“Making the invisible visible – sounds like something out of Harry Potter. And one day, you’ll be able to read all of the Potter books, or any other book for that matter, without cracking the spine.”
Ten years ago there was a MIT group that shows you can look at a close envelope with Terahertz radiation. Years later, research scientist B. Heshmat was curious about how deep you can look in books nowadays. He published a paper with other scientists in which a new camera was invented that can read the content on the first nine pages, with the purpose to refine the camera so that in the future it can read an entire book. But what does this innovation actually mean for information gathering processes?
First of all, this finding can help researchers to scan ancient books which are too fragile to open. New insights can be outdated from these old books, which is very important for both history researchers and artists who can examine the creative process.
Secondly, another great application of the new camera is to scan through large amounts of documents without even separating them. Much unnecessary time is devoted to separate the paperwork, especially for companies like banks, libraries or other information related companies. This new technology enables such employees to spent their time on more relevant tasks.
On the contrary, this new technology is sensitive to privacy violations. For spies it might even be possible to peer through envelopes with this camera. But according to Heshmat there is a solution to tackle this downside of the technology; use ink that is not visible for the camera because of the frequency ranges used in the Terahertz radiation spectrum. It will take some time to make this technology a common way of working, but I think it’s worth it because it will certainly save time on the work floor and provide the world new insights which can drastically change your history books.
References for this article:
http://uk.businessinsider.com/mit-camera-reads-closed-books-2016-9?r=US&IR=T
http://www.livescience.com/56054-new-tech-could-read-closed-books.html
http://now.howstuffworks.com/2016/09/13/this-camera-can-read-a-book-opening-it
Reading books without even opening them – indeed sounds like some kind of magic!
Surely it’s nice to hear about such a niche innovation instead of reading again about Uber. However not significant nor revolutionary it may sound, a scanner which reads books without opening might be a milestone in archaeology and a great improvement in libraries and accounting departments.
Perhaps I would like to find out more about how exactly is it possible to do this and how it works. As I find out the machine uses beams of radiation to creep in between pages and scan individual letters. The scanner exposes the contents of the concealed pages by relying on terahertz radiation. Terahertz waves mimic X-rays and soundwaves by being able to penetrate surfaces. Moveover, different chemicals (eg. ink) absorb terahertz radiation in different amounts. Beaming terahertz waves at a book enable the scanner to skip through pages and tell the difference between blank and ink-filled parchment.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/mit-machine-read-books-without-opening/