Long-awaited mathematics proof could help scan Earth's innards

nature.com

51 pointsgreeneggs5 comments

That's too bad... because he's also disproved the cloak of invisibility!

In fact, I suspect this sort of proof may be useful to other fields of tomography (eg CT / MRI) beyond UltraSound, if it really improves complete imaging knowing only shortest (eg highest index) paths from the surface. I guess the sparseness helps minimize errors faster than current techniques, although it's not clear to me how that necessarily follows from the mathematical proof.

Interesting idea about invisibility being disproved. Could you flesh out this idea in more detail?

If time-of-flight is the only necessary information to discover an objects structure, then all cloaking can be defeated because you can by necessity just detect that a light pulse took longer then expected to be returned (because it was bent around the object).

Well yeah, but you don't need this proof to see that. Invisibility cloaks should be detectable with Lidar I think.

The paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.03638

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