Science is cool. Cloak of Invisibility

Gah, beat me to it, by two minutes...

I love science...that's just brilliant

You just know something like that is going to get into the wrong hands. Like criminals or the government.

To bad it is only microwaves, i.e. nonvisible light. Also they can only do one wavelength at a time, so any practical application is years away. It was commented on in Popular Science a month or two ago, so that article is a little late in coming.

Edit: Bolded for Verithrax's sake.

Kinda neat. Just think this could be used in a lot of wrong ways.

I could have sworn I posted on this earlier, and everyone was making harry potter jokes.

You did.

Actually, the spectrum of microwaves is pretty wide, so saying it deflects 'microwaves' is pretty generic. However, the visible spectrum is pretty narrow, so adapting this to visible light might not be so difficult.

I specified that they can only do ONE wavelength at a time, in addition to not being able to do it with visible light (in the microwave spectrum).

Also it doesn't "deflect" microwaves. Deflecting them would defeat the purpose, it bends them so they travel around the object and continue on their original path.

Isn't there also the problem that light behaves as both a wave and a particle?

Aah, I missed that - I was under the impression they had a narrow range of microwave frequencies that worked.

That's just one of the bases of quantum mechanics, known as wave-particle duality, and doesn't have much to do with this.



Reading comprehension for the loss.

See, this is where the borg come in. You set your radar and I turn invisible to it, then you change your radar frequency to compensate for my ability to become immune to your radar!

Something I've been rather curious about. If you 'bend' electromagnetic waves, wouldn't this mean that anything inside the cloaking device cannot also use these waves? So, basically, if you cloaked a camera for the visible spectrum, it would be useless, as the light bent around it instead of actually reaching the lens.

Yeah I was sent this article earlier today, and the first thing the person sending it to me said was, "Yay I could get into girls' locker rooms." They're going to have to install detection units just to go into the bathroom.

Yes, if you were to cloak a frequency it would prevent the photons from actually reaching the device. This could potentially cause an issue with the cloaking of the visible light spectrum, should we manage to work out the problems which currently prohibit us from using it. We could likely set up a detector using another frequency however.

At the same time, the cloak does not work perfectly in the first place. It produces a two dimensional shroud, not a three-dimensional. Shift angles and more of the energy starts to shine through. The fun of interference patterns!

Edit: erm, nevermind

Hmm never realized there are soooo many astrophysicists here.