Writers and game designers have since incorporated cloaking devices into many other science-fiction narratives, including Doctor Who, Star Wars, and Stargate.Īn operational, non-fictional cloaking device might be an extension of the basic technologies used by stealth aircraft, such as radar-absorbing dark paint, optical camouflage, cooling the outer surface to minimize electromagnetic emissions (usually infrared), or other techniques to minimize other EM emissions, and to minimize particle emissions from the object. Star Trek placed a limit on use of this device: a space vessel cannot fire weapons, employ defensive shields, or operate transporters while cloaked thus it must "decloak" to fire-essentially like a submarine needing to "surface" in order to launch torpedoes. Fontana, coined the term "cloaking device" for the 1968 episode " The Enterprise Incident", which also featured Romulans. (He likewise predicted, in the same episode, that invisibility, "selective bending of light" as described above, would have an enormous power requirement.) Another Star Trek screenwriter, D.C. Star Trek screenwriter Paul Schneider, inspired in part by the 1958 film Run Silent, Run Deep, and in part by The Enemy Below, which had been released in 1957, imagined cloaking as a space-travel analog of a submarine submerging, and employed it in the 1966 Star Trek episode " Balance of Terror", in which he introduced the Romulan species, whose space vessels employ cloaking devices extensively.
However, over the entire spectrum, a cloaked object scatters more than an uncloaked object. Scientists already use artificial materials called metamaterials to bend light around an object. Fictional cloaking devices have been used as plot devices in various media for many years.ĭevelopments in scientific research show that real-world cloaking devices can obscure objects from at least one wavelength of EM emissions. In 2017, China’s “quantum of invisibility” cloak went viral only to be outed as a greenscreen hoax.With the cloaking device active, light is 'deflected' around the object to make it appear as if it did not exist, rendering it invisible.Ī cloaking device is a hypothetical or fictional stealth technology that can cause objects, such as spaceships or individuals, to be partially or wholly invisible to parts of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. A blurry soldier running toward a tank during the Iraq war was captured in a video so low quality it was mistaken for cloaking technology. In 2010, the British tabloids reported an inflated claim that their government had made a tank invisible (it was just a new type of “light diffusing camo”). This inspired other research programs to try to create their own “metamaterials” in an effort to bend other wavelengths of light.Īnd we’ve been burned in the past, too. And in 2006, a team of scientists including Sir John Pendry developed a sort of proto-invisibility cloak that was able to manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum using artificial materials, designed to exhibit light-bending properties not found in nature. The military tech space is understandably intrigued by camouflage that actively adapts to the background. There have also been plenty of legitimate, non-hoax attempts at invisibility cloaks and related tech. If a person or vertical object stands in a dead spot of a vertical lens, then the light doesn’t hit them-they become essentially invisible. Instead of continuing in a straight line, the light is slowed and redispersed at different angles, creating spots where the light no longer passes through (Cramer calls these “dead spots”). The plastic lenses refract the light as it passes through. It looks like a magic trick, but it’s just science. Turn it horizontally and the other pencils disappear, while the vertical pencils jump back into sharp focus. When the lens is oriented vertically, all of the vertical pencils become blurred to the point of invisibility. This gif (which recently made the rounds on Twitter) shows a stacked grid of colored pencils through a lenticular lens. And definitely not the entire visible spectrum,’” he says.
But you definitely can’t do two frequencies at the same time, if one is red and one is blue. “Physicists were saying, ‘well we know we can bend light at one specific frequency.
According to Cramer, physicists were skeptical that something like this was possible.
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What Cramer realized is that a clear sheet of these lenticular lenses can bend the full spectrum of visible light (it can also bend near infrared, near ultraviolet, and thermal spectrums).
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