more: Professor Zhang and colleagues are experts in metamaterials and their latest creation is the most impressive yet: modeling black holes by taking "analogy" out of writing and into actual hard science. By designing a metamaterial whose reaction to light looks the same as another phenomena, you can effectively examine that phenomena. This is because "looks like" isn't based on color, or shape, but on having exactly the same equations defining its motion - so that it no longer matters if it's because of metamaterials reaction to light or general relativity's to matter. By setting up this "optical-mechanical analogy" you can study an all-consuming gravitational crusher in a simple chip of material.

more: Some might call it a day after building a tiny black hole - those at Berkeley aren't such people. The team also constructed a way of studying chaotic celestial dynamics, a version of the famous "three-body system" where you have two planets orbiting and affecting each other's motion. By setting up an analogy for one planet's orbit, they can then simulate the perturbations from the other by applying electric fields to the material - again, the effects couldn't be more different in terms of scale, but look exactly the same in terms of equation.

Disturbing planets with electric fields, and building a pocket black hole? It's nice to know that Doctor Doom does exist, and he's a research scientist.

Luke McKinney

headline: Lab and Scientists Mysteriously Disappear While Conducting Experiment

....great sucking noise heard before turbulence

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." - Albert Einstein

Good clip cakebelly! We're just a step away from another Star Trek moment. Before you know it, with "optical-mechanical analogy" we should be able to tele-transport some kind of analogous matter/light into the next galaxy. Interesting how the first part of the word "analogy" works in this black hole thing.

Assuming they don't destroy the planet in the mean time...