Cloaking Devices and Metamaterials

Yeah - it's always that old "trying to get your crazy ideas to work in real life" thing that hinders so much great research.

I've only had a few moments to read your first paper. It has so many pages and odd that you published to a website rather than any journal. You also mention Einstein and Hawking a lot, that's never a good sign.

However, from the little bit I've read of that introductory paper, I can't find anything to point to and say "this guy is crazy". So help me out here. Why are these papers so long. And why have you not tried to publish to peer reviewed journal? Help me understand so I can at least feel like I'm not wasting time if I spend hours reading your papers. I'm looking for a little reassurance here. I'm willing to give your ideas a chance if I can have some reasonable reassurance from you.

Not me - I'm calling him crazy right out of the gate.

I'd like to, certainly the approach seems to indicate it, the problem is that a brief read of the physics makes me uncertain. I would have to spend hours to figure out if the physics is crazy or not and I don't have time at the moment.

As a general principle I usually go with "sane until proven insane" and I simply can't prove to myself that this guy is insane right now. I'd really like to hear from him.

"Help me understand so I can at least feel like I'm not wasting time if I spend hours reading your papers."

Might want to back that up with a 6-pack in the icebox..

excuse me, my understanding of metamaterials is pretty basic but I think you are very mistaken if you think that a (portion of) a metamaterial cloak can be turned into a window by flipping a switch.

I'm personally more interested in the materials characteristics than the math, so this is my perspective on the subject. These are very dense 3 dimensional structures intricately patterned on a fine scale. There is nothing about these structures that suggests they could be made transparent by running electricity through it (re "flipping a switch"). The cloaking effects are due to inductance and capacitance in the conductive elements of the structure: there are no circuits involved. Wherefore, then, a switch?

Without checking the references, I seem to recall some recent work exploring the possibility of "seeing" out through the cloak involved a displacement of the cloaking effect so that the "viewer" in question is cloaked but still able to "see", only because not actually physically behind the cloak.