Technology

Last night while I was doing my homework I was watching this show on the History Channel that was all about invisibility. The show was called “That’s Impossible” and scientists talked about how this new technology is advancing very quickly. The show was extremely interesting and I actually learned a lot from it. At the beginning of the show it started off talking about deception of the eye and playing tricks on it to achieve this invisibility. Up until now that’s the only way people could obtain some sort of cloaking, the very first type of deception was used centuries ago by ninjas. These ninjas would deceive the eye by hiding in a person’s blind spot until their angle of vision focused on something and then they were able to attack without alerting anyone. The ninjas knew the eye very well and by knowing that they were able to move very stealthy among anybody.

Next the show talked about how in World War 1 the allies used deception against the German’s. Winston Churchill the leader of Britain hired a magician to try to cloak an entire canal and port from the German’s. This task was very difficult but the magician figured it out and his ideas turned out to be extremely affective. To conceal the port he created a fake port a few miles away from the actual port and also made it a little more noticeable by faintly lighting it up. This caused the German’s to be attracted to this fake port and kept the actual port intact. The canal was a different story he had to make a huge canal invisible to the naked eye which took some time to figure out. After a while the magician came up with an idea; the idea was to set up hundreds of spotlights with mirrors that would reflect the light causing the pilots to attract to this point and also disorient them. This deception of the eye was very effective and by maintaining these necessary points the allies won the war.

Before this century people could trick the eye, but now scientists are coming up with ways to actually cloak something. A professor from the University of California developed a “metamaterial” that could clock microscopic items, the first step into invisibility. The way a metamaterial works is that it is able to bend the light waves around an object making that object, invisible. Another professor from Duke also created a different type of metamaterial that was able to conceal an object by bending microwaves around these rings of his own fabricated metamaterial.

There actually has been a leaked top secret account of a tank being cloaked by people over in Britain, but the show didn’t explain that part very much. Also there is a scientist over in Japan that has created a cloaking jacket that is made out of tiny beads that bend the light around the suit making the person look invisible, much like that of Harry Potter. I’m pretty sure that this technology is actually out there and the government just doesn’t want the people of America to know about such a top secret thing. If this technology fell into the wrong hands there could be a national disaster, bombings and terrorist attacks would be coming out of nowhere and people’s lives would be in danger. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen and we can use this technology in the best way possible.

Images from: http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/C/cloaking_device.html