G. B. found this fascinating article about metamaterials, and it vaulted right to the top of this week's blogs and high octane speculation, for reasons that will become apparent:

Study says ancient Romans may have built “invisibility cloaks” into structures

In spite of its sensational headline, the reality here is a bit more mundane. Or is it? It's that question that we're concerned with in today's high octane speculation. Actually, today we're getting a "two for one special" because there's actually two high octane speculations I want to advance. So let's dive in.

Metamaterials have created the possibility for creating "invisibility cloaks" by bending light so severely around an object that the object itself cannot be seen:

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 negative index 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. Unlike Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, metamaterials really do exist, at least in the laboratory, but they are typically limited to specific wavelengths: microwaves, for example, or infrared light, and even certain frequencies of sound waves. Getting them to work with visible light is a much tougher challenge, although in 2017, French physicists demonstrated a proof-of-principle metamaterial using thin layers of gallium nitride (the blue light-emitting element in LCDs) carved into pillars of varying shapes to delay the flow of visible light through the material. Metamaterials also sometimes cast a telltale shadow, since they do absorb some of the light shining through them. (Emphasis added)

So, to our first high octane speculation: At the time when I was writing The Giza Death Star, my first foray into the bizarre alternative research field, I speculated that some of the crystal arrays of resonators that I speculated might have once existed within the "Grand Gallery" of the Great Pyramid were a special kind of crystal with unique indices of refraction able to so bend light that they were, in effect, "black crystals", able to absorb light without reflection or refraction so "severely" that they were a kind of "crystal black hole" as far as light was concerned, a kind of "black crystal". Under certain conditions of stress, these "black crystals" might emit massive bursts of photons (and phonons). I even speculated that in order to do so, these crystals would have to have an index of refraction that would "spiral" or "rotate" light into the crystal, perhaps being a special kind of liquid crystal. But in any case, I was, at the time, completely unaware of metamaterials and the research behind them, so I was quite intrigued when I read this article, for it suggests that my idea back then might be remotely possible. Indeed, the fact that metamaterials can both bend light around them, as well as absorb a certain amount of light, suggests that there is a boundary layer or condition around the metamaterial outside of which light is bent, and inside of which light is absorbed. If we were discussing black holes, we would call this boundary layer the event horizon: inside that horizon, light itself cannot escape, outside it, things are bent around it. The structure, in other words, appears to be similar, and in my thinking back then, this may be an indicator that there is a connection of some sort between these types of crystalline structures and gravity and anti-gravity.

Additionally, let us recall something I mentioned in my book Secrets of the Unified Field, namely, that when one digs long and hard enough into the background of the so-called Philadelphia Experiment, the infamous 1943 experiment allegedly meant to render naval ships invisible to radar, the key personage was physicist Arnold Sommerfeldt, a friend and colleague of Einstein's, who experimented precisely with refraction indices. In my attempt to reverse engineer a rationalization for the experiment, the US Navy allegedly thought that if one could change the index of refraction from incoming radar signals via electromagnetic means (again, brought about by the interferometry of three magnetic degaussing coils around the three spatial axes of the ship), one might "bend" the radar around the ship making it "radar invisible." As the story goes of course, the Navy achieved far more than it had bargained for, and the experiment rendered the entire ship optically invisible, not just radar invisible.

But there's something else in this article that caught my attention, and it's this:

It may also be possible to use metamaterials to lessen the damage caused to buildings and other infrastructure from earthquakes, by redirecting so-called Rayleigh waves, the more shallow, surface seismic waves that typically inflict the worst structural damage. Per Physics World, "The idea is to surround a building with a lattice of holes or solid objects within the soil. When seismic waves within a certain range of wavelengths pass through the lattice, multiple reflections in the lattice interfere with one another destructively to create a band gap that results in a significant reduction in the shaking of the building." ... 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. 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. (Emphasis added)

Clearly, however, the ancients, long before the Roman Empire, had some sort of knowledge of how to design buildings to shield them from earthquake damage. The Great Pyramid, for example, sits on top of five "sockets" that allow the building to quiver and move during earthquakes (and indeed, which allow it to quiver and move in the day to day mechanics of nature earth vibrations), placing the entire pile of granite and limestone (quartz bearing rock) under constant stress, making it a constant emitter of photons and phonons from the billions of tiny quartz crystals embedded in the blocks from which it constructed. Other ancient engineering such as the massive pre-Incan walls at Sacsayhuaman in Peru have blocks of stone cut into irregular patterns and held together merely like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle without mortar between the blocks, allowing the pieces of blocks of the wall to move during earthquakes, and then to settle back into their original positions after the vibrations are over, keeping the wall intact.

But this article now suggests that by constructing a deliberate lattice work in the earth, seismic waves can through interferometry be bent around a building, and even reflected back on its source, in a kind of interferometry-induced acoustic phase conjugation. And this of course brings us to our second high octane speculation, for it suggests something that I speculated upon in my Lulu book Microcosm and Medium, namely, that the placement of buildings themselves, if filled with a suitably powerful acoustic wave generator, using the buildings as resonant cavities, could perhaps induce seismic waves which, through interferometry, might induce such vibrations. Scale that idea up, and one might have an "earthquake" producer which would work via interferometry to produce a conjunction of acoustic seismic surface waves at a point sufficiently strong enough to cause an earthquake. Modulate an "intention" on those waves, and one has either a very powerful "defensive" or "offensive" "Tiller grid"...

See you on the flip side...