God Awful Things

I saw this last week on /. but didn’t have time to read it or anything, but as it is slow at the moment, I will spit this out to blow your minds.  For whatever reason, that reminded me of Lynda Barry’s  Ernie Pook’s Comeek.  There is one where Freddy says “Freak the man, freak the man often.”

Anyway… metamaterials.  They’re synthetic materials made to do cool stuff… like say… bend light? and maybe.. make an invisibility cloak?

Well, how do you take something that cool and make it even cooler?

Now Igor Smolyaninov at the University of Maryland has found another interesting mathematical analogy between optical metamaterials and general relativity. Metamaterials are substances in which the permittivity and permeability have been manipulated in a way that allows fine control over the behaviour of light. They have famously been used to create invisibility cloaks that hide objects from view.

But Smolyaninov has another idea. Why not create materials that reproduce the behaviour of light in various kinds of spacetimes. He gives the example of a metamaterial which is a formal equivalent to a (2+2) spacetime with two dimensions of space and two of time.

His piece de resistance, however, is a mathematical demonstration of an event in which a phase transition inside a (2+2) metamaterial leads to the sudden creation of a 2+1 spacetime (two dimensions of space and one of time) together with a large population of particles.

Think about that for a moment. What Smolyaninov is describing is an optical analogue of the Big Bang in which a spacetime is created along with the particles to populate it. “The characteristic feature of this phase transition appears to be a kind of toy “big bang”,” he says.

I freely admit that being a human bean I can’t really comprehend this, and I love that feeling where the brain gears grind to a halt.  Two dimensions of space and two dimensions of time?!?!  Maybe going forwards and backwards in time, but also up and down in time.. uh, actually I’m pretty sure it’s just not a notion I can comprehend and will have to wait for someone to dumb it down for me using fruit as models.

Edit: Oops, I forgot to link to the article in question.. apologies!