In H.G. Wells’ novel The First Men in the Moon a scientist discovers “cavorite”, a mineral impervious to gravity that can also shield other materials from its effects. The search for materials with the ability to modify gravity have long been considered science fiction. But recently a paper by Minter, Wegter-McNelly and Chiao suggested that hypothesized High Frequency Gravity Waves (HFGWs) might be able to be reflected like a mirror by thin superconducting films when Cooper pairs are in motion. http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.0661
Whether this will be the case is uncertain and Chiao has had some setbacks with his “gravity-radio” experiments in 2003, but of greater interest to myself is not whether any passive material may be able to interact with gravity waves or gravitons to redirect their paths, but whether there are materials that would be able to interact with gravito-photons, the hypothesized particles in Extended Heim Theory.
My candidate would be metamaterials.
Metamaterials have been modeled to manipulate photons to create invisibility cloaks in a manner analogous to the warping of space by gravity. Researchers such as Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St. Andrews, John Pendry of Imperial College London and Dr Guenneau, at the University of Liverpools’s Department of Mathematical Science are just a few of the theoreticians that have made clear the potential of metamaterials.
They have also shown how metamaterials can mimic phenomena that have been associated with manipulations of space-time. Dr. Guenneau, explains. “Using this new computer model we can prove that light can bend around an object under a cloak and is not diffracted by the object. This happens because the metamaterial that makes up the cloak stretches the metrics of space, in a similar way to what heavy planets and stars do for the metrics of space-time in Einstein’s general relativity theory. http://www.physorg.com/news97945163.html
Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St Andrews in the UK working independently of John Pendry of Imperial College London, says, “This research shows how much electromagnetic or optical instruments can do… Interestingly, the new calculations are inspired by the geometry of curved space — a discipline that is normally in the firm hands of researchers in general relativity.”
There was also an article http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080306-blackhole-fiber.html and news release on the creation of a fiber-optical analogue of the event horizon of a black hole. It simulated a gravitational phenomenon through the use of photonic-crystal fibers. A description of other instances of this effect is here: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ulf/fibre.html.
A paper published in the March 2009 issue of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Review, “Cloaking Devices, Electromagnetic Wormholes, and Transformation Optics,” presents an overview of the theoretical developments in cloaking from a mathematical perspective. The cloaking version of a wormhole allows for an invisible tunnel between two points in space through which electromagnetic waves can be transmitted. http://dx.doi.org/10.1137/080716827
With such a close relationship between metamaterials and optical analogues of gravity events, and the generation of gravito-photons through gravito-magnetic interactions, perhaps one day metamaterials will be able to be designed to passively interact with propulsion or standing fields produced by gravito-photons. This might include the ability to pass through them, reflect them, or shape them to form gravito-lenses on a small scale.