Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with text stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot Com say they're and welcome to text Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren, And uh, this test,
Speaker 1: we're not doing a listener request, although I would imagine
Speaker 1: a lot of our listeners have heard about the subject
Speaker 1: we're going to be talking about today. But before we
Speaker 1: get into it, Lauren, what is your favorite implementation of
Speaker 1: the concept of invisibility in FICTIONUS? Uh, probably the Ronnie
Speaker 1: Lank cloaking device, Yeah, which the Klingon's managed to get
Speaker 1: their hands on because I was to get the Bird
Speaker 1: of Prey from uh well, they both had Bird of
Speaker 1: Praise that could cloak, and the Star Trek University. Eventually
Speaker 1: the Federation picked it up as well. We could really
Speaker 1: really get into a full thing of us just talking
Speaker 1: about Star Trek and cloaking devices as it turns out. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: that's a cool, cool implementation. Another one, of course, the
Speaker 1: Predator being able to have that chameleon likability or I guess,
Speaker 1: I guess the halo armor. Yeah, there's of course the
Speaker 1: the Harry Potter invisibility. Yeah, the hay cloak with the
Speaker 1: Marauders invisibility cloaks. So yeah, we've we've got all these
Speaker 1: ideas about invisibility. It's of course been a popular concept
Speaker 1: in fiction, whether it's fantasy or science fiction. In the
Speaker 1: world of science fiction, of course, we have to try
Speaker 1: and come up with a way of how would this work,
Speaker 1: how would we manage to make something invisible? And well,
Speaker 1: some people feel more obligated to do that than others. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: because some people would argue that if you don't do it,
Speaker 1: you might as well call it science fantasy rather than
Speaker 1: science fiction. But the the concept usually boils down to
Speaker 1: the idea of somehow manipulating light so that bends around
Speaker 1: an object and then continues on as if the object
Speaker 1: were not there. So from an outsider's perspective, it's just
Speaker 1: you know, emptiness or or whatever. It's whatever, see the
Speaker 1: starf behind you or the wallopping willow or whatever. It excellent,
Speaker 1: really well done. I was wondering where you're going to
Speaker 1: go with the Harry Potter one exactly. So the interesting
Speaker 1: thing is that there are people who are really working
Speaker 1: on this technology. You guys out there have probably heard
Speaker 1: about variations on real world cloaking devices, and you may wonder, well,
Speaker 1: how is this even possibly attempted, and there are a
Speaker 1: lot of different approaches, but one emerging field that we
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about is meta materials. Right, because with
Speaker 1: normal materials, perhaps obviously, normal materials do not bend light
Speaker 1: around them so that you can see what's on the
Speaker 1: other side when they're solid and opaque materials. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: Even a even a transparent window is reflecting some light
Speaker 1: back to you. Right. The idea of a meta material,
Speaker 1: at least in this particular implementation, because there's lots of
Speaker 1: different potential ways to use meta materials, is to bend
Speaker 1: electromagnetic radiation, in this case visible light around it so
Speaker 1: that we wouldn't see it. Now, we're not there yet,
Speaker 1: by the way, spoiler alert, Yes, um, we are working
Speaker 1: slowly towards it. But let's put down a good solid
Speaker 1: definition of meta materials to kind of start the conversation off. Okay, so,
Speaker 1: first thing to keep in mind their artificial These are
Speaker 1: these are materials that are man made, and they are
Speaker 1: very different from natural materials because the properties that you
Speaker 1: would find in any natural material are largely dependent upon
Speaker 1: its chemical composition. So, for example, a bar of gold,
Speaker 1: a bar of gold has the weight, the color, the density,
Speaker 1: it has all of these things because of the nature
Speaker 1: of the atoms of gold. Right. That's if it were
Speaker 1: a different material, it would have very different properties, even
Speaker 1: if you had it at the same physical dimensions, right
Speaker 1: and so, And even though okay, a bar of gold
Speaker 1: is also a man made object, you're rarely going to
Speaker 1: pull a large chunk of gold like that right straight
Speaker 1: out of the ground having minecraft or something without it
Speaker 1: having some kind of impurities that you would have to
Speaker 1: melt out or whatever it is that you do. But
Speaker 1: basically it's all chemical exactly. Now, manty materials they get
Speaker 1: their properties not just from the kind of atoms or
Speaker 1: molecules that make up that mety material. In fact, the
Speaker 1: chemical composition doesn't really ultimately matters they structure exactly. It's
Speaker 1: it's how that material is physically constructed. And when we
Speaker 1: say physical structure, we're not talking about something you can
Speaker 1: see on the macro level. We're talking this is micro
Speaker 1: to nano exactly, to the point where it's so small
Speaker 1: that an optical microscope would not be able to show
Speaker 1: you what that structure is. And a lot of this
Speaker 1: was sort of theoretical. We'll talk about the history of
Speaker 1: it until relatively recently, we've just now started to get
Speaker 1: too sophisticated manufacturing processes that allow us to build these
Speaker 1: super tiny structures that will affect uh well, that will
Speaker 1: interact with electromagnetic radiation and interesting ways. Right. It's sort
Speaker 1: of similar to the way that we've talked about nanostructures
Speaker 1: having different effects on the world around them, then we
Speaker 1: would normally be able to observe larger structures. Meta materials
Speaker 1: are similar and a lot of them will interact specifically
Speaker 1: with electromagnetic radiation in very interesting ways. So if you
Speaker 1: look at electromagnetic radiation, if you were to to just
Speaker 1: be able to stop the whole universe and just look
Speaker 1: at a specific wave of electromagnetic radiation and be able
Speaker 1: to break that apart, conceptually, you'd be able to see
Speaker 1: that there are two major components of it, which are
Speaker 1: electric fields and magnetic fields. Um, there's also the vector,
Speaker 1: which is the wave's magnitude and direction. So all three
Speaker 1: of these things together determine how they interact with any
Speaker 1: given I reject exactly, and so conventional material usually only
Speaker 1: in acts with the electric fields. Usually there are some
Speaker 1: that interact with magnetic fields, but Generally speaking, the electric
Speaker 1: fields are what are interacting with conventional material Many materials
Speaker 1: can also interact with the magnetic fields, which increases the
Speaker 1: number of ways it can interact with any given electromagnetic radiation.
