The lecture hall at UC San Diego’s Price Center was full Wednesday with an audience eager to hear about devices that can bend light and sound waves to change what we can see and hear — and perhaps even make things invisible.
It sounds like magic, but it's physics. The presenter was physicist John Pendry from Imperial College in London, and the devices are called metamaterials.
“It’s a paradigm in terms of being a new way to think about how to control waves, whatever type of wave that might be,” said Richard Averett, a physics professor at UCSD. “So conceptually there are so many applications, and that’s one of the exciting things about metamaterials.”
The person Averett came to hear, Pendry, is a Kyoto Prize Laureate. The prizes are awarded every year by the Inamori Foundation in Kyoto, Japan.
The Kyoto Prize was founded by the late scientist and businessman Kazuo Inamori, who had a very strong connection to San Diego. He started the Kyocera Corporation, whose North American headquarters are in San Diego.
He was once the chairman of Japan Airlines, and in the late '90s, he became a Zen Buddhist priest.
The San Diego symposium is hosted by Point Loma Nazarene University and UC San Diego. Point Loma journalism professor Dean Nelson said the awards recognize achievement and a commitment to humanity.
“Dr. Inamori had this very spiritual side to him, as well as being a scientist, that said anything we do — any new discovery — needs to actually elevate the human soul and the human experience,” Nelson said.
John Pendry’s theory of manipulating rays of light starts with the fact that light in space can be bent and redirected, just as space itself is bent by gravitational forces. Scientists have created devices that can bend rays of certain frequencies.
Theoretically, one could use this to make light rays circumvent an object.
“And then you’ve got to send the light in the same direction it was going before. So it’s like a skier going around a tree,” Pendry said.
The device is called a cloak, a term borrowed from Harry Potter novels. But could you actually bend waves of visible light to make something invisible?
“People have done it with radar frequencies quite successfully," Pendry said. "The idea of invisibility — I may have mentioned in my talk — it is to say to people, ‘Look, this is very, very difficult.’ It’s not a problem you give to a PhD student."
David Smith — now a physics professor at Duke University — was a PhD student and postdoc at UC San Diego when he encountered Pendry’s work. He is the physicist who successfully bent radar waves to prove Pendry’s concept.
He said his lab has spun off several companies that are engineering cloaks to manipulate the waves that travel through air and space.
“All of our sensors. All of our devices. Everything we do involves waves at some level. So the better you can control waves, you have access to — not just science, but technology and real-world applications,” Smith said.
And that is something that can elevate humanity. At least that’s the view of the Kyoto Foundation.
As for really making things invisible, graduating senior Francisco Perez, from High Tech High Chula Vista attended Pendry’s speech and declared himself an optimist.
“Definitely in 50 years, with all the research that goes in, and the commitment, I see it happening,” he said.
This year’s other Kyoto Laureates are geologist Paul Hoffman of Victoria University in Canada, who won the category of Basic Sciences, and choreographer William Forsythe, who worked with ballet companies in Germany and joined the faculty of USC, winning the Arts and Philosophy category.
