The in/visible

InvisibleCover1.jpg
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.  (more)


Invisible Web

Dirk Lewandowski & Philipp Mayr

Exploring the Academic Invisible Web

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

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

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've Looked Like if I Were a Physicist

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

Attributions