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…
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.’
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