Invisibility cloak edges closer

[steven johnson]

Harry Potter, your cloak is nearly ready. John Pendry, from Imperial College London, theorized that a "carpet" design would allow tiny holes all over the cloak bend the light around the bump. A new material does this via a series of minuscule holes which manipulate the optical density of an object so you can transform the light path from a straight line to to any path you want.

Scientists have rendered objects invisible under near-infrared light.

Unlike previous such "cloaks", the new work does not employ metals, which introduce losses of light and result in imperfect cloaking.

"Essentially, we are transforming a straight line of light into a curved line around the cloak, so you don't perceive any change in its pathway," he explained.

The cloak's design cancels out the distortion produced by the bulge of the object underneath, bending light around it - like water around a rock - and giving the illusion of a flattened surface.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8025886.stm

[Dogmudgeon]

1. Science from Star Trek slang!

Who'd'a thunk it?

Maybe Esperanto will become more popular, too.

--d!
Varp-faktoro tri, Sinjoro Sulu ...

[BR_Parkway]

2. Those of us who grew up with Star Trek have seen many of their

products come into reality in our lifetime - and I've wondered if the geeks who grew up to be engineers designed things like flip phones after the original communicators Kirk & Spock used

[Dogmudgeon]

3. Flip phones ...

I think they predate Star Trek by several decades. I recall reading pulp sci-fi about hand-held communicators, written in the 30s and 40s. The "walkie-talkie" was an early version of this that caught on in WW2. The first cell phones were designed to look like 70s-futuristic walkie-talkies.

"Cloak" and "Cloaking Device" are strictly Trek. Before "Cloaking", it was "Invisibility". The word has become part of the technical lingua franca for any kind of hiding or concealment technology, although there is nothing about cloaks that suggested concealment or invisibility before Trek.

Likewise, the word "Contra-Terrene" or "C.T." was used before "Anti-Matter". The locution is clearly French; it seems to be from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_sea">a paper by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac">physicist Paul A.M. Dirac, French (and Hungarian, and possibly also English) by ethnicity.

Sci-Fi, of course, is full of cultural innovations. Even the near-misses are often amazing. The original book When Worlds Collide makes extensive (literary) use of nuclear energy, the way it was once thought to be; the reality came out a little different. Early movies about space exploration are full of little "tells". The book Darwin's Radio is half about medical phage therapy in its different developments. The exact form factor of BlueTooth was in use decades ago. My own big interest in Sci-Fi is how people and culture co-evolve with technology.

But I have a hybrid personal history as being half-geek, half-artist; I see technology as being an art itself, and our own era as being analogous to the very beginnings of the Renaissance in the early 1300s. We still have some plagues, some Papal States, an era of exploration, and two whole scientific revolutions to experience.

Give me reincarnation, or some kind of physical immortality; either way, I'd like to stick around a while.

--d!