‘Time Cloak’ Makes Events Invisible
You have to imagine that if the Pentagon is behind this, they are way ahead of what is described here, by Seth Borenstein for AP via Physorg:
It’s one thing to make an object invisible, like Harry Potter’s mythical cloak. But scientists have made an entire event impossible to see. They have invented a time masker.
Think of it as an art heist that takes place before your eyes and surveillance cameras. You don’t see the thief strolling into the museum, taking the painting down or walking away, but he did. It’s not just that the thief is invisible – his whole activity is.
What scientists at Cornell University did was on a much smaller scale, both in terms of events and time. It happened so quickly that it’s not even a blink of an eye. Their time cloak lasts an incredibly tiny fraction of a fraction of a second. They hid an…
Texas Scientist’s Invisibility Cloak Prototype
The device created by Ali Aliev, a researcher at University of Texas Dallas, uses threadlike carbon nanotubes. When rapidly heated, they create a mirage effect similar in principle to a stretch of highway on a very hot day. Perfect for keeping a small object hidden:
Space-Time Cloak Possible, Could It Make Events Disappear Too?
Could an entire bank heist take place at an open bank with no one seeing it? The National Geographic reports:
It’s no illusion: Science has found a way to make not just objects but entire events disappear, experts say.
According to new research by British physicists, it’s theoretically possible to create a material that can hide an entire bank heist from human eyes and surveillance cameras.
“The concepts are basically quite simple,” said Paul Kinsler, a physicist at Imperial College London, who created the idea with colleagues Martin McCall and Alberto Favaro.
Unlike invisibility cloaks — some of which have been made to work at very small scales — the event cloak would do more than bend light around an object. Instead this cloak would use special materials filled with metallic arrays designed to adjust the speed of light passing through.
Invisibility Cloak Could Be Coming Soon With The Use Of ‘Metamaterial’
With the invention of the iPad and driverless cars, technology has begun mimicking the images of old “futuristic” sci-fi films. Now our future may hold some inventions influenced by “magical” films, such as the Harry Potter series. BBC News reports:
Scientists in the UK have demonstrated a flexible film that represents a big step toward the “invisibility cloak” made famous by Harry Potter.
The film contains tiny structures that together form a “metamaterial”, which can, among other tricks, manipulate light to render objects invisible. Flexible metamaterials have been made before, but only work for light of a colour far beyond that which we see.
Physicists have hailed the approach a “huge step forward”. The bendy approach for visible light is reported in the New Journal of Physics.
Metamaterials work by interrupting and channelling the flow of light at a fundamental level; in a sense they can be seen as bouncing light waves around in a prescribed…
Invisibility Cloak Made Of Silk
Photo: Gerd A.T. Müller
Discovery News reports that silk, a material used for thousands of years, could be the key to creating a soft, Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak:
For thousands of years people have worn shimmering silk to stand out in a crowd. Within the next few years people could wear silk to become invisible in a a crowd.
For the first time ever, scientists have created an invisibility cloak made from silk, and coated in gold.
The new metamaterial, as invisibility cloaks and their kin are technically called, only works on relatively long terahertz waves (a region of the electromagnetic spectrum between radio and infrared light), but the Boston-area scientists who developed the technology think that silk could work as an invisibility cloak at much smaller wavelengths, even in the visible range.
The research could lead to a wide range of optically unique materials for use in biomedicine or defense.
“This is an unusual angle for…
Scientists Show Off Real Invisibility Cloak
Although the invisibility cloak can be created on a small scale, it would be impossible to recreate a larger version with the knowledge we have today. Image: Science/AAAS
We’ve reported on real-world invisibility cloaks before, but according to Discovery News such a thing actually exists now, albeit on a very small scale:
European researchers have taken the world a step closer to fictional wizard Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak after they made an object disappear, a study published Thursday in the journal Science showed.
Scientists from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and Imperial College London used their cloak, made using photonic crystals with a structure resembling piles of wood, to conceal a small bump on a gold surface, they wrote in Science.
“It’s kind of like hiding a small object underneath a carpet — except this time the carpet also disappears,” they said.
invisible soldier“We put an object under a microscopic structure, a little like a reflective…
