Invisibility cloaks possible....I kid you not.

The Sunday Times May 28, 2006

It’s magic: science gets closer to creating the Invisible Man
Jonathan Leake, Science Editor

INVISIBILITY and the ability to see through walls — dreams that were once confined to the pages of science fiction — are moving into the realms of feasibility.

Studies into the behaviour of light have delivered a blueprint for a new type of cloaking device that could be used to make objects and, potentially, people invisible. The researchers, some based at Imperial College London, have even created a prototype material capable of cloaking objects against radar waves as proof of their theory.

Sir John Pendry, professor of theoretical physics at Imperial, has compared such materials with the “invisibility cloak” seen in the Harry Potter films and suggests that the first could be created in the next decade. “Just as in Harry Potter, nobody would be able to see an object if it was cloaked,” he said. “Our cloaking system would render anything inside it invisible.”

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Pendry suggested such a material could be coated onto warships and tanks to make them invisible — although their wakes and tracks might give them away once they moved. “We know cloaking can be done with radar waves. Light waves are another form of electromagnetic radiation, so making a material capable of cloaking against light should be possible within a decade,” he said.

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