Well if the last blog post about two-headed turtles wasn’t impossible enough, check out today’s post. Today’s question is, “How in the world can you read a book if you can’t see the words?” Sounds like a question right out of a Harry Potter book. In Harry’s world, it would probably be easy to do. But in our boring old world of non-magic Muggles, is it possible?  Logic would have you say no. But then, logic doesn’t always seem to apply when it comes to science!

To find the answer to this mysterious question, we need to travel to the land of Harry Potter himself, England, to a strange building shaped like a donut, the Diamond synchrotron facility. And this isn’t just any little donut; it’s a donut that’s the size of five stadiums! But what does it have to do with reading books with no visible words? A lot. This building is a synchrotron, and a synchrotron is a particle accelerator. It sends particles whizzing around its donut ring at super high speeds. When particles travel this fast, they create a powerful beam of light, a beam so powerful that it is ten times stronger than the light produced by the Sun!

Sounds cool but what can it do? You probably already know the answer to this question. It can read books with invisible words of course—old books where the words have worn or faded away! How does it do this? This beam of light acts like a special x-ray beam. It creates a 3-dimensional image of the text that helps scientists “see” the words that were once there. It can even read old books that are too fragile to open. Now that’s some real magic!