Sex, Bombs and Burgers (37 page)

Pendry is an institution in British physics, having received numerous honours over his decades of work in optics, lenses and refraction, culminating in his knighting by the Queen in 2004. In 2006, he explained to the BBC his theory of how invisibility would work:

Water behaves a little differently to light. If you put a pencil in water that’s moving, the water naturally flows around the pencil. When it gets to the other side, the water closes up. Special materials could make light ‘flow’ around an object like water. A little way downstream, you’d never know that you’d put a pencil in the water—it’s flowing smoothly again. Light doesn’t do that of course, it hits the pencil and scatters. So you want to put a coating around the pencil that allows light to flow around it like water, in a nice, curved way.
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It turns out that’s not so hard to do after all. The key is something called a metamaterial, a composite material constructed at a macroscopic level rather than at a chemical level, which is how a traditional substance such as copper is made. Because they are designed on a much smaller level, metamaterials can conduct electromagnetism in ways not found in nature. Not surprisingly, DARPA has taken an interest in metamaterials and in 2004 held a conference in Texas to discuss potential uses of these new substances. Pendry was invited to give a presentation, wherein he suggested that metamaterials could be used to influence
electromagnetic forces to bend light. He wrote the idea up for DARPA—the agency occasionally sponsors research from non-American nationals, as long as they are friendly to the United States—and since then, two separate groups at Berkeley and Cornell universities have used the idea to build metamaterial “invisibility cloaks.” The cloaks were only a few millimetres wide and could cover only two-dimensional objects, but they successfully bent light to flow as a fluid around their subjects. With proper funding, which will doubtlessly come from the military, it will only be a few years until large, stationary three-dimensional objects can be made invisible. Moving objects, however, are more complex, so it may be a while before Harry Potter’s fabled invisible cloak becomes a reality. The first realization will probably be a static object, more like Harry Potter’s gun turret than Harry Potter’s cloak.

Metamaterials offer a world of possibilities. Bending light to confer invisibility may be just one of their nature-defying capabilities. More applications will become apparent only as scientists come to understand them better, as will the mainstream benefits. One spinoff is already being seen. Because they are tremendously light, metamaterials are working their way into radar systems, making these less bulky and extending their use to new applications such as the car collision-detectors mentioned earlier. As iRobot’s Joe Dyer says, these sorts of far-out technologies tend to come in “on cat’s feet,” one small step at a time.

That said, when it comes to invisibility, the British military isn’t waiting for the technology to creep in slowly. In 2007 the U.K. Ministry of Defence and its contractor QinetiQ announced it had successfully made tanks invisible, albeit
not with metamaterials but with more pedestrian technology. Using video cameras and projectors mounted on the tank itself, QinetiQ researchers fooled onlookers into completely missing the vehicle by projecting its surroundings onto its surface, an advanced form of camouflage. “This technology is absolutely incredible. If I hadn’t been present I wouldn’t have believed it,” said a soldier present at the test. “I looked across the fields and just saw grass and trees, but in reality I was staring down the barrel of a tank gun.”
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British military experts expect such tanks to be in the field by 2012—which, from the way things are going, means they could see action in Afghanistan or Iraq.

And yes, it is deliciously ironic that British scientists, who worked so hard to make things visible with radar sixty years ago, are now putting so much effort into making them disappear from view.

The Pornography of War

It’s a paradox that the longer the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq go on, the more technological advances there will be. In a way, the more death and destruction the West visits on the Middle East, the more economic benefits it will reap, since the weapons of today are the microwave ovens and robot cars of tomorrow. Like hunger and poverty, the desire to test out new technologies is a major driving force behind such conflicts. The more politically minded would-be terrorists see this unfortunate cause and effect as a form of imperialism, so they fight it by joining al Qaeda and the Taliban. For the general population, it must also rankle. Rather than creating the inventions, as they’ve done for centuries, the people are instead having foreign technologies tested on them. It’s a far cry from the Islamic Golden Age of science and reason.

Such is the way of war, however. When two opponents are evenly matched, there is less likelihood of one side trying anything radical; while a crazy new technology may promise ultimate victory, it can also bring disaster. Far-out new technology is usually only deployed after it has been thoroughly tested, or when one side has an apparent advantage. The Second World War is a perfect example. Nazi Germany only started deploying its futuristic weapons, like the experimental and highly volatile V-2 rockets and jet fighters, when the tide of the war had turned against it, while the United States only dropped the atomic bomb once victory was a foregone conclusion. The longer a war goes on, however, the less apparent it is that one side or another has an advantage, which is certainly the case in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The United States government, however, still believes it has the edge in those conflicts, so it continues the steady rollout of new technologies. For the immediate future, American defence spending will focus on smaller, more flexible and more personal technologies. Small, light robots will be a priority and individual soldiers will get a lot of new equipment to help them find terrorists who have melted into the urban landscape. Some of this technology will be biological, like the DARPA experiments into areas such as regeneration and heightened cognition, while some of it will be oriented around communications and sensors.

