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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.
But then I presume that the person inside the field would not be able to see a thing, if you were inside the field force you would be inside a black "universe". Interesting uh?
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... or does anyone else hope this information would become classified if it ever became a reality? If the technology was ever released (or the specifics and not the actual tech) there could be potential for multi million dollar heists and no one would be able to find out. Heck, the way they're talking, it's ALL light that would be manipulated, meaning there would be absolutely no way to track a person who was using it.
We do movie Physics presentations at my school each semester and Fan4 was one of them last semester. The calculations were comical and we showed that for her to possess the needed gravity, she would have more mass than our planet in Alba's frame. Furthermore, she would of been attracting (with gravity) everything around her. As far as Physics, this movie was one of the worst.
She must be a TIGER in the bathroom... I mean bedroom... ~Ryan
Shhhh, just because your shiny hat is invisible to most people doesn't mean it's invisible to THEM!
There's a crazy guy in my old hometown who leaps up and down in the city centre screaming "I'm invisible!". Of course, everyone completely ignores him, which fuels his fantasy that he really is...
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5230/5230.txt
I think we should pursue H.G. Wells' theory:
"You make the glass invisible by putting it into a liquid of nearly
the same refractive index; a transparent thing becomes invisible if
it is put in any medium of almost the same refractive index. And if
you will consider only a second, you will see also that the powder
of glass might be made to vanish in air, if its refractive index
could be made the same as that of air; for then there would be no
refraction or reflection as the light passed from glass to air."
"...the whole fabric of a man except the red of his blood and the black
pigment of hair, are all made up of transparent, colourless tissue.
So little suffices to make us visible one to the other. For the
most part the fibres of a living creature are no more opaque than
water."
This is very different tech to using a webcam/display to create the illusion of invisibility. This method uses exotic nanophotonic materials, such as arrays of tiny gold pillars which cause the material to have a negative refractive index, thus bending light in very strange ways compared to standard optical materials (the opposite direction to what you would expect). By creating a sheet of this material to the requiired size and with the optical properties it will redirect radiation around the object it is covering with no apparent distortion. almost like a bundle of optical fibres redirecting light around the object. Do a search for nanophotonics and photonic metamaterials for more details on this very interesting and extremely popular topic for research in nonlinear optics. Negative refraction can also be used for other things such as beating the diffraction limit in microscopy and may eventually find its way into the production of smaller transistors/components for microelectronic devices.
I understand that that is the technology behind this, but can you imagine it being used in the field? Could soldiers run around and shoot while wearing these suits? Could tanks still fire their weapons if coated in this? What happens when they got dirty? It has been known to happen in wartime. Practically I think that the ghillie suit is superior in war when people do not want to be seen.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
In some standoff in the middle of nowhere the ATF used one of these. The vehicle had fiber optics on pointed on each side. It made the vehicle invisible (the movement basically looked like heat waves on the horizon). They drove an armored personnel carrier within 20ft of the front door. lets just say it suprised the hell out of the gunman standing by the front door.
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One thing people always forget is how much social co-operation is involved when moving around/though other people. People don't try and walk though you in a crowd. On a battlefield, you don't shoot in a particular direction because a friendly is there. You don't change lanes on the motorway because you know there's a car present or is overtaking you.
Individual invisibility breaks these cooperative behaviors. If there's an opening in a crowd, someone will probably try and use it. Soldiers/tanks will shoot at targets without respect for their invisible buddy in the line of fire. How many times have you changed course in a crowd and bumped into someone because you thought that direction was clear? An invisible person would have to be continuously watching everyone around him to dodge out of their way.