• Question: is it possible to make a functioning cloaking device (make general stuff invisible/not noticeable.) By Barney Turnbull

    Asked by that thing sitting in the cornar to Joe, Jos, Kate, Lisa, Pierre on 11 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Pierre Lasorak

      Pierre Lasorak answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Hi
      I see it quite difficult right now to build some kind of “invisible” robot. We could think of using transparent plastics to build something, but usually we want to use some electricity to communicate with the device, or a electrical motor to make some wheel spins etc… There is a fundamental link between light and electricity (namely light is electricity). So everything which interacts with electricity interacts with light, in other word it is visible!
      You can see it because all the electronic cables are not transparent! So there is quite a long time before you toaster becomes transparent entirely!
      However you can think of very small objects that are so small that you can’t see them. And in fact this does exist, it is called the nanotechnology, or creating some bacteria that do what you want them to do…
      I have no other idea maybe you or the other scientists have??

    • Photo: Lisa Simmons

      Lisa Simmons answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      I know people that are working on this now. It falls under the area of negative refraction (making light bend back ). At the moment it is only possible to make things invisible in the acoustic region, in the visible region it is still a theoretical area of research

    • Photo: Joshaniel Cooper

      Joshaniel Cooper answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      I believe that theoretically we already know how to make one, the difficulty with actually making it is that it needs tiny structures much smaller than the wavelength of light and perfectly shaped (which is very difficult). However there are other ways around, for instance recently scientists have managed to make small things invisible to heat (which could be more useful in the future than invisible to light). For radio waves we have also already made things like the stealth planes (which work by just not reflecting any radio waves back to the receivers, effectively making it invisible.

    • Photo: Kate Dobson

      Kate Dobson answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      I think we have also developed the technology to be able to coat objects with flexible “screens” that can take an image of what is behind the object and then project that image onto the surface you are looking at.

Comments