That Was Fast
Back in May, I posted about an announcement that scientists believed they could create a cloak of invisibility. Guess what? They did.
WASHINGTON - A team of American and British researchers has made a Cloak of Invisibility. Well, OK, it's not perfect. Yet. But it's a start, and it did a pretty good job of hiding a copper cylinder.
In this experiment the scientists used microwaves to try and detect the cylinder. Like light and radar waves, microwaves bounce off objects making them visible and creating a shadow, though it has to be detected with instruments.
If you can hide something from microwaves, you can hide it from radar — a possibility that will fascinate the military.
Cloaking differs from stealth technology, which doesn't make an aircraft invisible but reduces the cross-section available to radar, making it hard to track. Cloaking simply passes the radar or other waves around the object as if it weren't there, like water flowing around a smooth rock in a stream.
The new work points the way for an improved version that could hide people and objects from visible light.
Conceptually, the chance of adapting the concept to visible light is good, cloak designer David Schurig said in a telephone interview.
But Schurig, a research associate in Duke University's electrical and computer engineering department, added, "From an engineering point of view it is very challenging."
Nonetheless, the cloaking of a cylinder from microwaves comes just five months after Schurig and colleagues published their theory that it should be possible.
Their first success is reported in a paper in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
The military will be VERY interested in this. Of course, the Romulans had a cloaking device a long time ago.
By Sam L., Thursday, 19 October , 2006 @ 3:05 pm
I recall a 50’s TV show, “Rocky Jones, Space Ranger” which used a device/system they called “cold light” to render their spaceships invisible.
Checking IMDB, I see it was in 1954, and the invisibility effect is mentioned in the user comments.