5 Amazing New Discoveries About Light

You might think that after centuries of studying light, we know pretty much everything about it. It’s true we’ve had breakthrough after breakthrough in using it, from illumination to communication, from examining the micro- and macro-universes to scanning our own bodies. We understand that light is an electromagnetic wave, thanks to James Clerk Maxwell, whose equations established that in 1865; and that it also appears as quantum packets of electromagnetic energy called photons, as Albert Einstein recognized in 1905. But the more we look into light, the more we see and the more we learn. The classical view of light as a wave still produces new science as light waves interact with artificial “metamaterials”; and we are still exploring light as a quantum particle. Both approaches provide ways to manipulate light that were once only science fiction. Here are five recent marvels.

1.  Bending Light for Invisibility

The magical invisibility rings andwhere hostile Romulan spacecraft conceal themselves with a cloaking device. This uses an idea from relativity, that strongly distorted spacetime makes light curve around the spacecraft as if it didn’t exist.