Scientists Make Item Invisible to Microwaves 219
Vicissidude writes "A team of American and British researchers has made a cloak of invisibility. In their experiment the scientists used microwaves to try and detect a copper cylinder. Like light and radar waves, microwaves bounce off objects making them visible and creating a shadow, though it has to be detected with instruments. If you can hide something from microwaves, you can hide it from radar and visible light. In effect the device, made of metamaterials — engineered mixtures of metal and circuit board materials, which could include ceramic, Teflon or fiber composite materials — channels the microwaves around the object being hidden. When water flows around a rock, co-author David R. Smith explained, the water recombines after it passes the rock and people looking at the water downstream would never know it had passed a rock. The first working cloak was in only two dimensions and did cast a small shadow, Smith acknowledged. The next step is to go for three dimensions and to eliminate any shadow."
Moo (Score:4, Insightful)
This title is absurd. Invisibilty?
The research is very kewl though, and i hope it progresses. But why not lay off the stupid titles, and produce results based on kewlness or usefulness, instead of what can be termed with a popular buzzword. Information Technology is bad enough from its buzzword infusion. Must we destroy legitamte research/discoveries as well?
Color me dubious (Score:2, Insightful)
You might be able to channel some energy around an object, but:
Re:bad analogy (Score:2, Insightful)
The next step is to go for three dimensions... (Score:1, Insightful)
Uh, yeah. This is a bit like saying "now that we've learned to jump 2 feet in the air, the next step is to jump up to the moon." That's a hell of a difference i nmagnitude and it's going to take enormous improvements in scientific understanding to achieve, if invisibility cloaks are ever possible at all.
Re:Just talking... (Score:3, Insightful)
Stealth Ship (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Was Anyone Else Thinking... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Quite some time. (Score:3, Insightful)
This assumes, of course, that the criminal element (or anyone else for that matter) will be able to use the cloaks successfully. Think about how hard it would be to rob a bank. If you're wearing the cloak then how does the teller know that you're there demanding money? Perhaps you just want to cloak the getaway car. How do you find it back when you're done with the job? Even if you remembered where you parked it, finding the door handle would be problematic. If you could turn the cloak on and off then maybe you'd be ok, but with this particular technology it doesn't look like that's possible.
Re:Color me dubious (Score:3, Insightful)
An infiltrator who appears as a dark spot will still be much more effective in how he's so hard to detect.
What about radiation from the object? (Score:2, Insightful)
Do some spectranalysis, and you immediately know something fishy is going on. (Copper won't radiate like the ground, for example)
Re:bad analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Quite some time. (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if there was no "on-off" button on this, it would be trivially easy to "make" one. Paint water colors on all or part of the object that you can wash off. Tape on visible objects. Put a cover over it. Etc. This assumes that the cloak *itself* isn't flexible, allowing you to take that on or off.
Also, I doubt it'll be perfect invisibility. Even if, to the naked eye it appears perfect, I doubt it would to custom goggles analyzing the scene. Surely there are some wavelengths that it won't work on (from the sound of it, you need to customize a layer of this for a *specific* wavelength). Or the polarity could be thrown off. Or all sorts of other things.
Re:Quite some time. (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's diverting all the light around you, there's no light to get in and hit your eye so you can see.
The solution would be much more complex than the basic cloak. You'd have to let some light in, but make sure it didn't get back out again. I can see that being problimatic.
Re:Quite some time. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Actual invisibility is useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Quite some time. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Quite some time. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why should Harry Potter have all the fun? (Score:2, Insightful)
======
X's and O's for all of my foes... ^^
Re:Quite some time. (Score:2, Insightful)
This would be devastating to the cloaking effect if the same wavelengths were let in that you were trying to cloak against. Your cloak would make the area it covers darker by not passing all light.
If you were trying to cloak against visible, you would have to use microwave or something else to look at things with to avoid this.
Re:Why should Harry Potter have all the fun? (Score:1, Insightful)
Not only that (Score:3, Insightful)
So this technology would be most useful for hiding static vehicles/persons, or perhaps even moreso for hiding buildings (think, a whole, semi-invisible bunker).
I wonder how it would affect sound waves as well. Perhaps sonar would pick up things that radar would not. After all, a mirror or glass might be used to distort or reflect light, but does little against sound...