Harry Potter invisibility cloaks a reality within years
There can be few people who haven’t either read a Harry Potter novel or seen a Harry Potter movie. And I suspect most people who have would love to own their own invisibility cloak like the one Harry Potter himself owns and uses to great effect. If you’re one of those people then your fictionalized dream could soon become reality.
For those of an older generation who are now wondering who this Harry Potter fellow is, how about a Star Trek reference, where whole ships are cloaked to avoid detection. Or The Invisible Woman, a superhero who can make herself invisible whenever she wants to. Making ourselves disappear is clearly a skill humankind would love to possess.
According to The Telegraph, one man has made it his mission to make invisibility cloaks a reality. Professor Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St. Andrews is working on a blueprint for a cloaking device with practical applications. And he’s just received £100,000 funding from the Royal Society’s Theo Murphy Blue Skies award to make that mission possible.
Leonhardt has been working part-time on invisibility and cloaking devices since 2006 but can now dedicate the next two years to making major advances in the field. He claims his technique involves “geometry, light and a wee bit of magic,” and Einstein’s theory of curved space is used as the basis for the idea.
Leonhardt explained:
Imagine a transparent material that guides light around an object without distorting the light. The object would disappear from view. One way of achieving this feat is to let the material act like a coordinate transformation of space: the cloaking device condenses space, enclosing the object into a single, invisible point.
Scientists have already succeeded in making objects appear invisible using microwaves but doing the same with visible light waves is a much trickier conundrum. If Leonhardt can make this a reality then we could all own invisibility cloaks within a couple of decades. Which sounds to me like a recipe for absolute mayhem and disorder. So maybe it isn’t such a good idea after all.
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