How to Become Invisible 336
mdm42 writes "Looks like a theoretical physicist at St. Andrews University in Scotland believes that invisibility may be possible. And its not going to be a potion or a cloak, but will come in the form of a device. " Let's just hope that when the invisible woman arrives, she's played more convincingly than Jessica Alba.
true invisibility is impossible (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Doesn't work (Score:5, Informative)
Grammar Police (Score:1, Informative)
It's 'than' not 'then'.
In Case Your Browser Can't Render the Site... (Score:3, Informative)
By Patricia Reaney
LONDON (Reuters) - It's unlikely to occur by swallowing a pill or donning a special cloak, but invisibility could be possible in the not too distant future, according to research published on Monday.
Harry Potter accomplished it with his magic cloak. H.G. Wells' Invisible Man swallowed a substance that made him transparent.
But Dr Ulf Leonhardt, a theoretical physicist at St Andrews University in Scotland, believes the most plausible example is the Invisible Woman, one of the Marvel Comics superheroes in the "Fantastic Four".
"She guides light around her using a force field in this cartoon. This is what could be done in practice," Leonhardt told Reuters in an interview. "That comes closest to what engineers will probably be able to do in the future."
Invisibility is an optical illusion that the object or person is not there. Leonhardt uses the example of water circling around a stone. The water flows in, swirls around the stone and then leaves as if nothing was there.
"If you replace the water with light then you would not see that there was something present because the light is guided around the person or object. You would see the light coming from the scenery behind as if there was nothing in front," he said.
In the research published in the New Journal of Physics, Leonhardt described the physics of theoretical devices that could create invisibility. It is a follow-up paper to an earlier study published in the journal Science.
"What the Invisible Woman does is curve space around herself to bend light. What these devices would do is to mimic that curved space," he said.
Re:true invisibility is impossible (Score:5, Informative)
In an urban setting, though, you'd be more likely to notice the distortion around a 95% invisible object if it was passing between you and a straight line, like the edge of a building, or making one portion of the car across the street appear a different color.
But combined with current stealth techniques (sticking to shadows, stay in buildings, etc.) this would be a tremendous advantage to the equipped force. Probably not quite as much as, say, power armor [wikipedia.org], but DARPA's got money going into that, too.
Re:How not to be seen. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:talking to women (Score:4, Informative)
No, that's the Transformers.
Thank you folks, I'll be here all week.
-Eric
Re:But what about inside? (Score:1, Informative)
And other people wearing IR goggles....