Slashdot Mirror
Cloak of Invisibility Coming Soon
davaguco writes "It seems that we will finally be able to make ourselves invisible" It seems like this story resurfaces every few months and then gets submitted a zillion times so here it is. Personally I'm still waiting for my cloak of evasion. 20% miss chance is awesome.
The article doesn't have any pictures; one can be found here.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I want my Acme rocket roller skates!
I drank what? -- Socrates
To create a Somebody Else's Problem field? People are quite good at ignoring what they think isn't important (or what they don't want to recognize), so if you could find a way to convince people to ignore something, it would be just as effective as actual invisibility.
I really find it hard to believe that the "Nothing for you to see here. Please move along." i just saw is accidental, some meta-humour by Taco perhaps?
I'll believe it when I see it.
/dev/random
Actually, according to D&D 3.5 rules, if you are invisible (as with improved invisibility), but are detected (ie enemies know where you are due to listen checks and/or maybe you just cast a spell, etc) you get a concealment bonus of 50%, which is better than that 20% evasion that you are talking about. So given a cloak of evasion or a cloak of invisibility, I would much rather have the invisibility, thank you very much. Even with regular invisibility I think it's a 25% concealment bonus -- still better than 20%.
From the end of TFA: So far the researchers have only worked through the mathematics to prove that the device is plausible. The practicalities of making one have yet to be solved.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Sounds like a rehash of a phase conjugate mirror.
m
http://www.cheniere.org/books/analysis/pc_wave.ht
You pick up a tattered cape (K unpaid). Only $250 for you.
You put on the tattered cape.
Suddenly, you can see through yourself.
The nurse hits.
You can not remove the cloak, it seems to be cursed.
The nurse hits.
The floor is too hard to dig here.
Really attack Wengretik the shopkeeper?
Wengretik strikes at thin air.
The nurse hits.
Wengretik hits. Wengretik hits.
You die.
Do you realize how wrong that sounds?
Didn't Jack Bauer already employ the "hoodie of invisibility" a couple of weeks (hours?) ago when sneaking onto the airplane?
These people have looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
I must not be a big enough nerd. I thought the cloak of evasion was something that helped you pay less taxes.
No, but a mosaic of microscopic convex mirrors might. The effect is such that you get the kind of "invisibility" that a chameleon does; the material would refract (or in the case of mirrors reflect) a blending of colours from surrounding objects, such that when an object is motionless it becomes very hard to pick out from the background due to the lack of contrast. It might be similar in appearance to the "invisibility" you see in the Predator movies. Not 100% invisible, but more of a shimmering, blended-in look, only it would not be transparent. If an object were to move behind the camoflauged object, you would immediately be able to pick it out from the background and target it. That's my guess, anyhow.
;)
A single mirror wouldn't cut it - if a flat mirror, you'd see a singular object from elsewhere in the region, or if a convex mirror, you'd see yourself in the mirror, along with your background. It would stand right out from the background, like an AC troll in an otherwise-reasonable discussion.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Motorcyclists have had this power far longer that slashdot AC's.
I assume it sounds wrong because he's talking about eating a mathematical constant right? ;D
most slashdotters can make themselves invisible simply by entering a room
(you're nodding your head right now, aren't you?)
Prof Milton's team calculated that when certain objects are placed next to superlenses, the light bouncing off them is essentially erased by light reflecting off the superlens, making the object invisible.
Wouldn't that make the cloak appear like a big black void of light?? Making things "invisible" requires light from the objects behind the cloak to pass through it.
From the article:
... :)
The cloaking device relies on recently discovered materials used to make superlenses that make light behave in a highly unusual way. Instead of having a positive refractive index - the property which makes light bend as it passes through a prism or water - the materials have a negative refractive index, which effectively makes light travel backwards.
Trust scientists to come up with a complicated term for "mirror"
If it only blocks one wavelength of light, you just paint the object that colour.
Can you seen me now? .... no? good.
Can you see me now? .... no? Good.
Can you see me now? .... no? Good.
My Dad worked on creating "custom fog" for the Navy. He studied propagation, e.g. this civilian paper. Then he developed a method of modifying droplet size distribution in fogs over the ocean. The end product (details classified) allows ships to create a fog bank on demand over large bodies of water (within 1 or 2 hours) that blocks enemy frequencies, but has "holes" for friendly scanner frequencies. The details include taking temperature/humidity/droplet profiles by altitude of the atmosphere over the target area.
All of these "cloaking" stories suffer from basically the same problem. Making something invisible is much, much more complicated than blocking light, or cancelling light, or anything like that.
The article says, rather imprecisely, "when certain objects are placed next to superlenses, the light bouncing off them is essentially erased by light reflecting off the superlens, making the object invisible."
But "erasing" the light reflecting off an object doesn't make it invisible, any more than painting a car black... even matte black... makes it invisible.
In a dark room, if you cover a light with a black box it becomes invisible. When viewing a star from the earth, if it is occulted by, say, the moon passing between you and the object, it becomes invisible. If I pull a red cloak over myself, covering myself completely, you can no longer see me. You cannot tell who I am and if I stand very still perhaps you cannot tell that I am not a statue, so, in a sense, I have become invisible.
But, to become invisible in the sense of H. G. Wells' "The Invisible Man," or a Star Trek cloaking device, or James Bond's invisible car, or what have you, requires much more than "not being able to see" the object. It means not being able to detect the presence of the object... under real-world lighting conditions, with real-world scenes _behind_ the object, and from more than one vantage point at the same time.
That last one is the problem with many of these schemes. It doesn't do any good to make an object invisible when viewed by your right eye if there are "matte lines" around it when viewed with your left eye. It doesn't do a lot of good to make an object invisible as viewed from one soldier if it is visible to everyone else in the platoon.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Radio waves (which RADAR uses) are simply light waves. Radar works by bouncing the waves off an object. If this device refracts the light in such a way that it pass around the object without reflecting off of it, then the radio waves would not be able to return a signal to the radar station.
Slashdotters already have the power of invisibility.
It only works against female humans for some reason though.
It is more like a cursed potion of invisibility from females if you really want to describe the artifact.
I suspect that a 12 pack of mountian dew a day combined with excessive cheeto consumption metabolizes
this potion inside the slashdotters body.
music lover since 1969
I actually think the trade was cloak for a certain class of Bird of Prey, not warp drive. However, the Vulcans made first contact with Earth, not the Romulans. The Romulans are a sister race to the Vulcans. They both evolved on Vulcan, and then during the Time of Sarek, when Vulcans were coming very close to the point of destroying themselves through constant war, Sarek, the Vulcan "Father of Logic", convinced the majority of the population to learn to suppress their emotions, a (comparatively) small sect decided to leave the planet on several sublight spacecraft rather than supress their emotions. This is referred to by the Vulcans as "The Sundering." In TOS this was initially a closely guarded secret of the Vulcans. These sundered cousins eventually settled on the twin planets Romulus and Remus, and through generations of genetic drift became a separate species. If you look carefully, Romulans have slightly less pointed ears and more prominent brow ridges than their Vulcan cousins. For generations, the Vulcans did not know what had become of their sundered cousins. Sometime after the sundering is when Vulcans developed the warp drive. When the Romulans finally landed, their ships were in very poor shape, and they didn't have much in the way of raw materials or production methods, and were thus sent back to a sort of stone age. When The Federation made first contact with the warlike romulans, neither species had developed warp drive. The first Romulan war was carried out with sublight spacecraft.