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September 6, 2007 -- Seeing A Future For Invisibility
I’m sure there’ve been many times when you’ve wished you were invisible. Like when your boss is looking for “volunteers.” Or when your clueless friend is just begging to be pranked. I don’t need to know the details.
Well, physicists from Sweden and China have determined that it should be theoretically possible to design a container that would render its contents totally invisible. This non-magical invisibility box would be cylindrical in shape and would be made of special “metamaterials” whose intricate microscopic structure would force light to follow a specified path. If the tube’s wall were the ideal thickness, the scientists say, light would be guided around it, thus making the container…and whomever is inside…invisible. To “reappear,” one need only take apart the container…peeling away the wall of the tube one layer at a time.
Of course a few practical problems still need to be ironed out. First, the scientists haven’t actually constructed such a chamber. Their analysis, which will appear in the journal Physical Review Letters, is theoretical, and the column is just a simulation. But perhaps more annoying: the person inside the container wouldn’t be able to see out. Which would definitely put a crimp in your elaborate pranking plans, whatever they might be.
