Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak could become reality

Fancy impressing your mates with a little fact behind the story? Let’s go all L’Oreal commercial as “here comes the science”. Apparently, “the idea centres on the use of a ‘metamaterial’ surface, which tricks the eye into thinking an item is not there by bending light away as it reflects from the source. Metamaterials are created by altering the internal structure of existing materials using complex nanoscale patterns to change their properties. At present objects can be made invisible to larger wavelengths such as radar but not to smaller wavelengths like light.” Got that?

Wow, sounds like less of a foolish pipe dream when dressed up in science jargon. Leading the project is Professor Sir John Pendry, who first talked up the possibility of a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak three years ago and Professor Stefan Maier, who as a “field-leader in plasmonics, or electromagnetic wave technology” seems to know his stuff.

Talking up the project, professor Pendry said: “I anticipate this technology will do things we already do, but do them better and cheaper,” he says. “For hundreds of thousands of years we have used chemistry to alter materials, and we have taken this as far as it can go. But there is a far more extensive set of properties that can be changed by altering the structure of a material. The grant has come at a very useful time – scientific funding has taken a big hit in the economic recession so a grant of this size is very encouraging.”

Encouraging indeed, and not just for the clever bods in lab coats, but for movie lovers, technology fiends and scampish children everywhere!

[via The Telegraph]