Speaker 1: Keep in mind, visible light is electromagnetic radiation. It's part
Speaker 1: of that spectrum. It's a very narrow part of that spectrum,
Speaker 1: which also includes things like ultraviolet light and infrared light,
Speaker 1: but also microwaves and radio waves. Um. So this is
Speaker 1: the stuff that would, at least in theory, if we
Speaker 1: were able to build the right kinds of structures, allow
Speaker 1: us to create an invisibility cloak for real zes or
Speaker 1: at least some sort of of physical object that light
Speaker 1: would bend around so you would not be able to
Speaker 1: see it. And right now we only have invisibility cloaks
Speaker 1: that bend microwaves around. The implementations tend to be very
Speaker 1: specific to very narrow bands in that spectrum, right and
Speaker 1: we'll talk about it. This has to do with the
Speaker 1: specific micro and nanostructures of these objects, which we'll get
Speaker 1: into in a moment um. But while we're talking about waves,
Speaker 1: electromagnetic waves are not the only ones that hypothetically these
Speaker 1: materials can interact with right, absolutely, anything that travels in
Speaker 1: wave form can in theory be uh something that interacts
Speaker 1: in a different way with a meta material. So seismic waves, earthquakes,
Speaker 1: that those it travels in waves, just like you know,
Speaker 1: it's hard for us to imagine in a way things
Speaker 1: like electromagnetic radiation because we can't directly see those waves. Um,
Speaker 1: we also can't well, I guess we can see earthquakes,
Speaker 1: or we can see the effective earthquakes, right, we can
Speaker 1: certainly feel them, certainly, So those those seismic waves that
Speaker 1: travel through the ground, you could in theory create a
Speaker 1: meta material that allows that stuff to just passed through
Speaker 1: it as if it weren't it wasn't there, and then
Speaker 1: imagine making a building out of that stuff. It wouldn't
Speaker 1: even sway when the earthquake moves through. The earthquake would
Speaker 1: just pass through it as if it weren't there. It
Speaker 1: would just redirect. Yeah, it's the same thing with sound waves.
Speaker 1: You could build I mean, I'm I'm picturing our sound
Speaker 1: studio right now without all of this albeit lovely foam
Speaker 1: that that Noll has put up on our walls. Instead
Speaker 1: of that, the walls themselves could just be made of
Speaker 1: a material that redirects the sound waves. They could either
Speaker 1: absorb it or because again it all depends upon the
Speaker 1: physical structure of the material itself. If you were able
Speaker 1: to do that, you could have a perfectly soundproofed room,
Speaker 1: so you would never have to worry about any sort
Speaker 1: of bleed out either going out of the room or
Speaker 1: coming into the room. And we would really like that
Speaker 1: because often we have to stop when there's a siren
Speaker 1: or a drag race or something going on outside, so
Speaker 1: that you guys, I mean, I'm sure a couple of
Speaker 1: them have snuck through anyway, but we try to limit
Speaker 1: them also at will. Waves like ocean waves, those are
Speaker 1: another form that I've seen. I've seen the Navy looking
Speaker 1: into a strategy where they would have a special meta
Speaker 1: material on the outside of the whole of ships to
Speaker 1: make them more efficient in moving through the water, exactly
Speaker 1: releasing all that drags so that you don't have to
Speaker 1: worry about that. It doesn't have to do as much
Speaker 1: work to move a huge vessel through the water because
Speaker 1: you have redirected the waves as if you're not there. Also,
Speaker 1: you could in theory, reduce the wake of a vehicle
Speaker 1: moving through the water, so that the ocean itself does
Speaker 1: not reveal the fact that an enormous like aircraft carrier
Speaker 1: just bustled through. You wouldn't have a wake, it would
Speaker 1: This to me is hard to imagine. It's hard for
Speaker 1: me to imagine. Yeah, going all, you know, Scutty said
Speaker 1: you cannot break the laws of physics, and I think
Speaker 1: I think it was a little shortsighted. Actually, I think
Speaker 1: mento materials kind of prove them wrong. But I mean,
Speaker 1: clearly we're still working within the laws of physics. It's
Speaker 1: just we're expanding our our knowledge of how they how
Speaker 1: they work. We're just tweaking them a little bit, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of you know, just a little thumb of the
Speaker 1: nose at the laws of physics. So, alright, what is
Speaker 1: actually going on here? How you know, we've talked about
Speaker 1: what they are and what they do in general, and
Speaker 1: we've talked about this structure issue. But let's let's get
Speaker 1: down into it. Yeah, So, if you were able to
Speaker 1: shrink down to a teeny tiny size and observe this
Speaker 1: material on the nano scale, what you would notice is
Speaker 1: that the actual physical structure of that material would be
Speaker 1: made up of repeated patterns. They would be kind of
Speaker 1: like a repeated scaffolding in a way. And think, again,
Speaker 1: this is on the nano scale. You to to us
Speaker 1: on the macro scale, it would just look like stuff.
