Cloak of invisibility!
I've always wanted one of these.
*intro music*
Listen up muggles, because today I'm talking about cloaking devices,
first made famous by those pesky Romulans in Star Trek,
but perfected by the demiguise.
You don't know what a demiguise is?
Well, it's a small animal in the world of Harry Potter, uh,
that's fur is woven into the cloak of invisibility that Harry Potter uses.
Uh, you thought it was just a deathly hallow,
also, umm, made of demiguise fur.
So, in case you thought that my cred as a Harry Potter nerd was in question,
you can just evacuate all of the thoughts in your brain right now.
The fact is, there's real research going on in the real world right now
that could, one day, make things - like me, for example - invisible!
And who doesn't want to be invisible every once in a while.
Like you, dear viewer, that time that your mom walked into you re-enacting the scene from Spider-Man
with the upside-down kiss with a wig head.
So let's get the big question out of the way first.
Do the laws of nature allow this to happen? Allow for a thing that's there to appear to not be there?
And the answer is, yes! Kinda.
And two, do those technologies currently exist, and the answer to that is no, kinda.
The key to making a real invisibility cloak is not to actually make the thing itself vanish.
The key is to make light waves bend around that thing, or refract around it, so that you're basically seeing what's behind it.
You know, like this.
The first research on this stuff was actually started in the 1950s and it focused on plasma, kinda like ionized gas.
Scientists found that plasma was really great at reflecting or absorbing radiation as it comes in,
and so they spent a lot of time and money figuring out how to surround vehicles and people with clouds of plasma.
It doesn't make things invisible to our eyes, but it does make them invisible to things like radar.
But more recently, cloaking research has actually made progress creating materials that can bend light.
In 2009, for example, two separate research teams came up with two very similar methods for cloaking using nanomaterials
One team at Berkeley drilled millions of tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little holes in silicon based materials.
And these little holes allowed infrared light to bend around microscopic objects.
Another team at Cornell was able to achieve similar effects by studding the surface of materials with tiny nano pillars.
And then, there's this.
Last year, in 2011, a team of nanoscientists
- Yes, they are actually tiny, tiny scientists -
used heated sheets of carbon to make nanotubes in a pool of water to create what's known as the mirage effect.
This is like when you're driving on a hot, summer road and the road in front of you looks like a pool of water.
That's because the hot air you see just over the road's surface is refracting the light you see to reflect the sky above.
What you saw there is a lot like that. Refracting light to create a reflection.
Scientists have also gotten similar results using calcite and other kinds of crystal stuff,
but the problem, well okay, there are a lot of problems.
A lot of these techniques only work when you're like under water, or in a certain colored light, or from a certain angle,
and usually, only work for the very small objects.
And so far, the research only focused on nanomaterials hasen't been able to cloak anything that is very big,
because these nanomaterials are so extremely expensive to make, and so until they get cheaper to create,
there's no way we're going to be able to build a whole cloak out of it.
So for now, all you wallflowers and wig head kissers, you're just gonna have to find different ways to blend into the background.
Unless, of course, you manage to score yourself a demiguise pelt, like me.
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We'll also be in the comments below if you have suggestions for other things that you'd like us to cover.
And of course, as always, there's information on where we got all of this information in the description
so that you can learn more, because that's what this is about, right?
Goodbye