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Yvettep
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 3044
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, July 03, 2008 - 06:22 pm: | 
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Wouldn't it be great if you could become invisible whenever you wanted? Harry Potter can do it, and so could certain groups of futuristic creatures on "Star Trek."
Such technology remains far off, but it may not be entirely impossible.
Teams of scientists around the globe say they're making progress on theories and experiments involving cloaking -- that is, making things invisible.
In theory, all that's needed to make a small object invisible is something called a superlens, says Graeme Milton, a mathematician at the University of Utah.
He and Australia-based collaborators Nicolae Nicorovici, Lindsay Botten and Ross McPhedran have made mathematical models showing that at a critical distance from a superlens, an object would seem to disappear.
A superlens has a negative refractive index, meaning light that hits it reverses and goes in the opposite direction. Physicist John Pendry at Imperial College London was among the first to propose superlenses in 2000.
At a certain distance from a superlens, an object becomes invisible because light that bounces off it cancels out with light reflecting off the superlens, Milton said. It's a little like noise cancellation devices such as earphones, he said.
"We've seen it numerically -- not in practice, but we've got a theoretical proof that collections of particles become invisible," he said...
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/07/01/invisible.cloak/index.html |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 7101
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, July 05, 2008 - 10:49 am: |
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What would happen to your clothes? Would you have to go around shoeless and naked? You could cut up your feet and catch your death of cold.
What would happen to the water you drank? The food you ate? Wouldn't folks be able to see it?
How about when dust settled on you.
You wouldn't be invulnerable or super strong, would you? Folks could catch you,whip your butt, cover you wth paint and toss you in a cell.
H.G. Wells' great novel, which was one of the first modern investigations on this, was meant to illustrate how helpless a real Invisible Man would be. It was a rejection of the Nietchean Superman. |
Yvettep
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 3047
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, July 05, 2008 - 04:45 pm: |
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Chris, according to the press release the invisibility would be achieved through a lens placed near the object. So, it would be more along the lines of Harry Potter's invisibility cloak or the technology from a recent Bond movie (can't recall right now which one) rather that in Wells. |
Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 7115
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, July 07, 2008 - 11:32 am: |
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Hmmmm. You know that makes me think about...
PIMPS! |
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