Azrael: The Angel of Death
“That night the angel of the LORD went out and put to death one hundred eighty-five thousand men."
The Science of the Multiverse:
In 1884, an English clergyman, Edwin Abbott Abbott published a scientific fantasy entitled, Flatland. I read it in high school and was charmed by the world consisting of a Euclidian plane in which two-dimensional beings lived. Their world was like a vast sheet of paper on which straight lines, triangles, squares, pentagons, and other geometric figures moved about from side to side on the surface of the plane, but without the knowledge of up or down.
However, one day, the main character, A. Square, had what could be called a close encounter of the third kind: he met a stranger who called himself a sphere. Because A. Square was confined to a two dimensional plane, he did not perceive the stranger as a three dimensional sphere, but rather as a circle, that portion of the sphere that bisected the plane of his world. This concept is illustrated above in part 1 of the figure. Shown is a blue circle living in a planar world as a sphere intersects his world. The sphere appears as a curved line to the blue circle since he has no perception of up or down.
The stranger's explanation of the existence of multiple dimensions started with a geometric point, which technically is infinitely small and has no dimensions. However, placing two points together defines a single dimension, length, or a line. Laying several lines next to each other creates a two-dimensional plane. Stacking several planes on top of each other creates a three dimensional cube.
Now comes the hard-to-conceptualize part. Stack several three dimensional objects in an unknown fashion, and you get a fouth dimension, and so on. The fourth dimension is generally considered to be time.
The Multiverse concept leads to some interesting possibilites, this time illustrated in part 2 of the figure above. Imagine you're the yellow square, B, facing the blue circle, A, in this planar world. Now, the sphere comes along and moves the blue circle, A, up into three dimensional space. To you, it would appear as though the blue circle had disappeared into thin air. Next, the sphere deposits the blue circle back onto the plane, but behind you. To your surprise, the circle would seem to miraculously reappear.
Applying this to the concept of Multiverse time, as illustrated in part 3, we want to change the color of the yellow ball, however it takes several weeks to do so. But, if the ball is moved into the multiverse where time really has no meaning, we can change its color and take as long as we like. When finished, the ball can be moved back to a the 3-dimensional time frame and barely microseconds will have passed due to the fluidity of time outside of three dimensions.
H.G. Wells borrowed this concept in his story of the Time Machine. When the time traveler moved forward in time, he still occupied the same space, but in a different time. Because of this, he seemed to disappear. It is difficult for our three dimensional minds to grasp the concept of multiple dimensions. But since the Multiverse consists of infinite dimentions, time would be fluid. Thus, Liam could pluck a character from a disaster in which everyone ended up dying, take the character to the Multiverse to heal, and place them back just after the time of the disaster in the human dimension. The diaster will have affected the others left behind, but the person taken into the Multiverse would be unharmed.
Mind boggling but fun to imagine.
Liquid Body Armor:
When the police or military think of body armor, bulky, hard, and heavy come to mind. But not for long. Rheologists, who study the flow of material, have developed a new gooey liquid, which turns normal fabric into stab-proof, bullet-proof material after only one coat. A normal Kevlar vest consists of 30 to 40 layers of tightly packed Kevlar fabric. But liquid body armor is considerably lighter and more flexible. It's the equivalent of wearing a wet suit.
The key component of liquid body armor is a shear-thickening fluid or STF, composed of hard particles suspended in a thick liquid. The non-toxic liquid, polyethylene glycol, can withstand a wide range of temperatures. The other components of STF are hard nano-particles of silica.
Normally, the material is very flexible, but once a bullet or a piece of shrapnel hits the STF-coated fabric, it becomes rigid, preventing anything from penetrating the soldier's body. For example, an ice pick will go right through untreated fabric. But the tiny hard particles in the liquid body armor-coated fabric cluster and jam together when struck by a projectile, blocking its penetration. This means it will not only stop a bullet, but also a knife thrust, whereas the joints of Kevlar-based armor make the wearer vulnerable to a stab wound.
The improved body armor can also be incorporated into pants and sleeves, areas that can't be covered by Kevlar armor. For more information, contact:
Norman Wagner, Ph.D.
Chemical Engineer
University of Delaware
wagner@che.udel.edu
THE SCIENCE OF METAMATERIAL:
Probably everyone has fantasized about what it would be like to have an invisibility cloak like Harry Potter. Well, the idea may not be so far fetched. The most promising development involving invisibility is an exotic class of material called "metamaterial," and which one day may render objects invisible. In 2006, researchers at Duke University and the Imperial College of London successfully used metamaterials to make an object invisible to microwave radiation, defying the conventional wisdom of Physics. An example of a metamaterial coat is shown below.
What are metamaterials? They are substances not found in nature and are created by embedding tiny implants in a material such that they force electromagnetic radiation or light to bend in unorthodox ways. The metamaterial created by the scientists at Duke University were composed of a mixture of ceramic, Teflon, fiber composites, and metal components. The effect of the metamaterial is analogous to a fast moving stream with a boulder at its center. The flowing water is forced around the boulder to meet again on the other side. Downstream, there is no evidence that the boulder even exists. Similarly, metamaterial can bend light waves around an object making the object inside the metamaterial invisible.
The key to metamaterial is its ability to manipulate the refractive index of light. Refraction is the bending of light as it moves through a transparent medium. If you've ever put your hand in a pool of water, you may have noticed that your hand appeared to bend and distort. The position of your hand that you saw through the water was not, in fact, where your hand was. Similarly, the apparent position of a fish in a pond is shifted from its actual location, something a spear fisherman must learn to correct for if he is not to go hungry.
The reason the light refracts or bends is that the speed of light slows down when it enters a dense transparent medium. In a pure vacuum, like space, the speed of light remains constant. But light traveling through water, glass, or some other transparent medium must pass through trillions of atoms, which slows it down. The refractive index of a substance is the speed of light in a vacuum divided by the speed of light in the substance. Thus, since light slows down in any substance compared to its speed in a vacuum, the refractive index is always greater than 1.0. For example, the refractive index of of air is 1.03 and for glass, 1.5.
Usually the refractive index of a substance is a constant. A beam of light entering a piece of glass is bent at a constant angle and then continues in a straight line. But imagine, for a minute, that you could control the refractive index at will, so that it could change at every point in the material. You could theoretically cause the light to bend around an object inside the material, rendering the object invisible. To achieve this, however, the metamaterial must have a refractive index less than one, which conventional physics says is impossible. Yet though metamaterials seem preposterous, and were once thought impossible to construct, they have now been manufactured.
One flaw in achieving total invisibility is that someone inside the cloak would not be able to see out without having his/her eyes become visible. In the world of Liam Michaels, that is exactly what I have done. You'll note that anyone viewing Liam or anyone wearing the metamaterial suits is confronted by a pair of eyes staring back at them. Furthermore, although a true Harry Potteresque invisibility cloak is within the laws of physics, there are some formidable hurdles. The problem is making structures incorporating metamaterials that bend light of a wide range of wavelengths in three dimensions. Current metamaterials bend light of a narrow set of wavelengths and in only a single dimension. There is considerable money being poured into developing this technology, most of it for military applications. Thus, in spite of the challenges, many physicists feel tha total invisibility technology will be available within the next two decades...unless, of course, you're an angel with somewhat greater resources.
