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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.