Invisibility

Could a person or an object really be made invisible? Science fiction writers have toyed with the idea for more than a century, and it has now become a subject of serious and widely reported scientific research. Gregory J. Gbur, an optical physicist and science writer, follows the idea from its beginnings to the present day.

His account starts with nineteenth-century fiction by authors such as H. G. Wells and Fitz James O'Brien and runs through to modern stealth technology, invisibility cloaks and metamaterials. Along the way he covers the history of invisibility and the scientific developments tied to it, among them the discovery of the electromagnetic spectrum, the development of the atomic model and quantum theory. He shows how invisibility moved from imagination to working science, and he considers what directions researchers might take next.

The book is also a history of how people came to understand the nature of light, and it introduces many of the figures whose discoveries advanced that understanding.