Scientists Can See Invisibility Cloak Happening In (Near?) Future

It has been the stuff of our wildest day dreams: what if objects or man could be invisible? It has been the stuff the played a key role two great books that were made into two great films: the Invisible Man and Harry Potter, with his invisibility cloak.

But now here’s good news for teenage boys everywhere who have ever dreamed of being a fly on a girls’ locker room wall:

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.

Studies into the behaviour of light have delivered a blueprint for a new type of cloaking device that could be used to make objects and, potentially, people invisible. The researchers, some based at Imperial College London, have even created a prototype material capable of cloaking objects against radar waves as proof of their theory.

And, this Times Online piece says, it may not be too far off:

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. “Just as in Harry Potter, nobody would be able to see an object if it was cloaked,� he said. “Our cloaking system would render anything inside it invisible.�

The AP is a mite more reserved about the possibility of you being able to walk into your office and give your boss a hard kick in the butt unseen very soon:

The key to creating a Harry Potter-like invisibility cloak lies in man-made materials unlike any in nature or the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, researchers say.

They’re laying out a blueprint for turning science fiction into reality. And they say that, in theory, nothing’s stopping them from making such a cloak.

Well, almost nothing: They still need to perfect the manufacture of those exotic materials with an ability to steer light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation around a cloaked object, rendering it invisible.

“Is it science fiction? Well, it’s theory and that already is not science fiction. It’s theoretically possible to do all these Harry Potter things, but what’s standing in the way is our engineering capabilities,” said John Pendry, a physicist at the Imperial College London. Details of the study, which Pendry co-wrote, appeared in Thursday’s online edition of the journal Science.

If Pendry is right, such technology could be used for a variety of purposes, from hiding military hardware the size of warships or other objects such as unsightly buildings.

The Register notes that there are other applications, as well:

The idea is that we now have technology to manipulate the surface of metamaterials on the nano scale, meaning light can be directed very precisely around an object, making it imperceptible to an observer. Researchers at Imperial College and Duke University did the sums, and found that an invisibility cloak should be possible.

Duke professor David R Smith said: “The cloak would act like you’ve opened up a hole in space. All light or other electromagnetic waves are swept around the area, guided by the metamaterial to emerge on the other side as if they had passed through an empty volume of space.”

Invisibility would not be the only application, of course. Metamaterials could be used to improve the transmission of any kind of electromagnetic signal around obstacles, or they could be tuned to steer sound waves for perfect acoustics.

So will this become part of our lives soon? TP Tech News says yes…and no:

In their paper in today’s journal “Science,” physicist John Pendry of Imperial College London, along with David Smith and David Schurig, of Duke University, have shown theoretically how these metamaterials could be tuned so that light flows around a hole.

The same idea was presented in an independent study — also in today’s “Science” — by Ulf Leonhardt, a physicist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Pendry predicted that demonstrating metamaterials that make an object invisible to radar — not visible light — might be possible within 18 months. Other scientists suggest it might be within five years.

This kind of radar invisibility would be different from, say, stealth technology in which radar is being prevented from reflecting back to its source. Duke’s Shurig has noted that making metamaterials work for the entire visible spectrum would be a much greater task.

Observers of emerging technologies caution about such metamaterials reaching the marketplace for general consumer use. “If it ever became a consumer product, it would be incredible,” said Jackie Fenn, an analyst at Gartner, a technology research firm. “But it’s a materials science and mathematical theory at this point, and, given that it’s at a fundamental state, it could be decades before we see — or, rather, not see — anything.”

We see — now, that is…