Speaker 1: Whatever it happened to be made out of. We went
Speaker 1: notice that structure because it's far too too tiny for
Speaker 1: us to see. But you would see these repeated patterns,
Speaker 1: and those repeated patterns would be specific to whatever wave
Speaker 1: it was supposed to interact with. Because here's the thing.
Speaker 1: For meta materials to be effective, generally speaking, those structures
Speaker 1: need to be smaller than whatever the wavelength is of
Speaker 1: the whatever it's going to interact with. Right. This is
Speaker 1: why we've had better success with microwaves than anything else,
Speaker 1: because microwaves are very long wavelength as well, I mean
Speaker 1: compared to light. Absolutely. If for red's the same way
Speaker 1: and for red is a longer wavelength and say red, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you run into a building problem, just just a
Speaker 1: structural issue here. Exactly how do you build something tiny
Speaker 1: enough to interact with these very tiny wavelengths? Yeah, so
Speaker 1: in order for you to have something that would be
Speaker 1: able to shield an object from visible light, you would
Speaker 1: have to make uh structures with such precision that those
Speaker 1: repeating patterns would be just teeny teeny tiny, like yeah,
Speaker 1: as building blocks would have to be like no bigger
Speaker 1: than ten to twenty nanometers. Yeah, that's really super small.
Speaker 1: And we've managed to do that kind of thing with microprocessors,
Speaker 1: but we're talking about expanding that out potentially to a
Speaker 1: three dimensional object. Ultimately, when you're looking at microprocessors, you're
Speaker 1: really talking about two dimensions. You're talking about the height
Speaker 1: and the width. There's no real Yeah, it's to the
Speaker 1: point where you might as well say it's two dimensional.
Speaker 1: So when you're talking about three dimensional object and building
Speaker 1: that outward volumetrically, especially to cover say a car or yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, or an aircraft carrier or whatever. Obviously the
Speaker 1: military carrier whatever, the military applications for this are obvious, right,
Speaker 1: I mean any kind of cloaking device. So yeah, being
Speaker 1: able to manufacture that out in a way that it
Speaker 1: has a practical effect is an enormous undertaking. It's something
Speaker 1: that is, uh, we're years beyond that, like or no,
Speaker 1: that's years beyond us, I should say we we and
Speaker 1: it not close together. As my point, we're kind of
Speaker 1: shouting at each other exactly through the future exactly, so
Speaker 1: although we can't see them because when they're in the
Speaker 1: future in two they're invisible. But uh yeah, that's the
Speaker 1: thing is that you have to have these super super small,
Speaker 1: small small structures. And not only that, but visible light
Speaker 1: takes up a spectrum. You know, we say the visible spectrum,
Speaker 1: and you know the easy way of saying that as
Speaker 1: the Roy G. Biv Right, You've got from red on
Speaker 1: one end to violet on the other end, and that
Speaker 1: and everything in between. And that's what makes a visible
Speaker 1: light for us. Well, in order to be able to
Speaker 1: shield something from visible light, you would have to somehow
Speaker 1: engineer a meta material that would be effective for that
Speaker 1: entire range of those wavelengths. That's really tricky. It's one
Speaker 1: thing to design a meta material that works for a
Speaker 1: narrow range of wavelengths. That is, it's I hesitate to
Speaker 1: use the word easier. It's more realistic than effect creating
Speaker 1: a material that would be effective across an entire spectrum
Speaker 1: of wavelengths. So it may be that we never get
Speaker 1: to a point where, using meta materials we create a
Speaker 1: cloaking device that's effective for visible light. That doesn't mean
Speaker 1: we won't create cloaking devices. We may do it through
Speaker 1: a totally different technology, or we may have cloaking devices
Speaker 1: that are cloaking devices for specific wavelengths like microwaves, because
Speaker 1: radar uses microwaves. Right, So, a stealth bomber that has
Speaker 1: meta material surfaces which means that the radar waves will
Speaker 1: go straight through it and not bounce back, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: have to have those super funky uh the panels that
Speaker 1: are all at weird angles. Yeah, that whole episode right right.
