.  Consider, for instance, this short video of a macroscopic optical invisibility cloak, a small-scale version of an object demoed at TED 2013 by physics professor Baile Zhang:

Impressive, is it not?  This device is the implementation of a cloaking idea introduced in 2008* and described colorfully as “hiding under the carpet!”  It holds the most promise in the short term for being able to effectively hide macroscopic (larger than microscopic) objects.

But what is a “carpet cloak,” and how does it work?  To answer this, we delve back into the weird optics of cloaking devices, and their design using theoretical warpings of space!

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Posted in Invisibility, Optics | 4 Comments

John Blackburn’s “Bury Him Darkly” and “Broken Boy”

Posted on February 22, 2013 by skullsinthestars

Part of why I love writing this blog is rediscovering classic weird fiction that has been lost through misadventure and misfortune.  Happily, others share this interest, and some of them are in an even better position to do something about it!

Over the past week, my favorite publisher Valancourt Books released two new editions of classic horror novels by British author John Blackburn.  The novels are excellent, but these are of personal significance to me: I wrote new introductions for them!

blackburncovers

Valancourt is releasing a series of Blackburn’s works, beginning with Broken Boy (1959) and Bury Him Darkly (1969).  But who is John Blackburn, and why did I call his works “classics?”

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Posted in Horror, Personal | 7 Comments

The Giant’s Shoulders #56 is out!

Posted on February 16, 2013 by skullsinthestars

The 56th edition of the history of science blog carnival, The Giant’s Shoulders, is up at The Dispersal of Darwin!  In this edition, you can read about:

  • How a (sort of) believer in ancient astronauts almost became U.S. President,
  • The searchers of the dead: the unappreciated 16th people who collected and inspected the bodies of plague victims,
  • Forgeries, lies, and deception in history,
  • Charles Darwin’s geological studies,
  • Macaque and dagger in the simian space race: how espionage and science crossed paths in early space exploration,
  • and much more!

Many thanks to Michael Barton for putting together a really interesting and large carnival!

We’re still looking for more hosts for the carnival, but next month I will host The Giant’s Shoulders right here at Skulls in the Stars, posting on the 16th!  Submissions can be sent directly to me via email, blog comment, or twitter.

Posted in General science, Science news | Leave a comment

The mirror that (didn’t really) make it rain! (1713)

Posted on February 15, 2013 by skullsinthestars

In my last post, I talked about the remarkable career of Etienne-Gaspard Robert aka “Robertson”, who became famous in debunking the supernatural by revealing how ghosts and phantoms could be faked.  Remarkably, even today there are still places in the world where superstitious fear can be deadly, as two recent stories, here and here, demonstrate.  It seems to be ingrained in human nature to be credulous, and science-minded people must be vigilant in explaining away the supernatural before it gets out of control. Robertson himself had many experiences to drive this point home before he started his phantasmagoria.

One story that Robertson heard that clearly left a great impression on him was told to him by his early mentor, Monsieur Villette, an optical instrument maker.  Villette’s father was a maker of large concave mirrors, and at one point the local villagers became convinced that this mirror was producing excessive rain that was ruining their crops!

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Posted in ... the Hell?, History of science | Leave a comment

Phantasmagoria: How Étienne-Gaspard Robert terrified Paris for science

Posted on February 11, 2013 by skullsinthestars

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 through the history of science, there are countless colorful characters whose personalities and activities almost defy description.

A great example of such a character is Étienne-Gaspard Robert (1763-1837), a Belgian physics teacher who was also a pioneer of ballooning and, of interest in this post, a stage magician known as “Robertson.”  Using his knowledge of physics and optics, Robertson perfected the optical stage illusion known as “Phantasmagoria,” which he used both to educate and terrify the Parisian public!

