The Easter holiday rush is receding into distant memory. The only thing airport security personnel have to worry about is what happens when everyone starts arriving for the Olympics. That, and the helpful physicists who have worked out how to smuggle a gun through a metal detector.
It all started as a bit of harmless blue-sky thinking. In the late 1960s, a Russian physicist pointed out the fun you could have if you invented a material that bends light in the opposite direction to normal. You could use it as an invisibility cloak, he said: just as water diverts round a rock in a stream by going first to one side, then back to the other, light bent in two different directions as it passed an object would give a viewer the impression that the light had travelled in a straight line and that the object simply wasn’t there.
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