Intelligent metasurfaces" - that is the topic of an article in "eLight", a trade journal for optics and photonics.

Another new word with the preceding pair of syllables, whose career is climbing to ever more dizzying heights.

Anyone looking for someone to blame for this will end up with a certain Andronikos of Rhodes, who in the first century BC published the general philosophical writings of Aristotle under the title "Metaphysics" - simply because he based them on the writings on nature (Greek "physis"). ) and “meta” as a preposition with accusative means “after”.

Most of the time, the "after" is meant spatially or temporally, but occasionally also qualitatively for positioning in a ranking.

The enormous intellectual level of Aristotelian theoretical philosophy now helped the qualitative connotation of "meta" to flourish, albeit in a peculiar reversal: "below" became "above".

Because metaphysics thinks more fundamentally about the world, it is a higher-ranking, or at least more demanding, science than mere natural history.

Philosophers who were enthusiastic about the triumph of modern natural science took issue with it and practiced metaphysical criticism, right up to those thinkers of the 1920s who declared all propositions that were not based on empiricism to be nonsensical - except, of course, for the one they formulated when they were declaring this.

So that went wrong.

But since then you can't just do metaphysics again and call a multicellular creature (like yourself) a "metazoon" without blushing.

The 'meta' also inherited something from its use as a genitive preposition - there it meant 'with' or also 'by means'.

With a word preceded by “meta”, there is almost always something more fundamental in mind, something that only comes into view when you take a higher perspective, i.e. go to the meta level and remain open to it, so that only one of perhaps several levels of reflection to have climbed - "meta" with the dative means "between", also in the sense of switching over and mediation.

But the prefix is ​​slowly going down the wrong path.

While meta-studies are still studying many studies in order to then know more than these together, only new properties appear in meta-materials through the incorporation of certain structures.

Metasurfaces, intelligent ones at that, can somehow limit more than spatial bodies and the Metaverse is far more amazing than the universe could ever be - but that's all we know about it yet.

One would like to become New Testament and shout “Metanoeite!” (Mark 1:15).

Literally, this means: "Rethink!" Luther translates: "Repent!"