Other Questions, Please...

John Pendry wishes J.K Rowling had written about superlenses.
Photo by Cirone-Musi/Festival della Scienza/Flickr Creative Common

John Pendry is a physicist at Imperial College London who laid the theoretical foundations for the invisibility cloak and superlenses capable of producing the sharpest ever images. He talks about the profound physics obscured by his invisibility cloak and how metamaterials could help realize the perfect lens.

John Pendry: It's when I give talks, particularly popular ones. Of all the things I am interested in, I am always asked about invisibility cloaks. I think, "Oh God, not another invisibility cloak lecture." I still enjoy giving them, but there are many other things I'm working on that are more profound; they just don't have that fertile soil which J. K. Rowling prepared for us.

VJ: What topics do you wish were better-known?

JP: The concept of a perfect lens is profound. A lens is a complicated thing that takes every point in an object and reconstructs it in the image—with no loss of detail in the case of a perfect lens.

It is ironically, National Nothing Day (some science teachers hate me right now).

New Scientist/Slate: The Physics Hidden by the Invisibility Cloak