Invisibility

Take a look at this article!

Researchers at the Imperial College of London have discovered a way to "bend" light around solid surfaces (or something). As a result you can see through things using quantum mechanics. Pretty awesome and non-fake I think.

Damn impressive!

non-fake I think.

That site doesn't look like some crappy newsblog to me.

Crappy news-blog or not, I've seldom seen a news-media account of advanced research that wasn't twisted in some way. I believe this is the original publication on the matter. It's a really cool paper that was published in Nature Materials about nine months ago, but suffice it to say the most eye-catching of the claims made in that news piece are bogus. I am quite certain that the picture of the "transparent hand" was a particularly bad piece of photoshop work. Yes, the researchers have created a material that can be made transparent though application of an electric field, but we are talking about a semiconductor nanostructure similar to a computer chip. Claiming that you are going to be able to make ordinary objects transparent through this work is like saying that you are going to use your thumbnail as a substitute for the Pentium 4 in your computer!

As I said, this is really cool work that will likely have large impacts on laser and communications technology, but don't hold your breath for the invisibility cloaks, or even the medical imaging that your article envisions.

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Some people are like slinkys...

They aren?t really good for anything, but you can't help but laugh when one tumbles down the stairs.

I was just sitting here waiting for Tracer Bullet to weigh in. :smile:

Me too, actually.

But I'm a believer. For the sheer coolness of it.

a technology like this would impress me, yet i forsee something of this type of technology in our future, if not now when, however, i must agree with TB here

Fatstrings... what?

I don't care one way or another about this. Pretty much what will end up happening is one of 2 things: A large company will buy this technology and we'll never see it again (because they jacked the price up, not because it's invisibilite tech.) or the government will use it to kill people, and Iran will get it from the Russians who say they are our allies.

Soon after Iran gets the technology, the media (who loves to combine words into catch phrases) will start writing about "Invislam" and will get everyone whipped into a terror-frenzy....

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I tried sniffing coke, but the ice cubes kept getting stuck in my nose.
http://www.dimebowl.com

Nickelplate... what? Why did you feel the need to bring politics into... everything?

Pretty cool, but as TB said, not as cool as the article says. Yet.

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

Ok, a new challenge: Cheese!

Who manages to relate cheese to politics or religion? Anyone?

Ok, a new challenge: Cheese!

Who manages to relate cheese to politics or religion? Anyone?

1)It's forbidden to eat cheese during fast.

2)The song "Dance This Mess Around" from the B-52's: "Why don't you
dance with me? I'm not a Limburger. Just a limburger." People from
Limburg (in Holland and in Belgium) feel this as an offence because
they think it is about them. They don't know this cheese as
"Limburger", but under different local names. Many tried to pass a bill
banning the song in the before mentioned countries (but failed).

I win. :heee: