The Economist Whenever anyone asks me who I think deserves a Nobel Prize in physics,
which happens a lot at this time of year, there's one name I always bring up, John Pendry.
John is a professor of physics at Imperial College London and over his career,
He's won a lot of scientific prizes, including, most recently, the Royal Society's Copley Medal.
That's their most prestigious and the world's oldest scientific gong.
He's even been knighted for his services to science.
John is a theoretical physicist whose work on the interaction between light and matter has led to some very practical inventions.
not least a new class of materials known as metamaterials.
Metamaterials enable seemingly impossible things to happen.
They can manipulate electromagnetic waves from radio waves to visible light in quite bizarre ways.
They do it because they've got tiny nanometer-sized lines and rings etched onto their surfaces.
Metamaterials can, for example,
bend light the wrong way and can be used to make lenses that can magnify things way beyond what's possible,
say, with glass.
I first met John almost 20 years ago, just after he'd published one of his most important papers.
It described a material that could make an object invisible.
by eliminating any reflection and also removing an object's shadow.
A team of experimental scientists later made the material that John had suggested and proved that it really did make things invisible,
to radio waves at least.
The invisibility cloak could guide radio waves around an object.