Would You Like an Invisibility Shield?

Who has not had a dream of having the power of invisibility? Such a power could be fun, useful, and dangerous. If it were invented, how would people use it? How would governments use it?


It is time to ask these questions because engineers have devised a new concept for such a shield. Although the concept is early stage and there are practical bugs for implementation, the science and general engineering are good and it is only a matter of time before such a device is demonstrated.

" The possibility of using plasmonic covers to drastically reduce the total scattering cross section of spherical and cylindrical objects is discussed. While it is intuitively expected that increasing the physical size of an object may lead to an increase in its overall scattering cross section, here we see how a proper design of these lossless metamaterial covers near their plasma resonance may induce a dramatic drop in the scattering cross section, making the object nearly invisible to an observer, a phenomenon with obvious applications for low observability and non invasive probe design. Physical insights into this phenomenon and some numerical results are provided."
- Alù A. & Engheta N. Preprint, Achieving transparency with plasmonic coatings (2005).

Additional References

Engineers devise invisibility shield

Nanofocusing in Tapered Plasmonic Waveguides

Quote of the Day

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
-- John Cage

Home on Lagrange (The L5 Song)

Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus
Where the three-body problem is solved,
Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K,
And the cold virus never evolved. (chorus)

We eat algea pie, our vacuum is high,
Our ball bearings are perfectly round.
Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed,
And a kilogram weighs half a pound. (chorus)

If we run out of space for our burgeoning race
No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch
When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart,
If we just find a big enough wrench. (chorus)

I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space,
And living up here is a bore.
Tell the shiggies, "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodbye
'Cause I'm moving next week to L4! (chorus)

CHORUS: Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.

--Home on Lagrange (The L5 Song)
© 1978 by William S. Higgins and Barry D. Gehm