Mission Invisible

Invisibility has fascinated people since time immemorial, but only a decade ago did invisibility become a serious subject of scientific investigation. This lively novel, authored by an expert in the field, takes the reader on a journey to fascinating places and - en passant - on an intellectual adventure involving some of the most fascinating subjects of optics. While enjoying the fun and action of a travel story, the reader will gain an accurate notion of the real science of invisibility, of the light and shade of the business of science, as well as glimpses into different cultures. From the first page, you will gradually become immersed in a different world, the world of the science of light. The book includes an appendix providing interested readers with deeper insights into the fundamental physics of space-time, gravity and light.

Ulf Leonhardt received his PhD in theoretical physics from the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1993. He did his habilitation in theoretical physics at the University of Ulm in 1998. From 1998 to 2000 he was in Stockholm at the Royal Institute of Technology as a Göran-Gustafsson Fellow. He held the chair in theoretical physics at the University of St Andrews in Scotland between 2000 and 2012. In 2006, he published the first scientific paper on invisibility cloaking with metamaterials at the same time as Pendry's group published their paper in the journal Science. He has been involved with the science of cloaking objects since then.

Leonhardt is a Wolfson Research Merit Award holder from the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and currently holds the Murray B. Koffler Professorial Chair in physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He is involved in a wide range of research on geometry and light. Specific disciplines are quantum electrodynamics in media, invisibility cloaking, perfect imaging, optical analogues of the event horizon, Hawking radiation, the Casimir effect and cosmology. 

Ulf Leonhardt published one of the first scientific papers that turned invisibility from fiction into science. He is a professor of physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Ulf Leonhardt enjoys imaginative research that connects the practical aspects of physics with abstract ideas, thoughts and stories. He loves to find and use unusual and often unused connections across several areas of physics, from invisibility cloaking to cosmology. He lives with his family in Tel Aviv.