Speaker 1: The surface of stealth bombers right now operate by redirecting
Speaker 1: those waves exactly. It's kind of like the idea of
Speaker 1: just uh, deflecting the wave to some other direction ap
Speaker 1: from the receiving station. Right. So, as long as the
Speaker 1: receiving station never gets the waves back, it doesn't know
Speaker 1: that there's an object. So you can you could go
Speaker 1: on and make those things more aerodynamic at that point, yeah,
Speaker 1: you could. You could completely redesign the self the weird
Speaker 1: bulky looking thing. Yeah, I mean sure they were ridiculously
Speaker 1: expensive and inefficient ultimately, but hey, they look cool. I
Speaker 1: also like the Deloreans, so same. I mean, Deloreans show
Speaker 1: up on radar like crazy, but that's that's that's another episode. Now,
Speaker 1: there are different types of meta materials. There's there are
Speaker 1: different ways of building meta materials to interact with various
Speaker 1: types of wave links. So I'm going to go ahead
Speaker 1: and preface this part of the podcast by saying, neither
Speaker 1: of us are physicists, and electromagnetic radiation is a difficult
Speaker 1: topic to wrap your head around when you haven't had
Speaker 1: that as as your continual background for say thirty years. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So if there are any physicists out there who cringe
Speaker 1: as we start to oversimplify what's happening, I apologize to you. Now.
Speaker 1: I am doing the best of my ability to explain
Speaker 1: what's going on. Yes, and if we get anything wrong,
Speaker 1: please do be gentle with us, but let us know, Yes,
Speaker 1: please do, because then we can always do a follow
Speaker 1: up and say, you know what, we were doing this
Speaker 1: based on our understanding, and as it turns out, our
Speaker 1: understanding was flawed, and here's how it really works. We
Speaker 1: appreciate that. Yes, please be gentle. Alright, So starting off,
Speaker 1: we have the electro magnetic band gap meta materials or
Speaker 1: also known as e b M meta materials or just
Speaker 1: a b M, because that's what the m stands for
Speaker 1: So these manipulate light propagation, and they are either made
Speaker 1: from left handed materials or photonic crystals left handed materials.
Speaker 1: That means they're more creative, it means they're sinister. So
Speaker 1: when you go to the old French being a left hander,
Speaker 1: I consider myself sinister. Now, left handedness and electromagnetic radiation
Speaker 1: is um a very particular thing and you've got to
Speaker 1: be careful on how you define it. So with electromagnetic radiation,
Speaker 1: like we said earlier, you've got the electric field, the
Speaker 1: magnetic field, and the wave vector, which is that magnitude
Speaker 1: and direction combo. Right, So you also have physical material.
Speaker 1: So any given physical material has a couple of different features,
Speaker 1: one called permitivity and one called permeability, and those are
Speaker 1: the ways in which it's going to interact with any
Speaker 1: given wavelength of electromagnetic radiation. Right, Yeah, Because your permitivity
Speaker 1: is how it interacts with electric fields. Your permeability is
Speaker 1: how it interacts with magnetic fields. And a positive number
Speaker 1: essentially says that it has this kind of interaction. But
Speaker 1: here's the thing you can actually have. You can create
Speaker 1: a material that has negative permitivity and negative permeability. You
Speaker 1: won't find it in the nature, or at least we
Speaker 1: haven't found anything in nature so far that has both
Speaker 1: negative permeability and permitivity simultaneously. We have made stuff that does,
Speaker 1: and that stuff is called left handed yes and h.
Speaker 1: So it's really interesting concept that you are able to
Speaker 1: create something that has this negative permitivity and permeability. What
Speaker 1: it ultimately means is that you could create a material
Speaker 1: that resists waves as they impact that material. So imagine
Speaker 1: creating a military vehicle out of this stuff and there's
Speaker 1: an electromagnetic burst. This thing would actually effectively the material
Speaker 1: itself would push back against that oncoming electromagnetic wave, leaving
Speaker 1: the vehicle fine. So you could imagine that being really
Speaker 1: effective for something like an electromagnetic pulse weapon that wipes
Speaker 1: out electronics. Otherwise, if you're if you have it shielded
Speaker 1: with this stuff, it's like the ultimate Faraday cage. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like a field almost, but it's because of again
Speaker 1: the physical structure of the structure of the material. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's no energy thing going on here. It has
Speaker 1: nothing to do like you don't have to turn off,
Speaker 1: switch off exactly. It's just the way the stuff is
Speaker 1: physically built. It's it's unbelievable to me. It's amazing to
Speaker 1: me that just by uh, specifically designing the structure, you
Speaker 1: can dictate how electromagnetic radiation is going to interact with something.
