Future Inventions

Science fiction often features technology that inspires future inventions.

Cell phone inventor Martin Cooper claims the communication devices used on Star Trek motivated him to invent cellular phones.

Harry Potter has an invisibility cloak and the Romulans in Star Trek make their starships disappear using cloaking devices.

This fictional technology has inspired scientists to try and make invisibility a possibility. In fact, recent developments in nanotechnology could make invisible cloaking a reality in the near future.

We see things because light reflects off objects. Black objects absorb light and this absence of light is seen as darkness which also helps us to detect objects.

For an object to become invisible it cannot reflect or absorb light. If light could be bent around an object without any reflection or casting of shadows then we would not see it.

Ideally, we would only see what is directly behind the object. It sounds strange but scientists have created a new class of matter that can do this.

Metamaterials are nanostructures that have a negative refractive index, which means they can control how light waves are bent, reflected and absorbed.

But these meta-materials were limited in size. They couldn't be made larger than a few microns and only manipulated certain frequencies of light. So they could only make invisible what you couldn't see anyway.

However, a team of scientists at the University of Central Florida have discovered a method for creating "large-area fabrication" of these meta-materials for the full spectrum of light.

As described in their research published in the journal of Advanced Optical Materials, this means that any object covered in this fabric would become invisible.

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