Bonus Info for “Nothing can be fully transparent”, or, ZAFO is impossible

I had a piece in Scientific American over the weekend, a short news article on a cool theoretical physics paper that argues that no material that bends light can be perfectly transparent. Normally I don’t have much “bonus info” for the shorter news pieces…but there’s a fun subtlety here. I figured I’d start the piece by talking about some of the most transparent materials out there, like the Guinness world record, an aerogel designed to insulate windows, then compare them. I’d list how transparent each substance is, ending up with the new theoretical limit, far above any real material. There was just one problem: there wasn’t a number to list. You might think of transparency as a percentage, how much light gets through, the kind of thing you tweak on a slider in a program like Photoshop. Indeed, there’s a nice number like that in the Guinness world record, a range of 97% to 99%, with a single pane of glass, in comparison, listed at 92%. But when I wanted to compare those numbers to…

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