Have you seen the “Harry Potter”? If yes, you must be familiar with term making invisible visible? And this is practically possible now, soon you will be able to read all the harry potter books or any other books without breaking your spine. You must be wondering, how? So, here is the answer. This is not because of any wizard. But, it is possible because of science which is creating magic. A team of researchers at the “Massachusetts Institute of Technology” and “Georgia Tech” are working on a system that is capable of reading pages of books without even opening them.
MIT research scientist Barmak Hesmat quoted in a news report that Metropolitan Museum would allow this system to read some of the antique and fragile books. This system is not just the latest e-reader, but Museum understands the delicacy of these books and they are confident about this amazing system.
What is the technology behind this camera?
To see through the books, terahertz radiation is required, this is a band of electromagnetic radiation between the infrared light and microwaves. These waves are capable to penetrate and can yield an entirely different frequency for each chemical they encounter in their path. Terahertz frequency can differentiate between ink and paper unlike the X –rays. There are some tiny pockets of air present in between the pages of books. Scientists have used these air pockets to emit the radiation via terahertz camera.
Terahertz camera sensors can detect the radiation and scientists use the total time of arrival back to this sensor to gauge which reflects the distance of each page. This information for the page distance uses an algorithm to extract the information about the present chemical properties, which can be ink or paper or the reflecting surfaces to identify the letters on the pages.
This defines the correct page order and letter sequence to the researchers. To date, the researchers can read only nine pages at a time from the stacked papers or books. But they are confident about the terahertz imaging and they believe it is a kind of magic that is going to improve the accuracy of used detectors. With these detectors and power radiation sources, we will be able to read any books from beginning to end.
Wait for this magic!!!
