Cloaking Technology Coming — We’ll See

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Yes, pun intended. Cloaking devices, like the ones in Star Trek or the cloak Harry Potter inherited from his father? Science fiction for most, but groups in the U.S. and England feel its possible.

Both John Pendry, a physicist at the Imperial College London and Nader Engheta, a professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania have done work in the use of “metamaterials” for this purpose. Pendry co-wrote a study which appeared in Thursday’s online edition of the journal Science. Metamaterials can be tuned to bend electromagnetic radiation — radio waves and visible light, for example — in any direction.

A cloak made of those materials, with a structure designed down to the submicroscopic scale, would neither reflect light nor cast a shadow.

Instead, like a river streaming around a smooth boulder, light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation would strike the cloak and simply flow around it, continuing on as if it never bumped up against an obstacle. That would give an onlooker the apparent ability to peer right through the cloak, with everything tucked inside concealed from view. Source: USA Today

We Say: What’s holding this back, according to the researchers, is the engineering technology to make it happen. Apparently the theory is solid (pun intended). OK, can we now make a starship to go with it?