Thursday, November 18, 2010

Hello, I Must Be Going

Some British researchers have done some puzzling over a proposed "invisibility cloak" and have theorized a way that it might be even cooler -- if that's possible.

This "4D" version of the cloak would not only use an exotic substance called "metamaterial" to bend light waves around the covered object and make it impossible to see, they would also use some of their other wild properties to somehow manipulate time itself, which would allow whatever they were covering to disappear from one place and simultaneously reappear somewhere else.

The only problem right now is that this "metamaterial" exists in very small amounts and the speed of light would require an immense amount of stuff to work. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, and in order to displace things one second, you would need a cloak of metamaterial 186,000 miles thick. And yes, that would definitely make you look fat, so don't even ask.

Lead researcher Martin McCall disagrees, saying that even current fiber-optic technology could create a sort of practice cloak that would demonstrate the proof of the concept and get scientists a-crackin' on making the real thing. My guess is that we would see the lead in this project being taken by high school science whizzes who would never never never never never never never use a working invisibility cloak to camp inside the girls' locker room with the highest megapixel resolution video camera they could get their hands on.

Never.

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