Well this isn't exactly the kind of quantum physics and nature of reality topic I do here, but it is a major physics breakthrough and I figured it deserved a quick mention here. It’s not a Romulan or Klingon cloaking device like those seen on the many Star Trek incarnations, but it’s a very big step in the right direction.
In October 2006, US and British scientists successfully tested a device that hid a small copper cylinder from microwaves in testing done at Duke University. The device works by deflecting microwaves around the object and then re-routing the waves around the object and restoring them to their original trajectory on the other side, as if they had simply passed though empty space.
While it works for microwaves, at the moment there is still no way to render an object invisible to the human eye – at least not yet. The cloak is made of 10 fiberglass rings covered with copper elements and is classified as a “metamaterial”. This “metamaterial” is an artificial composite that is engineered to produce a change in direction of electromagnetic waves.
In October 2006, US and British scientists successfully tested a device that hid a small copper cylinder from microwaves in testing done at Duke University. The device works by deflecting microwaves around the object and then re-routing the waves around the object and restoring them to their original trajectory on the other side, as if they had simply passed though empty space.
While it works for microwaves, at the moment there is still no way to render an object invisible to the human eye – at least not yet. The cloak is made of 10 fiberglass rings covered with copper elements and is classified as a “metamaterial”. This “metamaterial” is an artificial composite that is engineered to produce a change in direction of electromagnetic waves.
In the experiment, the scientists initially measured microwaves traveling over empty space with no objects in the way. Then they placed a copper cylinder in the path of the waves and measured the scattering of the microwaves. Finally the researches placed the invisibility cloak over the cylinder and ran the test again. Although it did not completely cancel out the disturbances in the microwaves, they were significantly reduced – effectively rendering the copper cylinder invisible to microwave emissions.
In theory the same principle could be applied to visible light, but the materials required would have to be much smaller. The rule is, the metamaterial must be smaller than the wavelength of radiation (in this case light).
The wavelength of visible light is less than a micron, so your metamaterial microstructure has to be a few tens of nanometers across, and current nanotechnology is still in it’s infancy.
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