Good thing for now is we're a long way from this being available at the Wal-Mart, and practical enough to be used by a bunch of people. The working experiments now are extremely controlled and limited in scope, efficacy, and actual volume of area covered. The conditions are static, too: no one is moving around quickly, changing directions, moving through various lighting sources. And as the article points out, it's only effective on a small wavelength of light. We have a long way to go before a cloak--even a relatively simplistic one--is available that could cover a whole man or group of men at all wavelengths of light. I can imagine that, even when such cloaks are available, therefore, they could be detected at those wavelengths of light they're not particularly good at bending. Maybe banks will have to be fitted with UV emitters or microwave emitters or something, that would get around the cloaks' abilities. And I'm still not sure how someone inside an invisibility cloak can see outside of it without the apertures they use to see showing up as literal holes in the cloak (since the light that enters the user's eyes isn't curved like the rest of it, its absorption would show up as a hole in the cloak).
Still, it's only a matter of a couple of decades I guess... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rogue" <n1ro...@aol.com> To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com Sent: Saturday, March 20, 2010 10:39:34 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: [scifinoir2] Where's my Cloak of Invisibility? I agree with you on this. I can see it now, you have bad guys robbers using this cloak or a really bad knock off trying to rob banks and trying to steal or rape people. However there is a bright side to all of this. Kids or people who work would never again be late for anything you could always just slip in. --Dax I love mankind - it's people I can't stand! From: Mr. Worf Sent: Friday, March 19, 2010 3:28 PM To: scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [scifinoir2] Where's my Cloak of Invisibility? I can see nothing but bad coming from this. On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 7:52 AM, Kelwyn < ravena...@yahoo.com > wrote: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100318/ap_on_sc/us_sci_cloak_of_invisibility Cloak of invisibility takes a step forward By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer – Thu Mar 18, 4:05 pm ET WASHINGTON – From Grimm's fairy tales to Harry Potter, the cloak of invisibility has played a major role in fiction. Now scientists have taken a small but important new step toward making it reality. Researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology report they were able to cloak a tiny bump in a layer of gold, preventing its detection at nearly visible infrared frequencies. Their cloaking device also worked in three dimensions, while previously developed cloaks worked in two dimensions, lead researcher Tolga Ergin said. The cloak is a structure of crystals with air spaces in between, sort of like a woodpile, that bends light, hiding the bump in the gold later beneath, the researchers reported in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science. ------------------------------------ Post your SciFiNoir Profile at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scifinoir2/app/peoplemap2/entry/add?fmvn=mapYahoo ! Groups Links http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scifinoir2/ -- Celebrating 10 years of bringing diversity to perversity! Mahogany at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mahogany_pleasures_of_darkness/
