Pun Salad

The Dewey Decimal number was 535, placing it solidly as a physics book, so I checked it out without much further investigation. Reader, there's some physics in here, and I can understand they had to put some number on it, but it's really all over the place: history, occultism, literary and movie criticism, biology, military strategy, materials science, even a quick bit about economics, …

That's not a bad thing though. The author, Philip Ball, takes the reader down a bunch of unexpected paths, and tells a lot of good stories. The concept of invisibility has been with us for a long time. Even in pre-scientific times, people noticed the invisible forces of magnetism and static electricity causing things to move without being touched. Imaginative as we humans are, that was quickly generalized, given healthy doses of fantasy, superstition, and grift …

Right at the beginning, we're told Plato's story of Gyges, who discovered a ring that, when you turned it on your finger, made you invisible. Gyges quickly used this power for schemes of rape, murder, and usurpation. (Wikipedia mentions this yarn as a possible source of Tolkien's One Ring.)

There were a lot of early magical recipes for turning yourself invisible; they were inevitably gross. ("One involves grinding together the fat or eye of an owl, a ball of beetle dung, and perfumed olive oil, and then anointing the entire body while reciting a selection of unlikely names.") PETA would not approve.

Interestingly, the advent of science seemed to give fantasies of invisibility more credence. Telegraphy and radio worked invisibly to send information hither and yon. If that works, why not telepathy? Over the years, people have speculated about phlogiston and the luminiferous ether, both undetectable to the eyes.

And (of course) today we have "dark matter". Which meets the very definition of invisibility: it doesn't seem to interact with light much, if at all. And not to mention: efforts to "visualize" quantum reality yield nothing but frustration; as near as we can tell, there's nothing to see, it's just math down there.

H. G. Wells and his The Invisible Man get a number of pages; like Gyges, Wells' titular character was quickly corrupted by his invention, turning to murder and mayhem. Fun story about the movie: Wells' deal with the movie studio gave him veto power over the screenplay. And (as a result) the project went through four directors and ten screenwriters! (Still turned out pretty decently.)

Also considered is the different sort of invisibility pictured by Ralph Ellison in his Invisible Man.

Other neat stuff: a discussion of how Hamlet's father's ghost was handled over the centuries. Should the ghost be played by an actor, or should it be invisible everyone except Hamlet? We learn about hydraulic fright wigs.

I mentioned economics above: Ball briefly mentions Adam Smith's "famous invisible hand" metaphor. In a confused passage, he attributes the "true provenance" of the metaphor to the notion of the hand of God taking an active role in human affairs. But, one sentence later, he partially disclaims that "provenance", saying that's clearly how his readers would have read it, "whether Smith intended it or not." With an asterisk leading to a snarky footnote about neoliberalism.

Without going into detail, that's just wrong. There's nothing necessarily supernatural about Smith's use of the term. And it wasn't particularly "famous" at the time; it was pretty much ignored until the 20th century.

Other than that clunker, though, I enjoyed the book.