Invisible Buildings

I read this article today about how physicists are attempting to make buildings "invisible" to the effects of earthquakes.  The concept is familiar to most people.  Look at the flow of water around a stone in a stream.  The waves of water flow around the stone and continue on their way while the stone does not move.  Their idea is based around efforts to create an "invisibility" cloak.  Scientists today are trying to create an invisibility cloak by bending light waves around the object and then reconverging them behind the object.  The idea for the invisible building involved following the same concept with any waves, including the waves created in the ground by an earthquake.  Sounds ingenious enough, right?  Here is the article itself: Invisible Buildings

  I read the article with great interest, mostly interested in the way they planned to bend the mechanical waves harmlessly around the building.  Then I read that they planned to create a shield made of a series of concrete rings.  Each of the rings would be tuned to a different wavelength to account for the many varying wavelengths created during an earthquake.  Right now, it's all just a concept and they want to see it expanded upon.  It currently does not account for waves that travel beneath the surface and is limited by the tuning wavelengths of the rings.

 While this seems like an ingenious solution, the first thing that I thought about while reading the article is that they could not possibly make the building invisible to an earthquake.  There was just no possible way to account for all the wavelengths that could occur.  The best bet would be to go with statistical probabilities, but even then, you might as well continue with conventional earthquake engineering methods.  Still, a very interesting article.  Maybe we can figure out how to account for the worst case scenarios and start developing a new CODE for invisibility cloaks.