Speaker 1: And now there's also single negative meta materials, which would
Speaker 1: have one of those two things, primitivity or permeability, be negative,
Speaker 1: but the other one would be positive. Then you have
Speaker 1: natural materials that have like the double positive, which means
Speaker 1: the permitivity and permit permeability are both positive. You can
Speaker 1: make meta materials that have that same stuff. Uh, I mean,
Speaker 1: it all depends on what you want the meta material
Speaker 1: to do obviously. Uh. Then there are others that get
Speaker 1: restively more difficult for me to describe. So I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna try because I know at that point I would
Speaker 1: just be giving misinformation. But uh, that's the basic ideas,
Speaker 1: the the idea of interacting with either the electric field
Speaker 1: or the magnetic field or both in a way that's
Speaker 1: different from your general natural materials out there. So this
Speaker 1: all sounds like incredible science fiction technology to me. This
Speaker 1: is all probably really recent research, right, Well, how about
Speaker 1: late nineteenth century is that still recent? I mean, overall
Speaker 1: from a geological time scale, it's like no time at
Speaker 1: all has passed, but for for humans. Yeah, this this
Speaker 1: is actually the whole concept is built upon observations that
Speaker 1: were starting to come out of the scientific world in
Speaker 1: the late nineteenth century. Back in a scientist named Jagaudie
Speaker 1: chunder Bows experimented with microwaves and twisted structures that today
Speaker 1: we would call artificial chirals. Chiral, by the way, is
Speaker 1: essentially an asymmetric shape. It's one that if you were
Speaker 1: to superimpose a reverse of its image, it would not
Speaker 1: fit onto itself. Um. He found that by introducing randomly
Speaker 1: oriented wire helisses as in the plural of helix uh
Speaker 1: in a host medium, he could create a microwave lens. Essentially,
Speaker 1: he was bombarding stuff with microwaves and he had these
Speaker 1: little wire helix structures embedded into that material, and then
Speaker 1: he would move the little helix helis sees around, changing
Speaker 1: their orientation, changing their their layout, and he discovered that
Speaker 1: that was changing the the effect of those microwaves. He
Speaker 1: could focus it exactly, so he's like, huh, something to
Speaker 1: do with the physical structure is affecting the way the
Speaker 1: microwaves are behaving with this material, and that was the
Speaker 1: very beginning. Some say, because there are people who argue
Speaker 1: about whether or not this is in fact the origin.
Speaker 1: But by the nineteen sixties you had scientists hypothesizing that
Speaker 1: if we were in fact able to build stuff with
Speaker 1: incredible nano precision, we could do so and make it
Speaker 1: so that it behaves in a specific way when introduced
Speaker 1: to electromagnetic radiation. There wasn't any way we could actually
Speaker 1: do it at that time. Yeah, we wouldn't actually get
Speaker 1: into that kind of production technology until the nineteen nineties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And in fact, really it wasn't until the two thousands
Speaker 1: that you started seeing the first real forays into the
Speaker 1: microwave world, where we were trying to uh specifically create
Speaker 1: a meta material that would allow microwaves to pass straight
Speaker 1: through it as if nothing were there at all, and
Speaker 1: kind of around it. But yeah, kind of around it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: When I say through it, over it, I guess technically, yeah,
Speaker 1: imagine that the light like think of it almost like water,
Speaker 1: you know how water. If you put a stone in
Speaker 1: an in flowing water, the water will just flow around
Speaker 1: the stone and then continue on as if nothing were there.
Speaker 1: It's the same sort of things. In this case, we're
Speaker 1: talking about light. It actually bends around the object and
Speaker 1: then continues on not to us, it's as if light
Speaker 1: is just passing straight through it, right, That's that's an
Speaker 1: optical illusion. So if we were able to see in microwaves,
Speaker 1: we would not see that object. It would just be
Speaker 1: as if there was nothing there at all. So that was,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of the beginning of it. But as
Speaker 1: far as where we are now, we're really seeing lots
Speaker 1: of effort going into making this technology more sophisticated. Uh,
Speaker 1: And we're able to create much more precise meta materials
Speaker 1: than we ever have been before. Oh yeah, A lot
Speaker 1: of that has to do with three D printing. Talk
Speaker 1: about that a lot on this show. We do. Uh.
Speaker 1: For example, that microwave invisibility click that we were that
Speaker 1: we've been talking about involved printing wires and patterns on
Speaker 1: too circuit boards in order to create this this shield. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's pretty cool. So this whole microwave shield thing, it's
Speaker 1: obviously the best example because those are the ones that
Speaker 1: have had the most experimentation, the than the greatest success
Speaker 1: rate so far. Again, it tends to be narrow bands
Speaker 1: of the spectrum. It's not like it will affect every
Speaker 1: wave length, but it has shown that this could be
Speaker 1: possibly used for stealth technology, like or if you want
Speaker 1: to turn it on its head, you could actually make
Speaker 1: more effective antennas using meta materials. Right, instead of it
Speaker 1: being something that that the waves passed through, it could
Speaker 1: be something that is channeling those waves more effectively, either
Speaker 1: to transmit or to receive, whether it's microwaves or whatever.
