Invisibility: It’s not just for fictional magicians anymore.
Scientists at the Pentagon have just published some fascinating
(understatement) research on “temporal cloaking”. As the team
noted in Nature, “To achieve spatial cloaking, the index of
refraction is manipulated to flow light from a probe around an
object in such a way that a ‘hole’ in space is created, and the
object remains hidden. Alternatively, it may be desirable to
cloak the occurrence of an event over a finite time period, and
the idea of temporal cloaking has been proposed in which the
dispersion of the material is manipulated in time, producing a
‘time hole’ in the probe beam to hide the occurrence of the
event from the observer.” Translated into lay-nerd terms, these
scientists figured that light allows us to see objects, so to
make an object or event invisible, all you have to do is keep
the light from hitting it (a key component of other existing
invisibility technology). And to keep it invisible for a period
of time, you have to speed u