Cloaking device coming...?

Martin Anderson

Invisibility for the masses. Well, for some army types, anyway. Can it really be possible to bend light around objects...and people?

According to the BBC, scientists are getting close to developing the kind of cloaking device used by the Klingons to hide their warships in the Star Trek canon. Invisibility - or the appearance thereof - is coming closer to becoming an actual scientific reality.

The materials being developed are capable of bending light around objects and have been created "on a nano scale, measured in billionths of a metre".

Published in the scientific journal Nature and Science, the findings say that the new system works by flowing light a round objects like water around a rock. The material is said to have "negative refractive" properties, in a multi-layered fishnet structure "which is transparent over a wide range of light wavelengths".

"Because light is not absorbed or reflected by the object, a person only sees the light from behind it - rendering the object invisible." says the report.

This is obviously military technology, intended to create 'stealth' tanks and planes and deepen the need for ever-thicker tinfoil hats.

Previous attempts at invisibility have involved directional playback from cameras pointing in the opposite direction to the viewer, and such 'workarounds' were used to explain James Bond's 'Invisible car' in the 2003 Bond outing Die Another Day.

H.G. Wells gave only a rough explanation as to how his anti-hero Griffin achieved invisibility in his classic The Invisible Man, but mentioned changing the composition of the human body to having "the refractive index of air".

If there was ever any technology that will not filter down in the usual trickle from military to business to private use, this is it. No breaking Vegas for you. And lads, forget Porkys-style glimpses at the girls' shower room. That's a job for the military now...