The in/visible

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InvisibleCover1.jpg

Edited by Clare Birchall


Introduction
Given that the essence of the invisible lies in our inability to see it, the large number of cultural attempts to represent and mobilise it as metaphor presents an irony. The use of invisibility as a fictive trope dates back at least to the legend of Gyges, discussed in Plato's Republic written around 360 BC. Gyges discovers a ring that makes him invisible and helps him to brutally win a kingdom. Ancient etymology indicates that the name of Hades, Greek god of the underworld, means ‘invisible’ and his helmet enabled him to realise this state (Roman & Roman, 2009: 182). More recently, H.G. Wells warned of its dangers, exploring the suspicion and havoc invisibility can wreak; Queen have sung about its appeal; and Harry Potter dons an invisibility cloak to vanquish dark forces in the first book. In philosophy, at least for Merleau-Ponty and Derrida in different ways, the possibility of perception relies on the difference between the visible and invisible (see Reynolds, 2004). After Adam Smith, economists refer to the ‘invisible hand’ of the market: indicating a supposedly self-regulating entity. In terms of identity politics the invisible is used as a marker of the marginalised and voiceless – unrecognised by the state or society and without power, they are effectively invisible. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, for example, begins: ‘I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me’ (1952: 1). As a result of all this cultural activity around the invisible, the strangeness, the absence, the alterity that attracts us to, and encourages us to find ways to represent invisibility through existing paradigms, is undoubtedly domesticated.

The trope of invisibility clearly has creative, political, epistemological and cultural force. But invisibility is not just a cultural trope: it is a physical state from which these other uses borrow meaning. Invisible matter is that which neither reflects nor absorbs light. It is a state that assumes its full resonance in relation to a human viewer: invisibility is nothing more than that which lies outside the visible spectrum (although we will need to consider the role of technology in the enhancement of vision and detection). In this respect, invisibility is not a positive property of the matter observed, but a limitation in, or manipulation of, the observer’s visual apparatus. Such a description works just as well at the metaphorical level - whether we are referring to cultural limitations, as with Ellison’s white folk, or psychological limitations in which the psyche refuses to face certain events or truths - as it does in reference to the physiological limitations of the human eye. (more)


Invisible Web

Dirk Lewandowski & Philipp Mayr - Exploring the Academic Invisible Web

  Link to original Article [Should the authors' names be part of a live link? And do you need this 'link to original article'?]

Jayant Madhavan, Loredana Afanasiev, Lyublena Antova & Alon Halevy 

  ‘Harnessing the Deep Web: Present and Future’

Makeuseof

 '10 Search Engines to Explore the Deep Web'

 

Black Holes

Ted Jacobson and Thomas P. Sotiriou

  ‘Might Black Holes Reveal their Inner Secrets?’

Alberto Sesana, Jonathan Gair, Emanuele Berti, Marta Volonteri

  ‘Reconstructing the Massive Black Hole Cosmic History through Gravitational Waves’

J.Hillis Miller

  Boustrophedonic Reading: Black Holes

 

Invisibility Cloak

Xianzhong Chen, Yu Luo, Jingjing Zhang, Kyle Jiang, John B. Pendry and Shuang Zhang

  ‘Macroscopic Invisibility Cloaking of Visible Light’

Yangbo Xie, Huanyang Chen, Yadong Xu, Lin Zhu, Hongru Ma, and Jian‐Wen Dong

  ‘An invisibility Cloak Using Silver Nanowires’

Huanyang Chen and Che Ting Chan, Shiyang Liu and Zhifang Lin

  ‘A Simple Route to a Tunable Electromagnetic Gateway’

Shuang Zhang, Dentcho A. Genov, Cheng Sun, Xiang Zhang

  ‘Cloaking of Matter Waves’

Moti Fridman, Alessandro Farsi, Yoshitomo Okawachi, Alexander L.Gaeta

 'Demonstration of Temporal Cloaking'


Dark Matter

Mark J. Hadley

  'Classical Dark Matter'

Vincenzo Vitale, Aldo Morselli

  ‘Indirect Search for Dark Matter from the center of the Milky Way with the Fermi-Large Area Telescope’

H. L. Helfer

  ‘On the Interpretation of the Local Dark Matter’

M. Rondcadelli

  ‘Searching For Dark Matter’

Andreus Albrecht et al

  Report of the Dark Energy Task Force

Cosmos Video News Release 

  'Dark Matter 3D Map' Open in YouTube


Stealth

F.P. Neele, M. Wilson, & K. Youern

  '"Stealth" Technology: Proposed New Method of Interpretation of Infrared Ship Signature Requirements'

David Hambling

  Vanishing Point

Gene Poteat

  'Stealth, Countermeasures and ELINT 1960-1975'

Trevor Paglen

  Invisible

 Youtube

  'YF-22 and YF-23 - Stealth Technology'


Seeing and Unseeing

Holly C. Miller, Rebecca Rayburn-Reeves, and Thomas R. Zentall

'What Do Dogs know about Hidden Objects?'

Gary Lupyan & Michael J. Spivey

‘Making the Invisible Visible: Verbal but Not Visual Cues Enhance Visual Detection’

Michael Wolf

'The Transparent City'

Geraint Rees

‘The Anatomy of Blindsight’


Microscopic

Willard Wigan

Micro Sculptor

Z. Wang, W. Guo, L. Li, B.S. Luk'yanchuk, A. Khan, Z. Liu, Z. Chen, M. Hong

'Optical Virtual Imaging at 50 nm Lateral Resolution with a White Light Nanoscope'


What this Living Book might have looked like if I were a physicist

'Invisibility', Physicsworld, Vol.24, No.7, July 2011

Attributions