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Scientists Closer To Invisibility Cloak
Aviran was one of many readers to submit news of a just-announced development in the ongoing quest to develop a working invisibility cloak, writing: "Scientists say they are a step closer to developing materials that could render people and objects invisible. Researchers have demonstrated for the first time they were able to cloak three-dimensional objects using artificially engineered materials that redirect light around the objects. Previously, they only have been able to cloak very thin two-dimensional objects" Reader bensafrickingenius adds a link to coverage at the Times Online, and notes that "the world's two leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, are expected to report the results this week." Tjeerd adds a link to a Reuters' story carried by Scientific American.
I would have claimed 1st, but someone appears to be cloaked.
Vescere bracis meis.
The lead engineer on the project added "Our engineers are currently testing the cloak extensively in women's locker rooms, on their speeding cars, to sneak into class late, to hide from bumbling crooks, and in other comic scenarios which have, to date, only been seen in lame movies. Our hope is to perfect the technology to the point where an engineer can sneak up on the bully that tormented him in high school and kick him in the testicles." After detailing the particulars of the complex optic engineering of the project, he concluded with "The day is now in sight where we will have a cloaking device truly worthy of an early-90's Kirk Cameron movie--or, God willing, even a Michael J. Fox made-for-TV movie from the 80's."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Scientists closer to fulfilling fantasy of hiding in girl's locker room.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
At first I was going to complain about the lack of pictures, but then I realized they wouldn't be too revealing anyway.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Very thin 2D objects eh? Nice.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080811-meta-material-does-not-render-anything-invisible.html Oh Ars.
Knows everything about nothing and nothing about everything.
An obvious use will be from a military aspect. I wonder about how this technology will be received by various insurgents in our numerous war campaigns. Imagine a small troop deployment vanishing and reappearing in front of a goat-herder turned freedom fighter. I don't know if he would cut-n-run or stand fast to fight the "demons"...
"the world's two leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, are expected to report the results this week."
You can find the Nature abstract here. And if you have a subscription, you can read the full research and see the data they collected from experiments.
According to the Ars Technica article on this, the Science link will be here.
There seems to be a few more papers and articles on this but if you're interested you can search for optical metamaterials with negative refractive indexes.
My work here is dung.
"His cloak is perfect... no tachyon emissions, no residual antiprotons." on a serious note, would this not be vulnerable to infra-red cameras?
Any problem caused by a tank can be solved by a tank.
This was posted in Pharyngula yesterday. The usual prescient commenters noted that nowhere on the researchers' pages was there active speculation about an "invisibility cloak", and it was probably just some reporters going wacky over the possibilities. http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/08/get_your_invisibility_cloak_he.php
This story has popped up here and there in the press today, but when I actually RTFA the actual breakthrough is negative refractive index materials, in the visible spectrum.
The application is not invisible tanks and infantry, but microscopy.
See here for photoshopped image that enhances the misleading headline http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7553061.stm
And the locker room will be full of girls wearing invisibility cloaks.
Sign me up for a blessed +5 waterproof one.
lol: You see no door there!
Yeah, they probably turned out the lights. See? Ha! no you don't! We're MIT! Take that you Stanford weenies!
I mean, I can see right through it.
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
To get my laptop past US customs without having it 'confiscated'...
Seriously though - how long do you think until any tech like this is restricted to military use only ? If you actually do achieve human-level visible-spectrum invisibility (even if you have to move very slowly to avoid being caught by reflection shifts and such and have to avoid anybody with IR) - it will be banned for civilian use like a shot. The people who want it for 'hunting purposes' will kick up a fuss but we couldn't take the risk of an invisible man sneaking into the white house and farting on the president's desk now could we ?
Okay... I tried to become serious but I failed... let's try this again:
Considering the real security implications of true invisibility from the naked eye - do you think it will be banned/restricted ? Do you think it SHOULD be banned or restricted ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I'll believe it when I see it.
now they just can't find the blasted thing.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I know everyone is making with the jokes,but I for one really don't like the idea of this. Yet again,we have scientists seeing if they CAN do something,rather than if they SHOULD do something. As aggressive as the US has been lately,does anyone really want gunships,fighter jets,and whole squads of special forces rendered invisible? Not to mention what a powerful weapon for "regime change" this would be. No country would be able to protect their leaders when you could set up a sniper a couple of blocks away from them without ever being seen. All around,with such a huge potential for abuse and no positive applications that I can see,it just sounds like a giant bad idea. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Don't know about the patent, but I can claim prior art. I have an invisible cloak that I wear all the time at home. I used to wear it in public, but kept getting arrested.
