The theory behind invisibility has been long known by scientists. They’ve even managed to do it before now on two dimensional objects. However, they’ve never been able to do it in three dimensions, until a team from Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology managed to crack the key. The team, lead by Tolga Ergin, developed a structure of crystals with air inside them that successfully shielded a microscopic speck of gold from view, creating the first real cloaking technology.
Of course, there’s a difference between hiding something you need a microscope to see and hiding something the size of a person (which is the ultimate goal in any cloaking technology). However, the researchers say their technique is completely scalable and could be used to cover any sort of object, though it’s not really feasible at this time to make an invisibility cloak for a person. Still, the more we learn about a technology, the better off we are when it comes to eventually making it work. As Ergin says, “Invisibility cloaks are a beautiful and fascinating benchmark for the field of transformation optics, and it is very seldom that one can foretell what practical applications might arise out of a field of fundamental research.”
Image: Travel House UK
Tags: invisibility, invisibility cloak developed, real-life invisibility cloak, Tolga Ergin, inventions, weird science, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, transformation optics
