How to Become Invisible

mdm42 writes "Looks like a theoretical physicist at St. Andrews University in Scotland believes that invisibility may be possible. And its not going to be a potion or a cloak, but will come in the form of a device. " Let's just hope that when the invisible woman arrives, she's played more convincingly than Jessica Alba.

Comments

true invisibility is impossible

[preppypoof]

and even if it was possible, we'd be blind while we were invisible. invisible means that there is no light to reflect off of us so that other people can see us. however, if there is no light to reflect off of us, there is no light to reflect off of our eyes, which means we can't see.

Re:true invisibility is impossible

[Chmcginn]

It would depend on the conditions, though - in a rural setting, letting 95% of the light through would be fine at any reasonable distance (20-50 ft or so) - the slight distortion of colors or bending of a line isn't too easy to spot when colors are gradient and lines are curves.

In an urban setting, though, you'd be more likely to notice the distortion around a 95% invisible object if it was passing between you and a straight line, like the edge of a building, or making one portion of the car across the street appear a different color.

But combined with current stealth techniques (sticking to shadows, stay in buildings, etc.) this would be a tremendous advantage to the equipped force. Probably not quite as much as, say, power armor, but DARPA's got money going into that, too.

Re:Doesn't work

[andrewman327]

Old news! Wired ran this story three years ago. The technology isn't any more advanced now than it was then. Military.com published an extremely informative guide to invisibility last year. Much better than TFA.

Grammar Police

[Anonymous Coward]

> ... she's played more convincingly then Jessica Alba.

It's 'than' not 'then'.

In Case Your Browser Can't Render the Site...

[eno2001]

...properly. Mine couldn't (Firefox 1.5 on Gentoo Linux). I got a bunch of screwed up CSS or something because there was text on top of text. Here's the story, what little there is of a story:

By Patricia Reaney

LONDON (Reuters) - It's unlikely to occur by swallowing a pill or donning a special cloak, but invisibility could be possible in the not too distant future, according to research published on Monday.

Harry Potter accomplished it with his magic cloak. H.G. Wells' Invisible Man swallowed a substance that made him transparent.

But Dr Ulf Leonhardt, a theoretical physicist at St Andrews University in Scotland, believes the most plausible example is the Invisible Woman, one of the Marvel Comics superheroes in the "Fantastic Four".

"She guides light around her using a force field in this cartoon. This is what could be done in practice," Leonhardt told Reuters in an interview. "That comes closest to what engineers will probably be able to do in the future."

Invisibility is an optical illusion that the object or person is not there. Leonhardt uses the example of water circling around a stone. The water flows in, swirls around the stone and then leaves as if nothing was there.

"If you replace the water with light then you would not see that there was something present because the light is guided around the person or object. You would see the light coming from the scenery behind as if there was nothing in front," he said.

In the research published in the New Journal of Physics, Leonhardt described the physics of theoretical devices that could create invisibility. It is a follow-up paper to an earlier study published in the journal Science.

"What the Invisible Woman does is curve space around herself to bend light. What these devices would do is to mimic that curved space," he said.

Re:How not to be seen.

[Jamil Karim]

For those who might not understand the joke - it's a Monty Python reference.

Re:talking to women

[elrous0]

"You mean there's more to invisibility than meets the eye?"

No, that's the Transformers.

Thank you folks, I'll be here all week.

-Eric

Re:But what about inside?

[Anonymous Coward]

it'd just be machines developed to notice it that found anything

And other people wearing IR goggles....