Invisibility Cloak: Scientists Engineer Material That Can Bend Visible Light Around Objects

The Times Online reports that scientists have developed a material that can bend visible light around objects:

INVISIBILITY devices, long the realm of science fiction and fantasy, have moved closer after scientists engineered a material that can bend visible light around objects.

The breakthrough could lead to systems for rendering anything from people to large objects, such as tanks and ships, invisible to the eye - although this is still years off.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, whose work is funded by the American military, have engineered materials that can control light's direction of travel. The world's two leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, are expected to report the results this week.

It follows earlier work at Imperial College London that achieved similar results with microwaves. Like light, these are a form of electromagnetic radiation but their longer wave-length makes them far easier to manipulate. Achieving the same effect with visible light is a big advance.

Keep reading here.

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Related: CERN: Large Hadron Collider To Fire First Proton-Smash Ray Next Month

Comments

[Marlyn]

10:07 PM on 08/13/2008

I can't wait to see it. Oh wait ... I won't be able to.

[Jared137]

09:07 AM on 08/11/2008

Great, but we are still dumping embryos in the garbage on a daily basis instead of using them to cure spinal cord injuries. Shameful.

[Oilygarch]

05:18 AM on 08/11/2008

One nation, under G-d, invisible...

[JScott]

02:33 AM on 08/11/2008

The thwarting method will now be a very large can of spray paint in a bright color
or a shoot a big bag of flour (per cartoons).

[Arguman]

04:33 AM on 08/11/2008

lol. indeed.

[Oilygarch]

05:11 AM on 08/11/2008

I must agree, that would work. And it would be so absolutely low-cost & low-tech.

In comparison the performance / cost ratio would be almost infinite.

It never ceases to amaze us how after we plunge gazillions of tax-dollars into such heavy high-tech stealth endeavors, somebody with hardly any tech and an extremely low budget can simply ram our own airplanes into our own buildings and call it a day.

Well, the bag of flour HAS doubled in price, much due to the price of oil. -& off-shore drilling won't cut it either.

[PepeLepew]

01:54 AM on 08/11/2008

Aw, man, you have to admit, this is wicked cool!

[MaracaKabob]

01:47 AM on 08/11/2008

Great, now turn the thing off and show me where I left my keys.

[Oilygarch]

05:16 AM on 08/11/2008

Shhhh! Don't let the cat out of the bag.

This technology has surreptitiously been piloted on keys and socks for years!!

[sirpatty79]

12:06 AM on 08/11/2008

What?!?!? This is AWESOME!!

[Lion24]

10:58 PM on 08/10/2008

Maybe they could make Dick Cheney invisible?

Then he wouldn't need that secure, undisclosed location.

[Oilygarch]

11:18 PM on 08/10/2008

What's the sense in making him invisible if he's still in power? Wouldn't that just make him more indiscriminately more powerful? There's already enough he gets away with. Imagine him getting away with more?

[knighthowl]

07:19 AM on 08/11/2008

I think the stench would give him away.

[Oilygarch]

08:04 PM on 08/10/2008

Counter-measures would include clustered distributed triangulative arrays of phase distortion sensors. Ukraine just sold an aspect of this technology to the Iranians, but you won't see much of that in the news either. The Czecs already have it too.

I'm sure that neither the Yank nor Brit contractors or civil servants working on these technologies would be willing to admit these shortcomings to their funding grantors.

What about Taxpayers?? None are aware how their money is really being used anyhow, so, ignorance would appear to be bliss here.

There are yet other technologies that would see through all this, but one branch of scientific research does not like to muddy the rice-bowl with other schools of thought. Still, in this day and age, to think holistically would turn the approval of government POMs and fiscal planning into a bowl of dirty rice.

[Oilygarch]

07:50 PM on 08/10/2008

As such, cloaking would only be most effective in the direction from which the perceived surveillance and reconnaissance would originate because any spacial intensity anomalies resulting from efforts to over-normalize effects imposed by the meta-material itself would need to be vectored in a direction away from the source of recon or surveillance.

This is all assuming such a source were to be punctual and not multi-source or multi-path. Such approaches would prove disruptive to the objective of invisibility, unless cloaking were to take place from all angles and excess the excess energy used for perceived space intensity normalization could be diverted inwards and then quantum entangled to appear dissociatively totally outside the object under cloak. For that capability, a minimum of another 30 years beyond the original objective of 2020 would likely be in order.

[Oilygarch]

07:42 PM on 08/10/2008

Aside from there being a time-delay, different colors are diverted at different rates, so a continuous phase-noise distortion would become apparent throughout the spectrum. The meta-material would absorb colors at different rates thereby also distorting spacial propagation intensity. For a medium to treat all colors about the same, the Q would need to drop. For a Q to be that low, the cloaking system would now become not-so-transparent, or ghosty. To make up for the ghostyness and amplify for losses in the low Q, additional energy would need to be generated from behind the cloaking field thereby potentially revealing yet another energy imbalance.

All of these anomalies would have a cascading effect which would make a device under cloak readily apparent to those who would know what to detect, classify and track. These methods would only fool the lay and under-priviledged.

[RepugsOut08]

07:37 PM on 08/10/2008

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, whose work is funded by the American military, have engineer materials that can control light's direction of travel rendering objects invisible.
This just in; Ten researchers from the University of California at Berkeley have been arrested for entering the female shower facilities naked, and wrapped in in a cloak of some unknown new material!

[Oilygarch]

08:11 PM on 08/10/2008

LOL, no, all they really had to do was make the wall that separates them invisible in one direction. Light has already been made to travel through ''opaque'' matter by 1st, intercepting it, 2nd- down-converting its frequency, and 3rd- up-converting it back once it has traversed the once ''opaque'' material.

[JessWonderin]

06:12 PM on 08/10/2008

big deal . . Republicans have been using this technology on poor people for YEARS . . . .

[mscriblerus]

06:20 PM on 08/10/2008

LOL!!!

[jOke]

07:42 PM on 08/10/2008

WOW.. Makings of a great metaphor.. lol.

[UnknownSoldier]

07:25 PM on 08/10/2008

LMAO

[fact finder]

05:50 PM on 08/10/2008

In the 1960's my wife worked for a company in Ann Arbor Michigan That did contract work for the U.S, NASA, the Pentagon etc. During this time they developed a ground penetrating radar that would "see" up to 30 feet under the ground. It is just in the last few years that this radar has become known to the general public.

Who is to say that this is not already available to the good old Pentagon.? Just think that bump that you thought that you felt but can not see was not some gov. spook.

[Oilygarch]

07:31 PM on 08/10/2008

This had been one of the transformational objectives for a program under the name of Land VVarrior.

[Viper]

05:37 PM on 08/10/2008

About as likley to happen as "Beam me up Scotty".\

An Anti gravity belt is much more likely.


Time travel... story at 11!

Regards

[Oilygarch]

07:31 PM on 08/10/2008

For a belt to be anti-gravity, with today's technology, it would need to be the diameter of a house.

[Oilygarch]

05:18 AM on 08/11/2008

Yet, beam-me up is what they'd plan to do with the excess energy employed in the level of effort to make an object ''invisible''. Think entanglements and quantum-leaps.