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Thursday, May 25, 2006

Scientists refuse to be further spanked by magic

Posted by on May 25 at 15:11 PM

Via cnn.com: Scientists, sick of being punked by teenage wizards, are designing their own invisibility cloak.

“To be realistic, it’s going to be fairly thick. Cloak is a misnomer. ‘Shield’ might be more appropriate,” said John Pendry, a physicist at the Imperial College London.

The keys are special manmade materials, unlike any in nature or the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. These materials are intended to steer light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation around an object, rendering it as invisible as something tucked into a hole in space.

A cloak made of those materials, with a structure designed down to the submicroscopic scale, would neither reflect light nor cast a shadow.

Instead, like a river streaming around a smooth boulder, light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation would strike the cloak and simply flow around it, continuing on as if it never bumped up against an obstacle. That would give an onlooker the apparent ability to peer right through the cloak, with everything tucked inside concealed from view.

Full delicious story here.


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I wish they'd stop screwing around with invisibility this and laser beam that. These things can only lead to evil.

The world needs alternative modes of transportation. They need to be spending their money on developing anti-gravity technology for flying cars or better yet teleportation.

Quantum entanglement has led to some promising, albeit very preliminary, results vis-a-vis teleportation, but don't expect anything remotely resembling a Star Trek style "transporter" anytime in the near future.

And laser beams have also created some intriguing possibilities in the area of spacecraft propulsion systems, so it's not ALL evil out there.

Personally, I'd like to see more money invested in developing nuclear fusion generation; that would go a long way towards solving our energy problems, and with almost no negative environmental impact.

I am really excited about how much this ought to spice up future wars, but i think it has far greater implications for Halloween. I plan to cut a hole in my magic cloak and go trick or treat as a floating head. muahahah!

as i proof read the above i now realize you could go as a floating ANYTHING. This is a win win for flashers.

Nice take.

Didn't some Japanese kid already develop a +10 Cloak Of Invisibility for his post grad work?

If this new one isn't like +12, it're really not news.

yeah, but the +10 was made obsolete by the 4th edition rules.

previously, only certain classes were able to wear one. right, mr. mudede?

now everybody will be able to wear one.

Is "submicrospic" a word in search of both a meaning and a reason?

If the set "microscopic" includes everything too small to see with the naked eye, then "submicroscopic" can't be anything separate. What subset would "submicroscopic" be? And why wouldn't we use a more specifically descriptive word (e.g. molecular, atomic, subatomic) to label it?

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