A Step Towards an Invisibility Cloak 172
An anonymous reader alerts us to work out of Purdue University in Indiana, where researchers have produced a design for a method of cloaking objects of any shape and size at a single wavelength of visible light. The math for such an invisibility effect was worked out last year at Duke and in the UK, but the new work, to be published in Nature Photonics this month, is the first practical design. The lead researcher, Vladimir Shalaev, notes that even though the current design works only at a single wavelength, and so would not convey true invisibility, it could still be useful — against, for example, night-vision goggles or laser target designators. Shalaev calls the technical challenge of producing an all-wavelengths cloak "doable in principle."
In future... (Score:1, Funny)
Fitness (Score:2, Funny)
Re:In future... (Score:5, Funny)
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Oblig. nethack (Score:2, Funny)
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Error Message (Score:5, Funny)
*yawn* (Score:1)
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Following suit with that article about the RIAA pushing for pretexting in California, I could just see them getting their hands on invisibility cloaks.
Be careful pirating music, the RIAA c
Re:*yawn* (Score:5, Funny)
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If someone could spy on you from within the cloak, it would no longer be invisible, since he would have to absorb photons coming from the object he's observing, instead of passing them through.
this in turn would make him look like a "dark" spot instead of invisible.
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Serious Note: Foreign Students & Critical Tec (Score:1, Insightful)
In the late eighties, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor prohibited certain foreign students from participating in government-funded research related to VLSI circuits. At the time, various alarmists in Washington warned that Japan would soon eclipse the USA in high
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Re:Serious Note: Foreign Students & Critical T (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing in this article to suggest that the student with the Indian name (Uday K. Chettiar) is not an American citizen, nor that Wenshan Cai or Alexander V. Kildishev are not American citizens, or that Vladimir Shalaev himself is not a US citizen (the fact that he was educated in Russia isn't an impediment: my grandparents were educated in England, and became citizens as adults); a cursory Google search finds nothing to suggest that they are not US citizens, either. However, I do know that Title 22 of the US code includes International Traffic in Arms Regulations (http://www.epic.org/crypto/export_controls/itar.h tml), and that universities and private companies in the US are required to stick to these regulations pretty closely, for fear of losing all federal funding: technologies that are covered under these regulations can only be worked on by US Citizens and those with "permanent resident" (green card) status. The fact that there have been a number of prosecutions of companies for technology transfers to China is proof that these regulations are taken seriously (though one does wonder about equality of enforcement with this particular administration).
So, apparently you assume that anyone without a European name is not a citizen - or, at least, anyone with an Indian name is not a citizen: you didn't question Prof. Shalaev, Mr. Cai, or Mr. Kildishev. Looking at your website (http://www.geocities.com/deskofreporter/), I see that you do raise some interesting points about Taiwan's relationship with China, but that the tone you use in doing so has an aroma of xenophobia. I'd suggest that you look into the history of great American immigrant patriots, beginning with Alexander Hamilton and continuing on through Albert Einstein (he became an American citizen in 1940 and remained one until his death).
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Re:Serious Note: Foreign Students & Critical T (Score:5, Insightful)
Out of curiousity, what comment would you make about Japan or China excluding US scientists access to this research? Would you object? Because the way things are going, the US is going to be increasingly finding itself in the position of other countries having a lead in certain technological areas.
As to India not signing up to the NPT, that would carry a little more moral weight if the US wasn't ignoring the treaty itself.
And Iranian students seeking bombs, is that a particular problem at your university?
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The US blows hot and cold on practically all treaties, depending on who is in the White House. That doesn't excuse India from it's behavior regarding proliferation. The problem here isn't whether foreign scientists should be excluded from certain kinds of work - they *should*, and they *are*, under the terms of ITAR, unless they have made the commitment of obtaining permanent residence status. The problem is the assumption that all of these folks are "foreigners." Just because someone has non-Anglo-Saxon n
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Invisible to lasers, anyway. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Invisible to lasers, anyway. (Score:4, Informative)
What this aims at is laser targeting systems. Those lasers carry hardly enough firepower to cause any damage (ok, should you look RIGHT into them, maybe you might have some problem), but they point out the target to a laser guided weapon. And, well, you can't hit what you can't see (unless you decide to fire a spray of those kickass expensive laser guided weapons, which has not really a good cost/gain relation).
Re:Invisible to lasers, anyway. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have absolutely no experience/knowledge of these laser targetters, but how much more expensive would it be to be able to use different wavelengths of light?
1. Try wavelength X: Oh darn, they're protecting against that with a shiny cloaking device, so...
2. Try wavelength Y: Profit!!!/explosions
The bomb or whathaveyou is searching for a very specific wavelength(X) right? But still doesn't seem like it should be impossible to program it to cycle through 2-3 wavelengths(X->Y->Z) until it finds your dot to lock onto.
