But that is what a group of researchers at Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, have done.

ECONOMIST: Optical fibres could carry more information in the future

Tony Tyson and David Wittman, who work at Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories, in New Jersey, and their collaborators have proposed building a telescope that estimates the distribution of mass in the past by analysing these deflected light-waves, a technique known as three-dimensional mass tomography.

ECONOMIST: Cosmology