Is there an emperor out there looking for an outfit for a parade? I have a spare that I'm willing to sell.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
No, the light gets bent around it perfectly. The light coming in from the background enters the metamaterial, is bent around to the other side of the object and exits it just as if it had passed through the area enclosed by the metamaterial without any obstacles. Ideally, there is no way that an observer could tell the difference with the exception of knowing the time of travel. The path through the metamaterial is longer than that of the perceived path. I would think that if the shrouded object was in front of a large reflector of a known distance from a radar like source, then the added delay in the signal would add a very small amount of distance to the location of the reflector. An astute observer with very good equipment may notice a change in the position of the radar returns as a cloaked object crosses through. There are further exceptions that are introduced the more you start to use the theory in practice, the biggest problem being that the current solutions would require that an object be encased in a spherical shell of metamaterial, not the most convenient situation. In addition, the current crop of metamaterials have very small bandwidths, making the cloaked object perceptible to other detection methods. If you cloaked for the visible (and actually could cover the entire visible region) then you would probably be easily picked up via radar or infrared imaging.
I know everyone is making with the jokes,but I for one really don't like the idea of this. Yet again,we have scientists seeing if they CAN do something,rather than if they SHOULD do something. As aggressive as the US has been lately,does anyone really want gunships,fighter jets,and whole squads of special forces rendered invisible?
Hear hear! Perhaps we should revise the Geneva convention. From now on, all snipers must jump up and down waving their arms and yelling "Look at me" before taking their shot. All submarines must have PA systems that continually blast Rick Astley music when they're submerged. All spy drones must broadcast Flight of the Valkyries when on a mission.
I understand your point but, as long as the world has weapons, governments will be spending money on improving them (range/cloaking/accuracy/flexibility/etc.) If you go to the government leaders who control weapons funding and ask them "Should this weapon be improved?", once they're done laughing the answer will certainly be "Yes." And, assuming that this product would be fielded for military use as you imply, it would be seen as a measure to both increase our effectiveness on the battlefield and protect our troops. That would change the government's answer from "Yes" to "Hell yes." Right? Wrong? Doesn't matter - just the world we live in.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
While we are limiting ourselves from creating an invisibility cloak do we have to ban warfare at night and stealth aircraft? I mean, those things just aren't fair. In fact let's get rid of guns, camouflage, body armor, aircraft, and submarines. We can settle things with a boxing match. Technological advances in warfare has continued for centuries now. We've been down this path before with other technology but I wouldn't be too worried. Just as devices like these are created others are created to defeat them. It is the natural progression of weapons.
Time makes more converts than reason
Even a perfect optical cloak would still be detectable in many ways. Bear in mind that wearing a perfect optical cloak will render you blind. This means you'll have to navigate using other methods. You could wear infrared goggles, but that means you're visible in infrared light and therefore detectable. You could make yourself invisible to all wavelengths, perhaps, and then navigate by sonar. A microphone will pick that up easily enough. Likewise radar. You could, I suppose, navigate via a remote camera signal that displays your surroundings on a screen located inside the cloaking device. That would be disorienting but one could probably train for it or use a VR representation of your surroundings. Assuming, then, that you can obfuscate the video signal and avoid emitting any light yourself, then you'll be foiled by a cheap fog curtain at the entrance of a building. Or, if you want to be more practical about it, a metal detector. If the target of your assassination attempt is outdoors, you'd best hope that there's no precipitation, smoke, smog, or fog. And you won't be able just to point and shoot, either. Remember, you're blind.
Even assuming a partial optical cloak that lets you be invisible "enough" (perhaps in shadows) and still see somehow, you'll still be detectable. If this technology becomes available, technology to defeat it will, too. Off the top of my head... a sonar or radar (preferably sonar, I think humans are transparent to radar) system that compares the visual or infrared spectrum with the echos. You probably wouldn't even need a human to operate it; a computer could simply find the discrepancies between the images and report them. A detection system like this would probably be affordable even to smaller nations. If you wanted to get really paranoid, you could even have the computer automatically target human-shaped echo discrepancies and fire long range or remote tasers at them, killing the cloak as soon as it is spotted.
Or, save yourselves all the trouble, sprinkle sand everywhere and just watch for footprints. Or hold all public events in the middle of huge, 2-inch deep lakes.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Resistance to an idea won't prevent its reality.
This technology will ultimately be available, and mankind will never learn to cope with it until it is a reality.
If we hadn't pushed so hard for nuclear weapons (which have killed far far fewer people than, say, firebombs or religion), we wouldn't have had the cleanest safest source of energy on the planet as soon as we did. (Note: windmills are a joke, and solar panels don't last nearly long enough for their initial cost.)
If only there were a way to make some dastardly weapon out of geothermal power...
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
>Just as devices like these are created others are created to defeat them. It is the natural progression of weapons.
You mean tools, not weapons. Many things that have potential use as weapons have non-weapon uses as well. It's only a weapon when it's used as one. Otherwise it's a tool. A knife is a tool when you use it to slice bread.
I don't think so. One may absorb some light without having to reflect any.
everything in moderation
Then you'd be a dark spot, or two dark eye shaped spots.
--why?
That's easy. Point your AK-47 at someone else and say "Slice that loaf of bread."
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.