Question: Why do you want to make a camera which sees through walls?

Matthew Selwood answered on 4 Mar 2019:

There are multiple answers to this question…

The “Official” answer: I am getting paid to look inside of a fusion reaction, for a process called “Inertial Confinement Fusion”. As a scientific community, we are struggling to compress the fuel evenly – imagine trying to squish a water balloon into a perfect small sphere using 142 pencils – and because it is inside of a tin can made of gold, we can’t see what is going wrong in order to fix it. So a camera to look through the gold can to see the implosion, and see how non-spherical it is, would be really useful.

My answer: Why not?! It would be awesome 😀 I like challenges in science, and this is definitely a challenge!

The “other” answer: Since I started working, I have been approached by the Home Office and Ministry of Defence. They want to be able to look through the walls of those huge great shipping containers. There is a lot of paperwork involved in having to open and search a container for illegal substances, smuggled goods and weapons. Plus it takes a long time, and the owner of the illegal stuff will notice and refuse to come pick it up. If they could look through the walls without opening the box, it would be far quicker to search every box (imagine the x-ray scanner at the airport, but on steroids). Then they can find everything from illegal cigarettes to drugs and bombs attempting to be smuggled into the country.