Scientists Make Gold Disappear

March 18th, 2010

Not much of a trick to make gold disappear, or is it? Scientists from Germany have published a study about bending light, and have been able to create a form of invisibility on a piece of gold.

The findings, published in the journal Science on Thursday, could in the future make it possible large objects invisible, but for now the researchers said they were not keen to speculate on possible applications.

“For now these…cloaking devices are just a beautiful and exciting benchmark to show what transformation optics can do,” said Tolga Ergin of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He said that it would take many years to be able to use these techniques on a person. Apparently he has never read any Harry Potter books. We need nutritional supplements we can use to disappear. Everyone will be a pornstar.

The “cloak” was composed of special lenses that work by partially bending light waves to suppress the light scattering from the bump.

“This is very exciting, because mankind has always thought about being invisible or having invisibility cloaks,” Ergin told Reuters in a telephone interview. “This is the first proof of principle. It shows that the technique works.”

“There have been proposals in the field of transformation optics for different devices like beam concentrators, beam shifters, super antennas which concentrate light into one point from all directions, and much, much more,” he said.

“It is really hard to say what the future will bring, but the field is definitely very broad and the possibilities are very large.”