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Study says ancient Romans may have built “invisibility cloaks” into structures
Foundational patterns in Roman theaters resemble electromagnetic cloaking devices.
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| Roman Colosseum is an oval amphitheatre in the center of the city of Rome. French scientists suggest its structure might have helped protect it from earthquake damage.Alex Livesey/Danehouse/Getty Images) |
Falling within the broader class of photonic band gap materials, a "metamaterial" is technically defined as any material whose microscopic structure can bend light in ways it doesn't normally bend. That property is called an index of refraction, i.e., the ratio between the speed of light in a vacuum and how fast the top of the light wave travels. Natural materials have a positive index of refraction; certain manmade metamaterials—first synthesized in the lab in 2000—have a negativeindex of refraction, meaning they interact with light in such a way as to bend light around even very sharp angles.That's what makes metamaterials so ideal for cloaking applications—any "invisibility cloak" must be able to bend electromagnetic waves around whatever it's supposed to be cloaking. (They are also ideal for making so-called "super lenses" capable of seeing objects at much smaller scales than is possible with natural materials, because they have significantly lower diffraction limits.) Most metamaterials consist of a highly conductive metal like gold or copper, organized in specific shapes and arranged in carefully layered periodic lattice structures. When light passes through the material, it bends around the cloaked object, rendering it "invisible." You can see anything directly behind it but never perceive the object itself.
Top view of a megastructure using periodic arrays of tall buildings as resonators to create a seismic cloaking effect. Stephane Brûlé et al.
Co-author Stephane Brûlé, a civil engineer at a Lyon-based company called Menard, demonstrated the possibility of this kind of large-scale acoustic and seismic cloaking a few years ago with colleagues from the Fresnel Institute in Marseille. The researchers drilled a periodic array of boreholes into topsoil and discovered that sound waves reflected most of their energy back toward the source when they encountered the first two rows of holes. Brûlé noticed a similar foundational structure while on holiday in Autun (a town in central France), thanks to an aerial photograph of the semicircular structure of a Gallo-Roman theater buried under a field.
When Brûlé superimposed a more detailed archaeological photograph of the theater's structure over an image of one of the invisibility cloaking metamaterials he and his Fresnel colleagues had made in the lab, the ancient theater's pillars lined up almost perfectly with the microscopic elements in the metamaterial. He discovered similar overlap with images of the foundational structure of the Roman Colosseum and other, fully enclosed amphitheaters from the same era.
"I doubt that the [Romans] intentionally designed their buildings to be earthquake resistant."
Roman engineers may not have done this deliberately; they could have just been lucky, according to Brûlé. Or they might have noticed over the centuries that certain structures were more resistant to earthquake damage than others and modified their designs accordingly. "Rigorously, we cannot say more for the moment," he told Physics World.
"The introduction of archaeological metamaterials is a fascinating idea," said Greg Gbur, a physicist at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. "I doubt that the builders of structures in that era intentionally designed their buildings to be earthquake resistant, or even that they were able to unconsciously evolve their designs over time to make them more secure—the time scales seem too short. I could imagine, however, that there might be a sort of 'natural selection' that occurred, where megastructures built with inadvertent earthquake cloaking might have survived longer than their counterparts, allowing us to see their remains now."
"There have been a few articles written in the past about the possibility of designing 'seismic cloaks' to protect buildings, but these were all focused on placing subsurface elements around an individual building to guide the waves," said Gbur. "This review illustrates how a well-designed urban area, consisting of multiple buildings, could use the buildings themselves as the elements of the cloak, using them to shield the most important or vulnerable buildings (schools, hospitals) from harm. I had my doubts about the feasibility of really designing practical seismic invisibility cloaks when the research first started coming out, but once again researchers have proven themselves more clever than I could imagine."
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A Simple Explanation of the above article is to point out the obvious fact that this "invisibility cloak" geometry is that of a torus.
As to the question of whether or not the Roman architects knew about seismic dampening fields, we're talking about the primordial shape of things from the quantum clouds on up. Atomic clouds, magnetic fields, galactic clouds all organize their aggregates into this torus shape.
According to the Simple Explanation cosmology, the torus shape is the actual shape of the container that surrounds our universe's space/time continuum. It is also the shape of fractal consciousness. As we are all fractal iterations of the Universal Unit of Consciousness, we know this shape deep in our soul.
My guess is that the Colosseum's architect had some sort of creative vision or direct intuition that the stadium needed to be designed "just so." It's likely the shape was conceived as somehow blessed by the architect who transcribed it as if in a dream.