Speaker 1: In fact, I've even seen talk about optical antenna's, So
Speaker 1: it would be something in the light range, not necessarily
Speaker 1: visible light, but in the light range that would be
Speaker 1: really effective at transmitting and receiving because the meta materials
Speaker 1: themselves were channel ling that radiation in a more effective
Speaker 1: manner um. Again, we're getting to a point now where
Speaker 1: I'm like, I understand the application, Understanding the mechanism is
Speaker 1: getting more and more complex. And then there's the idea
Speaker 1: of creating like an amazing microscope or telescope using meta
Speaker 1: materials to create super lenses. So here's here's the thing.
Speaker 1: When we talk about the nanoscale, and we talked about
Speaker 1: not being able to see something with an optical microscope,
Speaker 1: the main reason we talk about that is that you're
Speaker 1: talking about trying to look at things that are on
Speaker 1: a scale that's smaller than a light wavelength. So here's
Speaker 1: the weird part in theory. You could use meta materials
Speaker 1: that have a negative refraction index refraction. When when you're
Speaker 1: talking about lenses, there's a thing called the diffraction limit,
Speaker 1: and it's one of those things that like, the better
Speaker 1: or lenses, the less problem you have with diffraction, but
Speaker 1: ultimately you're going to run into it at some point
Speaker 1: or another. The menty materials can start to make that
Speaker 1: less and less of a factor. So as you have
Speaker 1: this negative refraction index, which would allow you to look
Speaker 1: at stuff that normally would be too small for you
Speaker 1: to see whether that is a distant star. So you're
Speaker 1: talking about a telescope in that case, or something on
Speaker 1: the nanoscale, so you're talking about a microscope on that case.
Speaker 1: And the the idea here is that, Okay, lenses focus
Speaker 1: light by bending it right, UM, and the refraction index
Speaker 1: measures how much a given material will bend the light
Speaker 1: passing through it. Uh, you know, the way that an
Speaker 1: object will look different when you view it through water
Speaker 1: or through a wine glass or something like that. UM
Speaker 1: and a negative refractive index means that the material is
Speaker 1: bending light the wrong way, which could allow for this
Speaker 1: very precise fine focus. Um, but it kind of goes
Speaker 1: against just again your common sense of how things work, right,
Speaker 1: because you're saying, oh, well, this just does it the
Speaker 1: opposite way. But but that's that's the thing at all.
Speaker 1: That's like saying if I jumped into water, I would
Speaker 1: get more dry. Like it's something that goes so against
Speaker 1: what are common experiences. It's hard, at least for me
Speaker 1: to imagine it. It's difficult for me to have a
Speaker 1: concept of how that works. But it does. But it does,
Speaker 1: and it could be useful for a number of technologies
Speaker 1: because a number of technologies in fact, to use optics,
Speaker 1: how about fiber optic cables or optical discs like DVDs.
Speaker 1: H that this kind of research could lead to huge
Speaker 1: improvements in a DVD's data capacity or in fiber optic
Speaker 1: cable transmission speed or power consumption. So one of the
Speaker 1: things that I talked about on a forward Thinking episode
Speaker 1: an upcoming forward thinking episode spoiler alert, folks, is the
Speaker 1: whole field of photonics. The idea of creating electronic components
Speaker 1: that are based on light rather than on electricity. So
Speaker 1: the thing about photonics is that they tend that they're
Speaker 1: incredibly fast, Like you can move a lot of data
Speaker 1: at the speed of light. So when I say fast,
Speaker 1: I'm not just talking about transmission speed, because really we're
Speaker 1: talking at this point transmission speeds that are close to
Speaker 1: the speed of light. I'm talking about how much information
Speaker 1: you can move through that channel at once. So throughput
Speaker 1: is probably a better word than speed. But the problem is,
Speaker 1: especially when you get into things like quantum computers, you're
Speaker 1: limited by how far you can you can extend these systems.
Speaker 1: You would not be able to create at this moment
Speaker 1: with our technology right now, a an internet based on
Speaker 1: quantum computers. It wouldn't reach far enough for you to
Speaker 1: be able to do that. I think thirty kilometers is
Speaker 1: about the limit that you can get. And while we
Speaker 1: could in theory build out a network that has a
Speaker 1: density for that, when you're getting to places that are
Speaker 1: you know, further out, Yeah, it's make working from Antarctica
Speaker 1: really difficult, right but by using meta materials and improving
Speaker 1: fiber optic technology, we might be able to address some
Speaker 1: of those issues and be able to extend that kind
Speaker 1: of of utility. Further, so then we are able to
Speaker 1: have these massive nate you know, networks of fiber optics
Speaker 1: that don't have any data loss issues or at least
Speaker 1: fewer data loss issues, and be able to put everyone
Speaker 1: on this incredible speed, and then we don't have to
Speaker 1: worry about the whole net neutrality thing anymore. I'm dreaming,
Speaker 1: I know, but still it's pretty cool. It's a beautiful dream.
