THE controversy is over. After years of argument, physicists have shown you really can build materials that will bend light the opposite way from normal, reversing the way refraction usually works. But whether or not such materials can fulfil the prediction that they will act as “perfect lenses”, capable of focusing features smaller than the wavelength of light, is still up for debate.
When light enters or leaves a transparent material such as glass at an angle, the rays get refracted, or bent. The light always bends the same way. But in 1968, theorist Victor Veselago at the Lebedev Physics…
