1.17 Assignment (3): Dealing with invisibility

This assignment is related to the Lesson One e-lecture. It is homework that you can do yourself and then discuss with a tutor, mentor or other mentees.

Take a look at this news-story (published by the "Sun," a British tabloid) (Here is some first aid on the vocabulary: A "boffin" is a scientist; an "invisibility cloak" is a coat that makes you invisible, if you wear it.)

Boffin invents invisibility cloak (The Sun, October 19, 2006)
AN INVISIBILITY "cloak" has been built by a British boffin. The device can steer microwaves around it to make objects undetectable by radar. Experts are confident it can be developed to do the same with light rays — making things invisible to the naked eye, just like boy wizard Harry Potter's cloak. A team led by Professor Sir John Pendry constructed the prototype at Duke University in North Carolina. It is made of ten fibreglass rings covered in wave-deflecting copper. Describing how it works, his colleague Professor David R Smith said: "All electromagnetic waves are swept around the area . . . to emerge on the other side as if they'd passed through an empty volume of space." Prof Pendry, of Imperial College London, unveiled the blueprint earlier this year. It has been part-funded by the US defence department.

This is a classical news story. It has the most important information at the beginning and answers all the journalistic questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Its language is simple and clear. But still there is something wrong with it.

IMPORTANT: Please don't try to become an expert in the physics of this research! You don't need to understand everything in detail here. Just try to understand roughly the main ideas, and estimate their journalistic relevance.

QUESTION 1:
Try to find out what it wrong with the article.
You can find the answer by looking at the following material:
original press release by EurekAlert
[ http://www.wfsj.org/course/en/L1/micro.html ]

Original paper in the journal "Science"
[ http://www.wfsj.org/course/docs/Cloack_Schurig-10-20-06.pdf ]

and a related news story in the same magazine.
[ http://www.wfsj.org/course/docs/cloack_cho.pdf ]

Here is also a good story on this written by the BBC
[ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6064620.stm ]

QUESTION 2: What was the research sentence of the article in "The Sun"?

QUESTION 3: What could be a better one?

QUESTION 4: Can you think of a storytelling sentence to cover this topic?


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