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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.
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
/. tells me there's nothing to see.
A story on invisibility, and
This is Mr. E.R. Bradshaw of Napier Court, Black Lion Road London SE5. He can not be seen. Now I am going to ask him to stand up. Mr. Bradshaw will you stand up please
In the distance Mr Bradshaw stands up. There is a loud gunshot as Mr Bradshaw is shot in the stomach. He crumples to the ground
This demonstrates the value of not being seen.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
"I'm invisible!" convincingly enough. It worked for Burt in Soap.
Whippersnappers: Look it up.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Let's be honest here, whatever you think of her acting skills, making her invisible is ill-advised.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
All it takes is a suitably large gravity well. Black holes have been doing this since the dawn of time.
But seriously, all the new light bending materials I've been reading about look neat, but seem to be focused on certain wavelengths. Broad spectrum invisibility will likely be pretty tough.
You mean there's more to invisibility than just talking to women?
I can look into a mirror...
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.
Sure, who would find a human-sized-walking-lightbulb suspicious?
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.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Let's be honest here, whatever you think of her acting skills, making her invisible is ill-advised.
I can think of a few scenerios involving me, Jessica Alba and an invisibilty device, but none involve making *her* invisible.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
If a device is made to either redirect light, or detect light in the environment, absorb it and then project light to match it, then there will be some delay necissary in the process, because you can't send out information before you observe it.
Don't know how significant it would be, but that could result in a slight disjointed projection of the area behind you if you were made 'invisible' with such a device, most observable when one moves.
Thus, the more apt movie reference would be Predator.
Ryan Fenton
The only part of Jessica Alba that should be invisible is her clothes.
If you want subtle acting and believable characterization, you can go watch Meryl Streep. In the meantime, I'll be watching Alba with the sound off.
Yes, they've made 15 prototypes so far. They just can't get past the testing stage. Keep losing them.
I think Monty Python made being invisible unnecessary with their "How not to be seen" skit.
Just don't hide behind a single shrub in the middle of a field...
-FL
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?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
And this experiment will be done with a ship in Philadelphia?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
... 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.
So all I gotta do is carry a black hole in my pocket. That's gotta suck...
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
I wonder if this is BadAnalogyGuy in disguise? :)
A most people will have actually seen water flowing around a rock in a creek or a stream will attest, the water doesn't just leave as if nothing was there: there's all sorts of turbulence, especially leaving visibile waves on the surface and even a trail of bubbles if there is sufficient flow to cause aeration.
The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand million, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a billion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it. The ultra-famous sciento-magician Effrafax of Wug once bet his life that, given a year, he could render the great megamountain Magramal entirely invisible. Having spent most of the year jiggling around with immense LuxO-Valves and Refracto-Nullifiers and Spectrum-Bypass-O-Matics, he realized, with nine hours to go, that he wasn't going to make it. So, he and his friends, and his friends' friends, and his friends' friends' friends, and his friends' friends' friends' friends, and some rather less good friends of theirs who happened to own a major stellar trucking company, put in what now is widely recognized as being the hardest night's work in history, and, sure enough, on the following day, Magramal was no longer visible. Effrafax lost his bet - and therefore his life - simply because some pedantic adjudicating official noticed (a) that when walking around the area that Magramal ought to be he didn't trip over or break his nose on anything, and (b) a suspicious-looking extra moon. The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what's more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural disposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else's Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there. -Douglas Adams
Well, that's because as anyone who's read Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy could tell you, they're doing it wrong. You don't need to turn something invisible, which is a horribly complicated thing and needs lots of energy. You just have to turn it into Somebody Else's Problem, in which case the human brain will just filter it out.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I can think of a few scenerios involving me, Jessica Alba and an invisibilty device, but none involve making *her* invisible.
/. meme?
Uh-oh. Do I detect the beginnings of a new "Natalie Portman"
The problem with asking Jessica Alba to play the Invisible Woman is that she's not someone we want to be invisible in the first place -- it's pretty hard to "suspend your disbelief" when you're busy hoping her invisibility powers fail but her costume's function perfectly...
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
"I'm invisible!" convincingly enough.
Actually, speaking isn't required. The actual technique is waving your hands in front of you and then snap your fingers.
Of course, it doesn't work when you're wet.
I gave a live demonstration of personal invisibility in high school physics class. I simply didn't show up that day. I got an A++. It was brilliant.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
Just follow the average slashdotter to a night club.
Uh-oh. Do I detect the beginnins of a new "Uh-oh. Do I detect the beginnings of a new $existing_meme /. meme" /. meme?
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
If only the redundant mod didn't have negative connotations...
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.
Mutual Assured Destruction has kept the nuclear powers-that-be in check for 60 years. A country that feels it has the technology to intercept incoming missles, and massively surprise its enemy (using stealth as discussed in this article), ... well that country might just decide it has to strike first, before its enemy achieves similar capabilities and makes the same judgement call.
Think about it. Your military advisers tell you that 1) you can intercept incoming missles (even from subs), and 2) deliver missles without being detected. In essence, they are saying you could launch a preemptive nuclear strike with mostly political, not military, consequences.
You are also advised that in a few years your enemy will have sufficient tecnology to do the same.
Suddenly M.A.D. is out the window, and replaced with a "whomever strikes first wins" scenario.
Put three guys in a room (U.S., China, Russia) blindfolded. Tell them the first that leaves the room will live, and the rest will die, but if they all stay put, they will all live. Then tell them there is unlimited power for the first one out the door. What do you think will happen?
Even if you don't pass IR into the invisibility field, there's still likely to be detectable elements of the heat signature or other items radiated/expelled from the cloak that it still wouldn't render you undetectable. Ie, if I made a vehicle visually invisible its still likely to emit exhaust or a big EMF field from electric motors, people breathe, exhaling heat and CO2, etc.
"Invisibility" as defined as not providing a reflected-light image is the least significant part of the problem without also providing some way of eliminating other physical detection. It might be useful if you were cloaking a sealed, inanimate object that had no EMF or other signatures detectable, but I'm not sure it'd be cost effective against other low-tech methods for simply hiding something or otherwise camouflaging it.
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.
What if only her clothes are made invisible?
None of this explains how to make things appear to be two hobos fighting over a wheel of cheese.
I'm gonna need a spec.
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.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
>What's the sound of one hand fapping... wait... nevermind
Fixed.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Could tanks still fire their weapons if coated in this?
Come on lad, Birds of Prey cannot fire when they are cloaked. That's Trek 101, basically.
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.
Only on Slashdot is this "insightful"