His activities were succinctly described in an 1855 biographical article (to be called BA1855 in this post):

He was a charmer who charmed wisely,– who was a born conjurer, inasmuch as he was gifted with a  predominant taste for experiments in natural science,– and he was useful man enough in an age of superstition to get up fashionable entertainments at which spectres were to appear and horrify the public, without trading on the public ignorance by any false pretence.

Robertson’s exploits could fill up several books — indeed, he filled two himself with his own memoirs!  Here we will take a look at some highlights of the remarkable man’s life, focusing particularly on his optical endeavors — and his phantoms!

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Posted in History of science, Horror, Optics | 15 Comments

His Wisdom The Defender: A Story, by Simon Newcomb (1900)

Posted on February 8, 2013 by skullsinthestars

My explorations of the early history of science fiction and horror has turned up a surprising number of scientists or people with scientific training who have dabbled in speculative fiction.  Optical scientist Robert Williams Wood coauthored a pair of science fiction novels, The Man Who Rocked the Earth (1915) and The Moon-Maker (1916).  Millionaire inventor John Jacob Astor wrote the space exploration novel A Journey in Other Worlds in 1894.  Many people are likely unaware that science fiction master H.G. Wells was a trained biologist and worked as both a science teacher and science journalist for short periods of time.  (There are more modern examples such as my friend Blake Stacey’s book Until Earthset.)

Scientists are often envisioned as passionless people whose scientific endeavors drain the beauty out of life: “unweaving the rainbow,” so to speak.  The examples above put the lie to that accusation.  Some time ago I found another example of a famous scientist trying his hand at science fiction: in 1900, the astronomer Simon Newcomb (1835-1909) published His Wisdom The Defender: A Story.

hiswisdomthedefender

In Newcomb’s book, a brilliant scientist makes an Earth-shaking discovery that can change the world, and he sets out to do just that!  The heroic antics of the scientist were, to me, actually rather reminiscent of another famous fictional scientist, as I describe below…

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Posted in History of science, Science fiction | 3 Comments

A(nother) visit to the Duke Lemur Center!

Posted on February 3, 2013 by skullsinthestars

One of the best-kept secrets that shouldn’t be a secret at all in North Carolina is the wonderful Duke Lemur Center, situated in Durham, NC.  A research facility for the adorable but sadly endangered prosimians, it has the largest collection of lemurs in one place outside of their native home of Madagascar!

This past week I was participating in ScienceOnline 2013 (#scio13) in neighboring Raleigh, NC.  Visits to the Lemur Center have been offered for conference in almost every year of the meeting, and almost every year I’ve tried to take the tour (see here and here, for instance).  I skipped it last year to give others a chance to see these wonderful animals, but this year it seemed to have plenty of space available and I happily went along.

I got some of the best photographs of lemurs that I’ve ever gotten before while at the center!  Follow me below to see the lovely lemurs, and learn a bit about of them.

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Posted in Animals, General science | 2 Comments

Artologica at ScienceOnline (and online)!

Posted on February 1, 2013 by skullsinthestars

Update: Michele will be showing off her work tonight, Friday the first of February, in the Marriott hotel lobby between 5:00 pm and 7:30 pm!

This week I’m attending ScienceOnline 2013, the yearly online science communication conference in Raleigh, NC.  I’ll have plenty of things to say about the meeting when it ends, but while I’m here I wanted to give a shout out to my friend and excellent artist Michele Banks, who goes by the name @artologica on Twitter!

I wanted to note two things: for those attending the meeting, please make sure you talk to Michele about her artwork: she has a variety of it for sale with her but can’t sell at the meeting, but will be happy to show you what she has.

More generally, I would like to point out that Artologica has both a blog and an etsy shop where you can see and purchase all of her work!  As of this writing, her shop is closed while she’s at the meeting here, but be sure to check back soon to see her amazing work.

I purchased one of Michele’s pieces last year at ScienceOnline 2012, and it is hanging in my office right next to my desk for easy viewing when I need inspiration or a break from my headache-inducing research:

artologicaMore on ScienceOnline to come soon!

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