Speaker 1: And besides fiber optics and DVDs, we could also see
Speaker 1: this helping improve technologies like ultrasonic technologies, anything that again
Speaker 1: involves waves, so sound ultrasonic obviously the whole sound profing idea,
Speaker 1: who stick shielding that kind of thing. Also, uh, you
Speaker 1: know solar panels again you want to redirect that light.
Speaker 1: So these are really cool potential applications of meta materials,
Speaker 1: assuming that we get to a point where we can
Speaker 1: produce them. Yeah, right, um, they could be the next
Speaker 1: evolution of ultra light objects. We were just talking about
Speaker 1: that in our camping episode. I mean, although this would
Speaker 1: probably be a little bit of the price point of
Speaker 1: many people are looking for hobbyist camping for a mere
Speaker 1: three million dollars. Uh m, I t and the Lawrence
Speaker 1: Livermore National Laboratory are working on three D printing stuff
Speaker 1: that has super low density and super high stiffness and strength. Um.
Speaker 1: For example, they can print these tiny lattices of polymers
Speaker 1: and then coat those lattices with thin films of metal materials,
Speaker 1: metal or ceramics or something like that, and then melt
Speaker 1: out the original polymer, leaving these little, tiny, bitty hollow
Speaker 1: tubes with walls you know, only like fifty to animeters thick,
Speaker 1: that are incredibly strong, like able to bear loads that
Speaker 1: are at least a hundred and sixty thousand times their
Speaker 1: own weight. Again, hard to conceive, It's hard for me
Speaker 1: to imagine. Meanwhile, scientists at the University of Southampton have
Speaker 1: been working with materials that will adhere to a surface
Speaker 1: when that material is exposed to light. What. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: imagine that you've got a wall, maybe it's made out
Speaker 1: usually you're talking about a dielectric wall, so something that
Speaker 1: can conduct electricity. So like, let's say that it's a
Speaker 1: stainless steel wall or some sort um, and you put
Speaker 1: this thing whatever it happens to be against that wall,
Speaker 1: and as long as it is being stimulated by light,
Speaker 1: it sticks there, and if you were to take away
Speaker 1: the light source, it would no longer stick there. And
Speaker 1: it's because it's a meta material that has these little
Speaker 1: vibrating electrons sites that would interact with electrons that are
Speaker 1: on the surface of the wall. It's health so it's
Speaker 1: an electron electron interaction that doesn't involve repulsion. And that's
Speaker 1: as much as I can tell you, folks, because I mean,
Speaker 1: once I started looking into it more, I was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have to take a full course in physics
Speaker 1: for me to really understand what's going on on a
Speaker 1: physical level. But the cool part is that this could
Speaker 1: potentially become a new way of developing brand new technologies
Speaker 1: that we can't even really conceive right now. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: kind of a new fundamental force. Yeah, it's essentially the
Speaker 1: discovering that wait a minute, there's something else that that
Speaker 1: can happen with under these specific circumstances that we didn't
Speaker 1: know about, and it is a fundamental force, which is incredible.
Speaker 1: I mean it, this is an amazing scientific discovery. So
Speaker 1: even if there's never like a practical application, just knowing
Speaker 1: that this is another way that our universe works is
Speaker 1: a valuable lesson. Oh of course. Um. Meanwhile, over at
Speaker 1: the University of Texas at Austin, they've been working on
Speaker 1: creating these meta material mirrors that are only foim, they're
Speaker 1: thick that can double the frequency of infrared radiation that
Speaker 1: hits it. Okay, So if the incoming radiation has just,
Speaker 1: for example, a wavelength of eight micrometers um, the outgoing
Speaker 1: reflection will have a wavelength of for micrometers um, which
Speaker 1: is a pretty awesome feature. But the researchers are also
Speaker 1: saying that they can possibly fine tune the structure to
Speaker 1: adjust the reflection to other desired wavelengths um. The mirror
Speaker 1: is made of a bunch of wacky stuff, including indium, gallium, arsenic, aluminum,
Speaker 1: and gold. But that's a little bit beside the point
Speaker 1: I just found. I was like, arsenic is in there.
Speaker 1: That's cool, and how I deal with That's what? That all? Right? Um?
Speaker 1: But but so you know, being able to convert the
Speaker 1: frequency of wavelengths at will would be incredibly awesome for
Speaker 1: a bunch of different optical purposes, like miniaturizing laser systems
Speaker 1: or improving optic space sensory tech. Yeah. Yeah, In fact,
Speaker 1: I've I've seen a lot about meta materials used to
Speaker 1: help create these manature laser systems, and you might think, well,
Speaker 1: what's that good for. We'll go back to that photonics
Speaker 1: discussion we had just a moment ago that would be necessary.
