DARPA gets that teensiest bit closer to making one:
Pentagon-supported physicists on Wednesday said they had devised a “time cloak” that briefly makes an event undetectable.
The laboratory device manipulates the flow of light in such a way that for the merest fraction of a second an event cannot be seen, according to a paper published in the science journal Nature.
It adds to experimental work in creating next-generation camouflage — a so-called invisibility cloak in which specific colours cannot be perceived by the human eye.
“Our results represent a significant step towards obtaining a complete spatio-temporal cloaking device,” says the study, headed by Moti Fridman of Cornell University in New York…
After proving that the “cloak” is possible, the next step for the researchers is to expand the time gap by orders of magnitude, firstly to microseconds and then to milliseconds, said Boyd and Shi.
The time cloak has a potential use in boosting security in fibre-optic communications because it breaks up optical signals, lets them travel at different speeds and then reassembles them, which makes data hard to intercept.
Last year, scientists reported a step forward in so-called metamaterials which act as a cloaking of space, as opposed to time.
Metamaterials are novel compounds whose surface that interacts with light at specific frequencies thanks to a tiny, nano-level structure. As a result, light flows around the object — rather like water that bends around a rock in a stream — as opposed to being absorbed by it.
Tinkering with time and space.
Geez.
Darpa’s Technicolour Dream Cloak.
Wonder what the professors in the humanities are working on? Occupy Wall Street 102?
This will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to survive it!
I thought we had a treaty with the Romulans that we wouldn’t develop this?
Yeah, but that was the Federation. And everyone knows the Federation are morons
Amazing what Star Trek predicted. Medical beds that monitor the patient. Computer disks. I’ll sort of count cell phones as communicators. GPS, of a sort. What else?
US$10M check from Qualcomm and X Prize Foundation waiting to be claimed by the first to develop a working Tricorder.
http://www.xprize.org/x-prize-and-qualcomm-announce-10-million-tricorder-prize
Think about what we know. The F117 Nighthawk, the plane that won the Battle of Baghdad in 1991 – that is 1970′s technology. Really. Sooooo what do you think the Boffins at DARPA have developed in the past 40 years that we know nothing about ??? Many UFO reports are likely newer, faster aircraft no one knows about….the XB-37 is just one of many highly secret toys at our military’s beck & call.
There is likely shite they have that would seem like it was straight out of STAR TREK if you were able to know what the DARPA, NSA, CIA, et al have in their tool kit….
A brave new world indeed.
Hell, aircraft landing-lights arrayed on ASW ac wing leading edges in WWII achieved much the same “disappearing” effect to the human eye when viewed from head-on. Crude, but effective use of “light waves.” (Hello “Photon Courier!”
) “Nano technology? Nano technology? We don’t need no stinkin’ nano-technology!” (They also experimented w. “hiding” tanks in the desert “in plain sight” with banks of lights.)
I have this old gold ring I’d be willing to sell you folks…
DARPA…Throwing the acquisition system away and Getting Things Done.
I miss working there.
as long as the Klingons don’t get a hold of it first…
After reading the article I am not very excited. Hiding a 50 picosecond squirt of light in a light pulse traveling down a fiber optic cable is a loooong way from a cloaking device. If this were a business I’d say marketing has gotten ahead of product development.
George V.
Gotta have the positive PR and suggest MUCH bigger things are around the corner to trigger Pavlov’s funding dogs and keep the research dollars flowing, Geo V, dontcha know how the game is played?
But, can they make a bikini go away?
Actually it was the Romulans who invented it…
I wish we could cloak the stench
— Montgomery “Scotty” Scott