Would you believe engineers have created an optical cloaking device to render objects invisible?
Nov 8, 2009 Cloaking
How would we make use of such a device as well as for what purpose?
Researchers regulating nonotechnology combined such a device which could describe objects invisible by running light around anything placed inside this “cloak.”
SOURCE: At Purdue University by Robert & Ann Burnett, Professors of Electrical & Computer Enginering during a Birch Nanotechnology Center during Ourdue’s Discovery Park.
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- Optical Cloaking Stop 5
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- Is it possible to make a homemade cloaking device that makes you invisible?
- Is the reason why we can’t really see UFO’s is because they use a cloaking device?
Tags: believe, Cloaking, Created, device, engineers, Invisible, objects, Optical, render, would
November 8th, 2009 at 8:52 am
Yes – the present and future are an exciting if scary time.
I’m not sure what kind of utilization this kind of technology would apply with the exception of espionage and war. Is invisibility not the primary objective of camoflauge?
November 8th, 2009 at 9:14 am
I wouldn’t believe it. Yes, they may have such a device but I imagine it would be very limited and imperfect.
And how exactly does this magic cloak “guide” light around it? Can you state a source?
November 8th, 2009 at 9:40 am
Yes, isn’t that fantastic? It’s still under development but it has been deminstrated to work. What next, I wonder?
I myself would use it to spy on back room deals between corrupt politicians, for one thing. Imagine being a fly on the wall in a Bush cabinet meeting (or a bin Laden one, for that matter) – you could bust that evil cabal wide open!
November 8th, 2009 at 10:33 am
That’s old. A TV program, “Mr. Wizard’s World,” which aired sometime in the 1960s, showed a talking head. The lower part of the body was invisible. This was done with mirrors. I have it on tape.
November 8th, 2009 at 11:05 am
The field of metamaterials is a huge area of materials science that is providing absolute proof of Clarke’s third law. Coupled with nanomaterials research it is fundamentally changing the approach that is necessary to do effective engineering.
The cloaking material, if reversed in effect, can allow you to build a lens that focuses in all directions at once if you happen to need an all-seeing eye in your design. This is just one example to show that decent design work nowdays requires you to assume at the beginning that you can do magic, the engineering being merely the details needed to work out what you wanted to do under the assumption of “magic”.
You will of course run into roadblocks in designing this way. The explosions in several fields of materials science, genetic engineering, biomachinery engineering , information and computer science, etc., etc, all going on at once, guarantee that if you don’t assume “magic” to start you will miss the best approach to your problem. The roadblocks seem, so far, to be surprisingly few.
Clarke’s Third Law:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
A p.s. I ran across in checking references:
Gehm’s Corollary to Clarke’s Third Law: Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. — Barry Gehm. Analog. 1991?
That make decent engineering sense to me.