I couldn’t help myself. It seems that the feline population has already invented the cloaking device. Anyway, here we go again with talk of invisibility. And, again, I am disappointed with the findings. It seems that the British tanks were equipped with video cameras and coated in silicon. That helps with reflective qualities. Cameras took video of the surrounding environment and projectors then displayed that background onto tanks and people. Of course, there are all types of problems with this type of invisibility. If we go to any spectrum other than visible light, boom, we can see the tank. Infrared would be a good start. What we want is something that John Pendry and others are working on.

Sir John Pendry at Imperial College in the UK, has been studying metamaterials and invisibility. He was involved in the latest camera/projector test. His studies seem to be running sort of parallel to what David Smith at Duke University is doing with cloaking. The idea is to use materials that allow visible light, and other wavelengths in the spectrum, to flow around the object. The problem with large objects is that when things go around that object, they take longer to reach the observer. This leaves a sort of staggered field which is open to recognition. This is akin to water flowing around an object. What John Pendry hopes to do is speed up the flow around an object. This will isolate the object from the outside world, effectively putting it in a box. And that box will be unobservable to the outside world. And that would have just a few applications – military being one of them. But, until then, I will keep dreaming of a real cloaking device and real invisibility.

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