An invisibility cloak? You might just be able to see it on the horizon…

The best books by good writers — and Philip Ball is a very good writer indeed — are sometimes the ones that don’t quite work. This brilliant study of how occultists and scientists alike have attempted to see the invisible is very much that kind of fascinating failure.

Its subject is just too large — and, well, it is just too hard to see its edges clearly. Ball begins with pseudo-medieval recipes for invisibility:

Take a black cat and a new pot, a mirror, a lighter, coal and tinder. Gather water from a fountain at the strike of midnight… put the boiled cat on a new dish… then put the bones one by one under the teeth on the left side, while looking at yourself in the mirror…

Most popular

Ed West

Trump is going to give us a thousand years of woke

He concludes with astounding scientific visions: ‘One can also imagine building a metamaterial structure that, rather than sealing off a part of space from light, will open up a hole, in effect linking one region in space to another.’ And in between, he covers Descartes’ interest in Rosicrucianism, David Garrick’s fright wig, Victorian spiritualist photography, the X-ray craze of the late 1890s, The Invisible Man, Robert Hooke’s microscopy and how the French navy painted its first world war fleet in crazy black and white stripes — well, it worked for zebras.

Ball does trace a line through this material, however, and while it is often wayward it also fizzes at times like a high-voltage power cable. His contention, broadly, is that invisibility has long lured greater (and, frequently, lesser) minds into richly speculative thought — and that the oldest ideas about occult forces persist in the newest experiments of physical science. When Newton speculated that some unseen force held the planets in their places, for instance, he wondered if it was carried in some sort of ethereal, invisible, occult cosmic fluid.