Still, it's a neat toy they're working on. I wouldn't mind one once they build one that's less selective.
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However, if this horribly complex and expensive sound cloaking technology (against just 1 wavelength) ever become a threat, it would be trivial to upgrade the military lasers to a tunable one. There are numerous ways, including using free electron lasers which can be tuned to a wide range of wavel
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A laser beam obviously is only one frequency, so a colored lens does nothing for you. No light at all would get through.
Russian Dolls (Score:2, Insightful)
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If you just switched it on at the last moment and then moved your tank, that might work.
You'd be given advance notice that something was inbound by the fact that you were being illuminated in the first place.
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I didn't RTFA (hey, this is slashdot) but from the summary it sounds like a truly effective cloak of this sort is still some t
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For example? I hear Patriot Intercepter missiles and space umbrella program didn't ever shoot anything down except under test conditions. If people are shooting nukes at you, maybe those very poisonous gases and expenses are not that bad after all.
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And UPS doesn't. I checked.
So personally my fear of n
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This is all classified info BTW, please kill yourself after reading it, unless you happen to have SPECOPS/JAWS clearance.
Re:Invisible to lasers, anyway. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Invisible to lasers, anyway. (Score:5, Informative)
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Don't get me wrong, I think it's still cool and a good first step, just not with any militarily robus
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It's not a question of output, it's a question of input, since presumably the invisible-cloak-wearer is outside of the night vision goggles. And they input many wavelengths.
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Roddenberry effect (Score:1, Funny)
Frickin Romulans.
Re:Invisible to lasers, anyway. (Score:5, Interesting)
Invisible to laser speed checks would have some non military applications.
Michael
Happy Harry (Score:1, Funny)
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Yes muggle. No need to fret, "Harry is fictional".
There's no such thing as wizards we^h^h They don't exist.
Re:Happy Harry (Score:5, Funny)
How much does it cost? (Score:2)
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Fortunately, this isn't meant to be seen on the battlefield at all.
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One step towards the most duped story (Score:4, Interesting)
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This has been done. [wikipedia.org]
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Meh (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Meh (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Meh (Score:5, Funny)
You won't see anything but yourself (Score:2)
Laser sharks (Score:4, Funny)
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-What do we have?
-Sea Bass
-Right, Are they invisible?
-Only to one wavelenght
-Oh well, that's a start.
Sadder, but wiser. (Score:2, Funny)
Don't make the same mistake I did. Learn from my experience that one should never, ever put the invisibility generator on top of the anti-gravity device.
Oh no! (Score:3, Funny)
Don't mod me down just because you don't get it.
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That was looking to be a good game, until I lost the disc in the third mission...
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Third mission? Aww, that sucks. Amazing game.
night-vision goggles or laser target designators.. (Score:1)
So, where is it? (Score:1, Funny)
Obligatory Star Trek Quote (Score:1)
Problem with Invisibility Cloaks in General ... (Score:2, Interesting)
So wouldn't it make two dark spots on the ground? that could be used to identify if someone is using an invisibility cloak.
Precious, my precious (Score:5, Funny)
According to TFA:
So basically, this will be made out of (a form of) gold, and encircle the object to be rendered invisible?
I'm betting that, in order to work, it will need to be inscribed with the phrase: Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
Re:Precious, my precious (Score:5, Funny)
Please tell me you looked that up.
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Please tell me you looked that up.
I did ... but only to check the spelling :)
night vision goggles and lasers, no. (Score:2, Insightful)
the same thing with a laser, you modulate the beam according to a hash function for each laser/missile pair, the string that produces the hash code could easily be communicated real time from air
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Also, as regards communications between planes and ground troops - presumably planes want to minimise
Lightbending 101 (Score:2, Informative)
This innovation and others like it have seen far too much press already. I know, I know, it's slashdot and no one RTFA anyway, but if you did you'd quickly realize that there really is nothing to see here. Let me explain at least for those of you who will read a comment if not any of the articles appearing in popular science sources for the last several months:
Imagine for the moment placing an object behind a mirror. Better yet, inside a mirror. Amazing! You cloaked it from observation from visible wavel
What is it like to wear ? (Score:2)
So if they succeed in making one that works at all wavelengths of visible light - one could not see out. However: imperfections would let some light leak in, but the direction that it came from might be distorted and so give a very blurred view of the rest of the world.
Dirt/damage resilience? (Score:3, Interesting)
I see this as a general problem with light-bending nanomaterials - while they might work in a lab environment, real-world environments have enough ways of disrupting them to make them much less useful.
Invisibility cloaks are today's perpetual motion (Score:2)
But they're all "promising" and they all "take a step toward" somethin
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But this type of stuff has to go. what type of low life has nothing better to do then refresh the front page for slashdot every minute to see if they can get the first post about some fucked up stuff.
There needs to be a report abuse button to have people like the sick fuck in the above post banned from slashdot.
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