Thursday, January 28, 2010

'Superman' vision penetrates opaque glass

It's not quite X-ray vision, but a way has been found to transmit simple images through opaque objects using ordinary light – physicists projected an image through glass covered in thick paint.

Some things we consider opaque – "not able to be seen through", in the New Oxford Dictionary of English definition – are slightly translucent, meaning some light does in fact make it through. However, it is scattered so much by bouncing around such materials' lattice of atoms that physicists thought it was beyond practical use for seeing what is on the other side of the object.

A 2007 experiment that managed to focus light through eggshells and a human tooth demonstrated that might not be so. Now the first simple images have been transmitted through an opaque object and reconstructed on the far side, by physicist Sylvain Gigan and colleagues at École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles in Paris, France.

Read the full article here...

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