Comments on: Would you believe engineers have created an optical cloaking device to render objects invisible?

By: virtualguy92107

virtualguy92107 — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:05:28 +0000

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.

By: Lionheart

Lionheart — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 10:33:21 +0000

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.

By: hznfrst

hznfrst — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 09:40:02 +0000

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!

By: pedros2008

pedros2008 — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 09:14:37 +0000

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?

By: Mr. Indignant

Mr. Indignant — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:52:40 +0000

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?