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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...
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.
true invisibility is impossible
Not really. It can be done and probably will be done some day. It is just not as simple or work the same way bad sci-fi shows portray it.
and even if it was possible, we'd be blind while we were invisible.
Yes, but this is a solvable problem as well. Bend visible wavelengths of light around, but not infrared and wear infrared goggles. Or bend light around everywhere except a pinhole too small to be visible, but which is used to generate a view outside the cloak like a pinhole camera does. Or transmit an image from a small device outside the cloak. The hard part is redirecting the light properly. Once that is solved, the rest is a lesser problem.
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.
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?
Of course, if you bend all light around you, there's no light hitting your eyes. That's BTW also the main fault of the invisibility concept in movies and stories: The people get completely invisible, but they can still see just like normal. But to see like normal, the light has to be fist bent by your eye's lense, and then absorbed by your eye's retina. Which should make at least your eyes visible quite well. Of course that's no problem with magic (magic can override all laws of nature anyway), but it's clearly a problem if the invisibility shall be achieved by a physical effect.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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...
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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
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.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
If only the redundant mod didn't have negative connotations...
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.
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.