Nanoscale Light-bending Material Could be the Key to Invisibility

Posted by on August 11th, 2008 in concepts, fashion, nanotech

The age-old fantasy of rendering objects invisible took a sharp step toward reality Sunday when scientists said they had created a material that can bend visible light in three dimensions.

For now the vanishing act takes place on a nanoscale, measured in billionths of a meter.

But there is no fundamental reason why the same principles cannot be scaled up one day to make invisibility cloaks big enough to hide a person, a tank or even a tanker, the scientists say.

The groundbreaking experiments, led by Xiang Zhang at the University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, were reported simultaneously in the British journal Nature and the U.S. journal Science.

From Discovery.com

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