Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

Bringing you the dark genius of Dostoyevsky
combined with the divine, intelligent humor of Pynchon
since spring 2002


What Cool Scientists Are Wearing



  • Click Here To Get Your Own Cool Science Guy Stuff!
Sites Cool Scientists Are Reading
  • Science & Supermodels
  • Scientific Blogging
  • Build Cool Stuff!
  • We Are Scientists
  • Sex And The Beach
  • The Grunt
  • The Mighty Dyckerson
  • Blog Portland
  • Mo Comedy
  • RevRee
  • Chatoyance
  • Crystal Village
  • Misogynous Portuguese
  • M-Visions
  • Forever Geek
  • Geek Logik
  • Michelle's Spell
  • Issy
Top 10 Reasons My Faster-Than-Light Car Rules:

10) Stephen Hawking always wants to carpool.

9) Breaking the laws of physics is only a misdemeanor in most states.

8) Traffic enforcement is pretty much limited to cops with Ph.D.'s in Quantum Physics.

7) Bugs - they never see you comin'.

6) I can get to the good hookers before Charlie Sheen.

5) I made a fortune selling pizza with the slogan "It's there before you order or it's free!"

4) I sleep until noon and still get to work by 8:00am!

3) I'm never in the car long enough to hear an entire Madonna song.

2) My cigar butts don't land in the back seat, they land in last week!

... and the number one cool thing about my faster-than-light car is ...

1) I get a license plate that reads "ME = MC^2"

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us
  • Subscribe

  • Making the world safe
    for technology,
    one comedic punch
    to the throat at a time.


  • Add to Technorati Favorites!
  • Subscribe in NewsGator Online
  • Subscribe with Bloglines

Previous Scientific Goodness

  • Science Wants To Give You Better Orgasms

  • Science Shows You How To Determine If Your Girlfri...

  • Science Helps You Plan Your Weekend

  • Science Advice For Wednesday

  • Scientists Bring Peace To The Mid-East

  • Phi, The Ultimate Supermodel

  • Show Your Favorite Stripper Some Love

  • Golden Fiddle Makes The Honorary Scientists List

  • Today Is International "Talk Like A Pirate Day"

  • Science Proves Women Are In League With Lucifer

Blah, Blah, Blah

  • Subscribe in NewsGator Online
  • unique IPs to-date
  • Top Technology Blogs
  • Site Feed
  • iPing-it!
  • Listed on BlogShares

  • Other Places
    To Find Me

    Powered by Blogger

Invisibility For Dummies



The proof of concept demonstration of a 'cloaking' device has a lot of people interested in how this technology works and what it means for the military, industry and, most likely, peeping Toms. I am here to help.

First, there are a few concepts. These are always the most difficult things to get people to agree on but if I don't make this simple enough that at least some wiseacre tells me I oversimplified, I did not do my job.

The important concept is that light, as physicists define it, is at multiple frequencies across a spectrum. That's why we have colors. In the picture below, there are frequencies and wavelengths for common items such as TVs, radios, microwaves, and the Gamma-Bomb that created The Incredible Hulk.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us


So far, the 'cloak' they have constructed only works in the microwave spectrum. You can see by the chart that this is outside the visiblity range for humans. Light that we can see has a higher frequency and a much smaller wavelength.

The next issue is the material. To make this work, they had to create "metamaterials" ... and those aren't found in nature. The New Scientist Tech article didn't go into detail about the material properties that made this work so I will. Metamaterials have electrical and magnetic properties that have a different index of refraction than normal materials. In other words, you see them differently because their electromagnetic properties are different.

How does that affect light? Maxwell discovered the complex relationship between electricity and magnetism and how they propagate at the speed of light. Snell's Law, or the "right-hand rule," tells us that magnetism curls around a wire in the direction of your fingers when you point your thumb in the direction of the current flow. According to the right-hand rule, light will always bend that way because of positive electrical permeability and magnetic permittivity.

Metamaterials, with their exotic properties, have negative permeability or permittivity, so they bend light away from what you normally expect. If you position them correctly, you can use this negative refraction to make light focus to a point. If I can prevent that electromagnetic energy from entering a region, light will "flow" around an object in the region, undistorted. Since the object won't reflect light, you won't see it and it will cast no shadow.

This all sounds great, so why aren't we out there zapping Klingons with it?

1) So far it only works in the microwave region. The optical region has much smaller wavelengths so for this to work the metamaterials have to be in the nano-size range. We have no way to make them that small yet.

2) It's still single frequency. This is a much more difficult problem. Looking at the chart above  you can see the visible spectrum covers a lot of ground. We need variable-index-of-refraction materials that can accommodate all frequencies and wavelengths and that will take a lot more work. Those don't exist yet.

This is going to happen in our lifetimes. We haven't quite gotten a handle on light yet because it's both a particle and a wave and that's a pesky issue to resolve in lots of other ways. But we're making progress. Most likely, the answers will come by not treating light as the source of the problem but as the by-product.

posted by your friendly neighborhood Moderator at 8:33 AM
Email This Cutting-Edge Humor
Direct Link This Post
or Add to del.icio.us or even Digg me.
4 attempts to be as funny as a scientist


Comments on "Invisibility For Dummies"

 

Blogger The Grunt said ... (10:46 PM) : 

These are some exciting developments. I can't wait to be invisible....er, I mean physically.

 

Blogger JR's Thumbprints said ... (11:05 PM) : 

Nice explanation. I've heard that when you look at a color, let's say blue, you're actually looking at every color in the spectrum but blue. Is that correct?

 

Anonymous Anonymous said ... (8:01 AM) : 

jr, no, you are only seeing blue. The other colors in the spectrum are absorbed.

But you can guess how that adds to the complexity of invisibility. On this website, we have 65,000 colors or so, each at a different frequency, and the metamaterials would have to work at all of them. In real life, the colors are millions.

 

Anonymous Anonymous said ... (8:02 AM) : 

Mr. Grunt, you are too modest. I've BEEN to your website. You may be invisible, but only to men.

 

post a comment