Future Tech

"Every day you play with the light of the universe," wrote Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Physicist David R. Smith of the University of California at San Diego takes those words to heart. He spends his days contemplating how to bend light in ways that reverse the normal patterns of refraction. And his are more than theoretical musings. Smith and a handful of like-minded researchers are now building mirror-image materials that could ultimately result in practical applications ranging from better cell-phone antennas to DVDs that could cram 100 movies onto a single disc. These playful manipulations of light were anticipated by the long-neglected ideas of Soviet physicist Victor Veselago of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. In 1964 Veselago theorized that the laws of physics allowed for the creation of a material that he described as "left-handed" because of the way it would affect light or other radiation passing through it. In conventional materials a ray of light moving forward has an associated electric field that points left and a magnetic field that points up. You can picture this arrangement by pointing the thumb, forefinger, and middle finger of your right hand in mutually perpendicular directions. In Veselago's bizarre material, these orientations would be mirror reversed, so they would follow the pattern of the fingers on the left hand instead.