The New & Improved Invisibility Cloak
An “invisibility cloak” that’s able to hide items thousands of times larger than before now exists, scientists say. The cloak works by wrapping light around an object.
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.
In 2010, scientists created the first cloak that worked for three-dimensional objects against light nearly visible to humans. Still, the cloaked area was only 30 microns wide, or about one-third the width of a human hair. Now researchers have developed a cloak that can hide three-dimensional objects against red and green lasers and ordinary white light. Although the cloaked region they demonstrated is only three-quarters of an inch wide, “there is actually no limit on the size of the cloak,” researcher Shuang Zhang, a physicist at the University of Birmingham in England, told LiveScience.
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.
