Beyond Science Fiction: The Physics of Invisibility

Sir John Pendry, the physicist who proposed the idea of an "invisibility cloak," is a professor of theoretical solid state physics at Imperial College London. Pendry has made seminal contributions to surface science, disordered systems and photonics, but his work on cloaking and metamaterials is arguably his most famous and potentially transformative. His concept for an "invisibility cloak" uses metamaterials - whose properties are not defined by their chemical makeup but rather by their structure on the tiniest scales - to bend light in such a way that it can form a container around an object and effectively make it invisible. Pendry is a recipient of such distinguished awards as the Newton Medal, Descartes Prize, and the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience. The 2016 Zaffarano Lecture in Physics