By Philip Ball
ISBN-10: 022623892X
ISBN-13: 9780226238920
If provided the chance—by cloak, spell, or superpower—to be invisible, who wouldn’t are looking to supply it a attempt? we're attracted to the belief of stealthy voyeurism and the facility to hide our personal acts, yet as fascinating because it could seem, invisibility is usually risky. it isn't simply an optical phenomenon, yet a situation filled with moral questions. As esteemed technology author Philip Ball unearths during this ebook, the tale of invisibility isn't really rather a lot an issue of the way it'd be completed yet of why we'd like it and what we'd do with it.
during this vigorous examine a undying inspiration, Ball presents the 1st accomplished heritage of our fascination with the unseen. This sweeping narrative strikes from medieval spell books to the newest nanotechnology, from fairy stories to telecommunications, from camouflage to ghosts to the sunrise of nuclear physics and the invention of darkish strength. Along the best way, Invisible tells little-known tales approximately medieval monks who blamed their misdeeds on spirits; the Cock Lane ghost, which intrigued either Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens; the makes an attempt through Victorian scientist William Crookes to become aware of forces utilizing tiny windmills; novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s trust that he used to be unseen whilst in his dressing dress; and armed forces efforts to enlist magicians to conceal tanks and ships in the course of WWII. Bringing in such voices as Plato and Shakespeare, Ball presents not just a systematic heritage yet a cultural one—showing how our simultaneous wish for and suspicion of the invisible has fueled invention and the mind's eye for centuries.
during this strange and smart ebook, Ball exhibits that our fantasies approximately being unseen—and seeing the unseen—reveal magnificent truths approximately who we're.
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Extra resources for Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen
Example text
When the English clergyman John Webster wrote in The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677) that ‘men ought to be cautious and to be fully assured of the truth of the effect before they adventure to explicate the cause’, he was speaking to every age. However bogus their claims, Reichenbach and Mesmer aimed to Occult Forces 45 position themselves within the scientific mainstream. The occult tradition, however, also retained a more Gnostic aspect in which adepts possessed special, revelatory knowledge, exemplified by the early seventeenth-century Lutheran mystic Jacob Boehme and perpetuated during the following century in the figures of Claude-Louis, Comte de SaintGermain, a would-be alchemist who traded his chemical expertise at the courts of Europe, and the wily Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, the assumed name of Italian apothecary Giuseppe Balsamo.
The occult web of natural magic was unweaving; the world was becoming disenchanted. Magic revealed In place of natural magic there was now a new kind of science, grounded in experiment and generally explained in terms of mechanical theories of particles in contact with one another. In the late eighteenth century, electrical phenomena entered the experimental scientist’s repertoire, and the magician-performers saw at once the possibilities they offered. The Frenchman Nicolas-Philippe Ledru, who adopted the stage name Comus after the Greek god of anarchy and revelry, toured the courts of Europe entertaining nobles with his tricks and experiments involving electricity, magnetism and light.
One of the cruellest prescriptions instructs the magician to cut out the eyes of a live owl and bury them in a secret place. A fifteenth-century Greek manuscript offers a more explicitly optical theme than Aubrey’s head-grown beans, stipulating that fava beans are imbued with invisibility magic when placed in the eye sockets of a human skull. ’ Within the magic tradition of correspondences, certain plants and minerals were associated with invisibility. For example, the dust on brown patches of mature fern leaves was said to be a charm of invisibility because it was thought to carry the fern’s invisible principle of reproduction: unlike other plants, they appeared to possess neither flowers nor seeds, but could nevertheless be found surrounded by their progeny.
Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen by Philip Ball
by Brian
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