Scientists Getting Closer To The Invisibility Cloak! Lock Yo Showers.

The invisibility cloak is one of those things that probably should never come into being. Unlike that Potter kid, I don’t think we’re going to use it to stomp around a musty-ass old school. No sir. No ma’am. More likely people like Solid Snake are going to use it to sneak into the bedrooms of important people and put a snap into their neck. And then stare at the deceaseds’ wives and husbands as they shower. Unknowingly.

This deadly apparatus for booby-staring and neck-snapping is getting closer. Closer I say.

io9:

Today’s major breakthrough comes from an undergraduate student at the University of St Andrews who figured out how to get around the fundamental problem of light taking too long to travel around the hidden object.

Here’s the problem: when you have an object hidden by an invisibility cloak, the light has to be warped around it so that the object is invisible, right? But now the light has to take a longer path, making it slower than it should be. If everything’s dead still, you won’t notice the difference, but as soon as there’s movement, the warping shows up.

So how do you fix this? You either make the light travel faster than the speed of light (very hard) or you do what this kid did,  and make a large bubble of space where the speed of light is slower than normal, so you don’t look out of place. By slowing down the speed of light over a larger area, it’s possible to match the speed around the cloak with comparative ease.

Get it done! You owe me the future I was promised. Damimt.