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Scientists One Step Closer to Invisibility Suit

by Warren Riddle on March 19, 2010 at 04:00 PM

Researchers at London's Imperial College recently received a generous grant of $8.1 million to fund the development of an invisibility suit. While various international scientists have been developing invisibility tech and filing patents on camouflaging material since World War II, the Imperial College coalition believes that these decades of work may actually soon come to fruition.

The cloaking system relies on a "metamaterial" composed of minuscule rods, which can manipulate light so that the masked objects aren't readily visible to certain wavelengths. The technology has actually been proven somewhat effective for two-dimensional perception, but cloaking a 3-D object has been impossible -- until now. Imperial Professor Sir John Pendry's design for a "carpet cloak" has apparently remedied that predicament. According to the BBC, the team of scientists successfully rendered a nearly infinitesimal "bump" invisible by covering it with the cloak.

German scientist Tolga Ergin, who is a member of the development team, said that a version capable of hiding objects from human eyes won't be available until scientists can make the rods smaller. He does believe, though, that the successful test has demonstrated a "remarkable proof of principle." In the names of Harry Potter and the Predator, let's hope that Moore's Law successfully applies to rods, metamaterial, and lasers, and not just to microchips and processors. [From: The BBC]

Tags: 3-d, harry potter, HarryPotter, ImperialCollegeLondon, invisibility, InvisibilityCloak, invisible, invisibleshield, science, top, weird

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