There has been a lot of
excitement about the
possibility of creating a
Harry Potter-like cloak
that can make people or
things appear to vanish. However, that goal
seemed like it may be
impossible to reach within
the next decade…until Dr.
Baile Zhang came up with
a new, simple and promising solution. Zhang
unveiled his own
“invisibility cloak”
technology at the
prestigious TED2013
conference in Long Beach, California on Monday. Most other previously
developed invisibility cloaks
were made with fabricated
materials in the lab that
have patterns working to
bend light waves. The problem with this
technology is that the labs
could only make a small
amount of the light-
bending materials. Making
things even more complicated, most known
examples of cloaking
material only work using
microwaves and other
invisible forms of light. While Dr. Zhang, a
professor at the Nanyang
Technological University in
Singapore, was reading
about these exotic
materials, he suddenly remembered a high school
physics classroom lecture.
The exhibit showed
students how calcite
bends light in odd ways.
That led Zhang to come up with a much easier way to
make a large invisibility
cloak. He decided to try
gluing two pieces of calcite
together. Though Dr Zhang's cloaking
device looks like more of a
box than an actual cloak,
the result is just the
same. It bends light around
objects, making them disappear. He
demonstrated how his
calcite cloak could hide the
section of items
underneath it. Unfortunately, Zhang’s
cloaking technique has
serious limitations. For
example, the cloak works
only in an exotic medium
known as laser oil. While the laser oil that was used
for the initial
demonstration worked
perfectly, at the moment
water or air will not work
with the cloak. However, it does suggest there is a
possible way to make
practical invisibility cloaks
on a mass level in the
future. Last year, Dr Zhang was
listed in the MIT
Technology Review's '35
Innovators Under 35' list.
The doctor’s cloaking
device is not the first invisibility cloak, which was
initially made famous in
multiple science fiction
films. Other designs are
currently being worked on
in places like London's Imperial College, Duke
University and the
University of Texas.

Hmmmm.....pictures?

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