They kinda downplayed, or skimmed over, that whole being-invisible-means-being-blind thing. If all the light is bent around you, there's nothing for your eyes to see.

I wish Michio Kaku would disappear, and take his endless stream of awful awful books with him.

Light is a form of radiation, if you can bend microwaves, and radio waves. Then you can bend light.

This is what I study. If anyone wants to know.

>> ^MycroftHomlz:
This is what I study. If anyone wants to know.


and youre getting a real kick out of these replies?

...

yes I brought a Fark cliche into the sift...

/\ Can you also take it away again?

As with Superposition and the rest of looney toon fizzix, it doesn't work in the real world.
Now when Al Queda stages a firefight in Dr. Kaka's lab, well, throw a tube of string theory around the redshirts and fire away!

^Online dating???

"the pentagon is not stupid."


11 billion
"The F-22 is arguably the Pentagon's most useless weapon system. Not only is it the world's most expensive fighter jet, but it was conceived in 1985 to fight a Soviet fighter jet that was never built. As wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo show, U.S. air superiority is not in doubt." -Think Progress

or

"the $81-billion submarine pushed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, presumably to fight al-Qaida’s navy." -Truthdig

"Of the 72 programs GAO assessed this year, none of them had proceeded through system development meeting the best-practice standards for mature technologies, stable design, or mature production processes by critical junctures of the program, each of which are essential for achieving planned cost, schedule, and performance outcomes." - GAO report

Or how about...

"the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a program estimated to be worth $300 billion in sales to its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, the nation’s biggest defense contractor and most generous donor to lobbyists and politicians’ campaigns. The program to build what Lockheed boasts is “the most complex fighter ever built” is also the most expensive, with estimated acquisition costs having increased a whopping $55 billion in just the last three years.

Lockheed need not worry about future profits, because the procurement schedule on this troubled plane has been stretched out to the year 2034." -Truthdig again

Nah, the Pentagon wouldn't waste money on stupid things would they?

MyCroft, that's awesome. I would love to know more.

I am a little uneasy with how flippantly he talks about the military applications of this.

lol! The Pentagon want invisible soldiers! I'm gonna help them! Kewl!

"This is Jonathon Smalls, head researcher for DARPA. He is trying not to be seen... he has spent $4 Billion dollars on a cloaking cylinder but unfortunately we can still see his eyes. BOOM!"

^ I think that's also under selling the potential here. Soldiers would kill for camo that good -- something that only made their eyes visible, especially if you could at will decide to go blind in exchange for being completely invisible for a time (like when a patrol is coming by, or a helicopter is flying past, etc.)

Then think bigger, what if a tank could be completely invisible, except for a 4" x 4" pane of glass over a camera? What about a fighter jet, or an aircraft carrier?

If it's all spectra of light, even infrared and radar couldn't see the invisible part.

Have fun spotting that little piece of glass flying through the air at twice the speed of sound...

@Drachen_Jager, far be it for me to defend the Pentagon's intelligence, but you're selling the F-22 and F-35 programs short -- they're both supposed to be platforms we use for at least 50 years. They may seem like expensive overkill now, but in 2045, they'll barely seem worth the metal-ceramic composite they're made of. The F-35 program in particular is mostly an exercise in cost-savings. It's a single fighter meant to replace essentially every other fighter in the Air Force's inventory, except the F-22. It's even being designed to try to replace a portion of the RAF's fighters as well.

As for submarines, yeah, I'd have a hard time justifying any budget for a new submarine program post-Cold War. Maybe a refresh on the old designs, but an all-new terrorist-fighting submarine is definitely defense pork.

These materials actually do not require a camera.

They bend the light around the object, in effect rendering it invisible. These materials are called negative index metamaterials. Metamaterials are named as such because they are often composed of two or more different materials that give the composite material an effective material property. In this case, we are talking about a negative index of refraction.

Until the 1960s, no one thought a negative index of refraction was possible- for a number of reasons that are not entirely necessary for our discussion. The predictions made by V.G. Veselago were largely ignored until J. Pendry 'rediscovered' negative refraction. After D. Smith invented the first negative index metamaterial, the field has taken off.

So what is a negative index of refraction?

The basic idea is that these materials have a simultaneous negative permittivity and permeability...

Ahhh... what does that mean?

That means that a time varying electric and magnetic field or wave which has one phase in a free space, will be exactly out of phase in a negative index material with n = -1.

See this video:

http://www.videosift.com/video/Cloak-of-Invisibility

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_refractive_index#Negative_refractive_index

^ The camera is for viewing the outside world, as it would be impossible to see anything inside the cloaked area (if light bends around your eyes to make you invisible, then it can't go into your eyes so that you can see).
A camera would allow for wide angle, recording, and infrared viewing, vs. looking out with your own eyes.

>> ^xxovercastxx:
They kinda downplayed, or skimmed over, that whole being-invisible-means-being-blind thing. If all the light is bent around you, there's nothing for your eyes to see.


Ok Really? Do I have to take this one? Nobody else saw how stupid this comment was? MarineGunRock, no? Ok I got it.
Assuming you could wear a device that bends light around you it obviously would not bend ALL of the light beams....just the ones that are hitting your body (or where the device is). If you wore the device/cloth(whatever it is) just putting on your eyes would make you unable to see. Wait theres more....
another thing, you could use this for machinery, like tanks...and use technology like radar to see, therefore eliminating your "you would be blind" scenario.

Actually, the interface between the positive and negative index regions can be used for viewing. See the attached video in my original post.

And Ben, MGR actually raises a good point. If you thought of light like a flow of particles, then he would be right. The real answer to his question has many dimensions. The first, the dreaded Kramers-Kronig relations imply that you cannot have a negative index over all frequencies. So, there will always be a frequency where the cloak of invisibility is just a cloak. Second, the information still passes before you, it is just distorted. In this case, you could see out although a computer would probably be necessary to interpret the information.

Impractical for military applications.

All an opposing army would have to do is use sonar to find you - something I imagine is much easier to accomplish than spending billions on invisibility technology.

One could even assume that development of technology that uses sonar that transmits images to a goggle or other screen for viewing would be much easier and cheaper to create and arm an army with.

>> ^NordlichReiter:
Light is a form of radiation, if you can bend microwaves, and radio waves. Then you can bend light.

Captain Obvious claims another victim...

This is all fascinating, but let's not lose sight of one very important lesson from this video:

That dork thinks cloaks are sexy.

I was hoping for a demo.

Video seems broken. I just see four floating eyeballs.

>> ^BenjaminFranklin2u:
>> ^xxovercastxx:
MarineGunRock, no?


>> ^MycroftHomlz:

And Ben, MGR actually raises a good point. If you thought of light like a flow of particles, then he would be right. The real answer to his question has many dimensions.

How the fuck did I come into this? And what question did I ask? All I said is that I want to know more about what MH does.

>> ^Throbbin:
Impractical for military applications.
All an opposing army would have to do is use sonar to find you - something I imagine is much easier to accomplish than spending billions on invisibility technology.
One could even assume that development of technology that uses sonar that transmits images to a goggle or other screen for viewing would be much easier and cheaper to create and arm an army with.


Problem with sonar is, by the time your outgoing pulse reaches the tank, it's fired a sabot round into your face. We're not talking a couple hundred feet here. You'd be masking a tank from miles out, where only the muzzle flash would be visible. I could see this tech being like a little fence you erect around the tank, and fire over it. Kinda like going hull-down on flat ground.