Cloaking Device May Be On Its Way

The London Telegraph reported today that scientists in Utah and Australia have made progress in their quest for a cloaking device.

The Klingons used it to make their Bird of Prey spacecraft invisible. The Romulans used cloaking too and variants of this stealth technology hid the nasty alien in the Predator films and have been mentioned in Star Wars, Doctor Who and more besides.

First, I must expose this most egregious error, which I would expect the science editor to catch but which he didn't. It was the Romulans who had the Bird of Prey, not the Klingons, although their spaceships were of similar design (see Wikipedia for confirmation). Now to the subject.

Prof Graeme Milton, of the University of Utah, and Nicolae-Alexandru Nicorovici, of the University of Technology, Sydney, announce that "we have found that cloaking might be realised". The "making of an object invisible through some cloaking device is commonly regarded as science fiction", said Prof Milton.

But with Dr Nicorovici he outlines how to do it with the help of materials with bizarre optical properties that were first postulated in 1968 by Victor Veselago, a physicist working at the General Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

The work of Victor Veselago was apparently kept under a cloaking device until six years ago, when a "superlens" was developed with unusual properties.

When an object is bathed in light of one colour, Prof Milton and Dr Nicorovici predict that light becomes trapped near the lens and "almost exactly cancels the light incident on each molecule in the object, so it has essentially no response to the incident light. Numerically we see that the molecule is effectively invisible".

By looking through a superlens at the object "one would only see the back half of it".

If they stick a second superlens behind the object, then would it be completely invisible? Would the device be two big superlenses strapped in front and in back of an object? That seems pretty cumbersome. My recommendation would be to make teensy-weensy superlenses that can be attached to each other to form a fabric-like "cloak," thus preserving the name, "cloaking device."

Of course, once the device is perfected, it will probably be banned everywhere for reasons of crime prevention and national security--which is a shame, because it sounds like a great toy.