The Speculist

Or, you know, woman. Person. The operative word being invisible, here, folks. Anyhow, it appears that we're getting closer:

INVISIBILITY and the ability to see through walls — dreams that were once confined to the pages of science fiction — are moving into the realms of feasibility.

Sir John Pendry, professor of theoretical physics at Imperial, has compared such materials with the “invisibility cloak” seen in the Harry Potter films and suggests that the first could be created in the next decade.

Pendry, whose work was partly sponsored by the Pentagon, based his research on close analysis of how photons — the basic particles of light — behave when hitting the surface of an object.

Most materials are opaque to light because they absorb photons and convert them to heat. This is why sunlight feels warm on the skin. But a few materials, such as glass, are transparent. This is because their atoms are organised in such a way that the photons can pass between them.

What Pendry and two colleagues from Duke University in North Carolina have shown, in a paper published in Science, the journal, is that there is a third class of materials that can be made to “grab” photons without absorbing them or allowing them straight through.

Instead, the metallic materials would carry the photons within themselves and then emit them from the other side as if they had travelled in a straight line directly through.The researchers liken the behaviour of such light to water flowing around a stick in a stream and then continuing smoothly on behind the stick downstream.

Intriguing idea. They plan to do a proof-of-concept with radar in the near future. Somehow, I have the feeling that something like this might work a lot better on radar or at a great distance than it will, say, close up.