UPCOMING TECHNOLOGY – What is an invisibility cloak? It is a device that can render humans and objects completely invisible. And we’re talking about actual invisibility from sci-fi stories; not cheap trickery. First, we’ll talk about some ongoing non-military researches. Followed by a Canadian company’s claim to have already made a fully functional invisibility cloaking material, exclusive to military applications.
Active invisibility cloaking
One of the researchers at The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering said (excerpts),
“We’ve demonstrated a different way of doing it,”
“It’s very simple: instead of surrounding what you’re trying to cloak with a thick metamaterial shell, we surround it with one layer of tiny antennas, and this layer radiates back a field that cancels the reflections from the object.”
Cloaking small electrical signals with Time cloaking (Space-time cloaking is currently much more complex and currently a challenge)
The research is being led at Purdue University. Joseph Lukens, a co-publisher of the findings said (excerpts),
“Time cloaking is relatively new. It’s based on the idea that there are places in time where if something were to happen it wouldn’t be picked up, so no one can tell that it has occurred.”
“Say you have a light beam. Speed up the front half and slow down the back half, and you create a place where the light beam splits apart. There is no light intensity there.”
“If you send a piece of data, but the light beam isn’t there, you can’t make the record. So if someone depicts the absence of light they will think no data was sent.”
Cloaking objects with ‘mirrors and lenses’
Wait, isn’t that what magicians do? Well, the researchers at the University of Rochester in New York acknowledge that this idea has been indeed used by magicians since a long time, but their research adds an layer of ‘easy scalability’. They have devices to unidirectionally cloak a human to something as big as a satellite.
Quantum Stealth
The camouflage design company based in Canada – HyperStealth Biotechnology Corp, claims to have successfully designed a material that completely hides any object by bending light. The creators also claim that the working of their technology remains a well kept secret.
On the company’s official page, they have answered several questions like why it made sense to release this news in public, and questions like could there be a commercial version of Quantum Stealth? And as claimed, the material has been declared classified by the US and Canadian military. With of all these on one hand, there is no existence of a solid proof of it’s existence on the other. Whether if it’s real or another hoax, we would probably never know.