Since the first conflict with Iraq in the early nineties, we in the West have come to believe that technology is a key factor in deciding who wins a war. Images from the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam painted horrific pictures: soldiers suffering in disease-ridden trenches or military hospitals with their limbs blown off, bodies being carried off the battlefield, dirt-smeared
faces. Recent conflicts, however, have all but erased those images and replaced them with scenes of laser-guided bombs, futuristic-looking planes, bloodless and victimless destruction, green-tinged battles of lights. War has become sanitized, safer, almost fun. While troops in the Second World War had to sing to each other to raise morale, soldiers in Iraq can now while away their leisure time playing Xbox games. To those of us who are insulated from the day-to-day horror, war is more like a game— or at least it is sold as such, if the Air Force’s video-game-heavy website is any indicator.

This sanitization and video-game-ification has affected the general public. With his smart bomb video, Norman Schwarzkopf gave rise to the “war porn” phenomenon, which has grown in lockstep with the rise of the web. YouTube is rife with videos depicting American tanks, jets and drones blowing up Iraqi and Taliban targets, many set to rollicking heavy-metal soundtracks. The same is true in reverse, with the website full of videos of insurgents setting off explosives and blowing up American forces. While only a small subset of the population enjoys watching such footage on a regular basis, the reaction of many to a video of a
Reaper
destroying a building tends to be, “Oh, neat.” Never mind the people inside that building who have just been obliterated.

I believe this is how we subconsciously want to deal with war. We know it’s happening and we know the real human cost, but we prefer to think of it as a necessity that produces “neat” results. That has certainly been the case in the Middle Eastern desert, where the death of thousands of innocents over the past twenty years has indirectly supplied us with more comfort and convenience than we know.

Who speaks to the instincts speaks to the deepest in mankind, and finds the readiest response.
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—AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT

There’s a scene in the movie
Fight Club
where the camera pans around Ed Norton’s apartment and labels pop up on screen to describe each piece of furniture, telling the viewer what it is and how much it costs. That’s kind of what the world has been like for me during the course of writing this book, only I’m not seeing an Ikea catalogue come to life, but rather the connections to war, sex and food. I see them everywhere I turn, or I end up suspecting connections and looking them up. I’m surrounded by them in my home—a very typical home, I like to think, which means that you’re probably surrounded by them too.

In the living room, there’s the plasma television, which saw its origins as a computer display. In their early days, computers were the exclusive domain of the military. My TV’s manufacturer, Panasonic, known as Matsushita in Japan, was shut down briefly after the Second World War when the Allies realized it had profited throughout the conflict by building everything from radios to bicycles for the Japanese government. The DVD/CD player sitting under the TV, plus all of my discs that play in it, are based on lasers, the first of which was created by Hughes Research Laboratories, a defence contractor, back in the late
fifties. Lasers are everywhere now, but like computers they were once primarily meant for military use. There’s also the fact that the whole home entertainment market got a healthy kick-start from porn. Back when Hollywood was busy suing VCR makers, porn producers were pumping out videotapes. It’s not too crazy to suggest that if they hadn’t done so, the home video market, and therefore DVD players, may never have developed.

Next to the DVD player sit perhaps my two favourite pieces of electronics, the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. For both, we can thank Ralph Baer and his defence contractor employer, Sanders Associates. Every time I sit on the couch and blow people up online while playing
Call of Duty
, I can’t help but think of the irony. I don’t think Vint Cerf, when he was helping to launch the ARPAnet, imagined that’s what people would eventually be using it for. (Or maybe he did?)

Speaking of my couch, it is stuffed with memory foam, a substance designed by NASA in the sixties to improve aircraft cushions. The mattress in the bedroom also contains it. Then there’s the air conditioner in the window, which owes a good deal of its history to Willis Carrier, an American inventor who perfected his cooling methods during the Second World War when he came up with a system that could simulate the freezing, high-altitude temperatures found on military planes. After the war, he used the techniques to help launch a boom in residential air conditioners. I’m glad he did because the summer months can get really sticky here in Toronto.

In my office, just about everything is derived from war and sex. The computer is perhaps the best example. Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak got their start as summer interns at Hewlett-Packard, which by the seventies was
a big supplier of computers and electronics to the military. In fact, the duo left and started Apple because HP didn’t want to get into consumer products. That’s ironic now, given that HP is the biggest personal computer manufacturer in the world. Of course, what’s a computer without an internet connection? As we’ve seen, that’s a technology that was military made and porn perfected. Heck, even the mouse was created with DARPA funding.

Over on the wall hangs a whiteboard on which I scribble my thoughts and to-do lists. The main ingredient in it is melamine, a plastic that, like many plastics, was first put to wide use during the Second World War as dishware aboard navy ships. Recently, melamine acquired a bad rap because some Chinese food makers sneaked it into baby formula. The plastic shows up in chemical tests as a protein, so it’s the perfect filler for unethical food makers looking to cut corners. Yum ... plastic!

Just about everything in the bathroom is made by large conglomerates that also have significant food operations. The Dove soap and Q-tips are from Unilever, which counts Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Lipton drinks and Ragu spaghetti sauce among its many food brands. The Pantene shampoo, Crest toothpaste, Gillette razors and shaving gel, Oral-B toothbrush and floss are all from Procter & Gamble, which also makes Pringles potato chips and Folgers coffee. It’s a little discomforting to know that the same companies that are formulating my shampoo are also concocting what I put in my belly. I’m also a little wary of using my Right Guard deodorant now that I know where it comes from. The brand is owned by Henkel, which, like many German companies, used concentration-camp prisoners as labour during the Second World War. The product name is a little off-putting knowing that.