Author Topic: Cloak of invisibility... For real?  (Read 1294 times)

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Offline Ghost1

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Cloak of invisibility... For real?
« on: Mar 24 2010 - 11:06AM »
REUTERS – By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer – WASHINGTON – From Grimm’s fairy tales to Harry Potter, the cloak of invisibility has played a major role in fiction. Now scientists have taken a small but important new step toward making it reality.

Researchers at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology report they were able to cloak a tiny bump in a layer of gold, preventing its detection at nearly visible infrared frequencies. Their cloaking device also worked in three dimensions, while previously developed cloaks worked in two dimensions, lead researcher Tolga Ergin said.

The cloak is a structure of crystals with air spaces in between, sort of like a woodpile, that bends light, hiding the bump in the gold later beneath, the researchers reported in Thursday’s online edition of the journal Science.

“In principle, the cloak design is completely scalable; there is no limit to it,” Ergin said. But, he added, developing a cloak to hide something takes a long time, “so cloaking larger items with that technology is not really feasible.”

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Offline Colleen2510

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Re: Cloak of invisibility... For real?
« Reply #1 on: Mar 26 2010 - 10:26AM »
Yes you can definitely see how cloaking a larger item would seem impossible but I believe that just as putting a large manmade bird in the sky seemed impossible until the Wright Bros. had a vision this too will become reality. There is way too much to be gained from this technology for them not to make it happen. One of my favorite parts of the Sci-Fi show Star-Gate Atlantis is that they have these little space ships called "Puddle Jumpers" that are kept in a huge storage facility on the Atlantis base station so that whenever they want to jump over to a planet some place they take a Puddle Jumper and it is completely cloaked so that they are not detected from the time that they leave Atlantis and even after they land on the targeted planet all the way till they get back to Atlantis.  Even when the Puddle Jumper has a problem and can't fly it is still cloaked so that they can work on it without detection. Of course Atlantis can also be cloaked and is infrequently but once again the size plays a factor. Since it's so huge (Atlantis is actually a huge spaceship which was docked on a planet many many light years away from Earth by the Ancients who have since Ascended and left Atlantis abandoned) anyway being so big, cloaking it requires a great amount of energy and parts of Atlantis has to be shut down so that energy can be rerouted to the cloaking device. Some of the devices having to be shut down is part of the defense system so even though they are cloaked if they should be detected then they have this problem of shutting down the cloak and getting the energy routed back to the defense system in order to defend themselves so they don't cloak Atlantis unless they need to move the city to a different location and travel thru some bad neighborhoods. 

All of this is fiction of course but 15 years ago when Stargate SG-1 was first aired it was all fiction too and some of the stuff they did seemed impossible and yet 15 years later some of that fiction is now reality. I hate that I can't think of any examples. My brain isn't working right yet this morning. Not that it ever really works right but it does get better about the middle of the day and they trail off toward the end of the day so I have a narrow window of actual clarity but it's been that way for so long that I seem to function OK even though it's frustrating at times like this when I know that I know something and just can't recall it yet. Some say that's what Google is for but I have found that Googling something takes up way more time and involvement than I usually have. In fact it's been nice to have a few minutes to visit the site and I don't want to waste any of it on googling.

If anyone else can think of something that was fiction in the recent past but today is a reality post it here. I'd love to here about it.
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