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Physicists Find Way to See Through Paint, Paper, and Other Opaque Mate


Marc

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um.... yes please! :)

Materials such as paper, paint, and biological tissue are opaque because the light that passes through them is scattered in complicated and seemingly random ways. A new experiment conducted by researchers at the City of Paris Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution (ESPCI) has shown that it's possible to focus light through opaque materials and detect objects hidden behind them, provided you know enough about the material.
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  • 5 weeks later...

For those who are interested in this sort of stuff, here's another article that's relevant. This one on random matrix theory

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627550.200-enter-the-matrix-the-deep-law-that-shapes-our-reality.html?DCMP=OTC-rss

From the article:

Others are using random matrix theory to do surprising things, such as enabling light to pass through apparently impenetrable, opaque materials. Last year, physicist Allard Mosk of the University of Twente in the Netherlands and colleagues used it to describe the statistical connections between light that falls on an object and light that is scattered away. For an opaque object that scatters light very well, he notes, these connections can be described by a totally random matrix. What comes up are some strange possibilities not suggested by other analyses. The matrices revealed that there should be what Mosk calls "open channels" - specific kinds of waves that, instead of being reflected, would somehow pass right through the material. Indeed, when Mosk's team shone light with a carefully constructed wavefront through a thick, opaque layer of zinc oxide paint, they saw a sharp increase in the transmission of light.

Awesome stuff :).

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Guest xionmark

I like how the whole thing was started from one scientist guessing a bunch of numbers and putting them in a matrix. :)

Indeed. Math is magical.

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