Rare is the moment when Harry Potter fans, Star Trek aficionados, H. G. Wells enthusiasts, and theoretical physicists unite in a moment of ecstasy. But that instant came last May with a flurry of dramatic headlines. "Scientists may be able to make magic like Harry Potter," wrote the Associated Press. "Here's how to make an invisibility cloak," shouted MSNBC. "Cast no shadows," said The Economist. For Duke University physicist David Smith, though, the oddest moment was seeing his work flashed on the CNN crawl the same day it appeared in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science. "It was surreal," he says. "The story was generating a huge splash before the scientific community had a chance to take a critical look."
Smith hardly fits the profile of a media celebrity: soft-spoken, patient, and bespectacled, he has the pale-skinned hue of a man who has perhaps spent too much time in a windowless lab fiddling with wires. All at once, however, he and his postdoc Dave Schurig became the targets of intense public interest. Reporters called from around the world, crackpots sent long letters hand-scrawled with dubious hypotheses, and a Korean television crew flew in to the leafy Duke campus, posing Schurig, graduate student Jonah Gollub, and technician Bryan Justice in lab coats in front of their intricate machinery. "They wouldn't film until we put the white coats on. We didn't even have any—we had to borrow them," recalls Schurig.