Speaker 1: If you want to have a microchip that is working
Speaker 1: under photonics and not just electricity, then you have to
Speaker 1: have these lasers that generate the light and by manatorizing it,
Speaker 1: that's what makes it possible. Otherwise, you know your components
Speaker 1: are going to be larger, which means your devices have
Speaker 1: to be larger in order to take advantage of that
Speaker 1: photonics technology. So this is really promising. Then you have
Speaker 1: this This was again one of those things where I
Speaker 1: read it and I thought, what some folks at Northwestern University,
Speaker 1: some scientists have been working on a material that would
Speaker 1: act the opposite way you would expect it to based
Speaker 1: upon our experience with the world around us. So imagine
Speaker 1: you've got a cushion, and when you sit on that cushion,
Speaker 1: instead of sinking down into the cushion as you would
Speaker 1: with any normal cushion, the cushion pushes back against you
Speaker 1: and actually rises up. Or imagine that you've got some
Speaker 1: sort of silly putty. But instead of when you pull
Speaker 1: on the silly putty and it stretches way out, it
Speaker 1: starts to compress as you pull on it. In other words,
Speaker 1: it sounds like we're talking about Harry Potter again. It
Speaker 1: is physically behaving the opposite of what it should if
Speaker 1: it were just a decent, law abiding material. And here's
Speaker 1: the crazy thing is that they're scientists who are working
Speaker 1: on creating material that does this stuff. Essentially, when you
Speaker 1: when you pull it, it compresses and when you compress
Speaker 1: it it expands. And they said that the way they
Speaker 1: did it because normally, if you made a material like
Speaker 1: this that could do this, it would be very unstable
Speaker 1: and it would collapse in on a more stable, uh structure.
Speaker 1: That what they did was they started by creating a
Speaker 1: stable structure that already did this, so when it collapses,
Speaker 1: it's collapsing into the the base form of this so
Speaker 1: that when you pull on it, it compresses. And uh.
Speaker 1: They explained the concept because again they're they're working on this.
Speaker 1: It's not like they have big old piles of this
Speaker 1: flubber like stuff out there. They're working on it, and
Speaker 1: it's very much in the hypothetical phase. They described it
Speaker 1: by by describing, uh, four atoms that are in a
Speaker 1: horizontal line and uh, and trying to pull those atoms
Speaker 1: apart would would cause them to compress closer together. That
Speaker 1: illustration didn't help me at all. But that's not due
Speaker 1: to them. That's because I'm dense. So I'm not blaming
Speaker 1: it on you, Northwestern University. I'm blaming it upon my
Speaker 1: own limitations. But I think, what again, just by making
Speaker 1: this material a specific structure, it has these very different properties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that part of this is so hard to
Speaker 1: wrap our minds around because it's i mean, not only
Speaker 1: is it breaking the laws of physics kind of sort
Speaker 1: of um, but also because it's also new. Um that
Speaker 1: there was a market research company called BCC Research that
Speaker 1: just this year estimated that the global market for mety
Speaker 1: materials is going to expand from like two eighty nine
Speaker 1: million dollars in to some one point two billion by nineteen.
Speaker 1: So because the future is bright, it's hypothetically picking up
Speaker 1: and it's it's the future is not just bright, it's invisible.
Speaker 1: But but to be to be fair, to be fair,
Speaker 1: this this proves, like you say, two million dollars, which,
Speaker 1: don't get us wrong, that's a lot of money. We're
Speaker 1: not saying it's a little money. If you think it's
Speaker 1: a little money, give us two million dollars. But it's
Speaker 1: a drop in the bucket compared to other industries. It's
Speaker 1: really proving that mety materials are in their infancy. So yeah,
Speaker 1: well it's it's incredible to think of the sort of
Speaker 1: applications that could potentially come out of this. I mean,
Speaker 1: imagine a city that's earthquake proof. That or a bridge
Speaker 1: that really is earthquake proof that the earth is shaking
Speaker 1: around it and the bridge is just fine. That's it's
Speaker 1: it's it blows my mind. It's incredible. I would like
Speaker 1: that future. It would be an awesome future, be fantastic.
Speaker 1: So we're really excited to see where meta materials go.
Speaker 1: We're really excited that again, this is properties that are
Speaker 1: just based upon the physical structure of that material, has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with like, hey, we we managed to
Speaker 1: make this new you know, stuff that is really unstable
Speaker 1: and decays almost immediately. So that's unfortunate, but look at
Speaker 1: the cool thing it does for the split second it exists.
Speaker 1: That's not what we're talking about. This is stuff that
Speaker 1: has permanency because again it's just the physical structure at
Speaker 1: that nano level that gives it that ability. Wow. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: now that we have melted our brains and hopefully stimulated
Speaker 1: your brains, I would like to invite all of you
Speaker 1: guys to suggest any topics you might want to hear
Speaker 1: about in the future. Maybe you said that was really interesting,
Speaker 1: Can we talk about something like really simple? Now? Maybe
Speaker 1: maybe the technology often Kitten's kitten technology. Obviously that would
Speaker 1: involve a deep discussion about YouTube. Just let us know
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Speaker 1: maybe we have covered something but perhaps are limited explanations.
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