‘Space-time cloak’ to conceal events revealed in new study
Welcome to the future.
Scientists have developed a recipe for manipulating the speed of light as it passes over an object, making it theoretically possible to ‘cloak‘ the object’s movement so that an observer doesn’t notice, according to a paper in the Journal of Optics.
The study, by researchers from Imperial College London, involves a new class of materials called metamaterials, which can be artificially engineered to distort light or sound waves. With conventional materials, light typically travels along a straight line, but with metamaterials, scientists can exploit a wealth of additional flexibility to create undetectable blind spots. By deflecting certain parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, an image can be altered or made to look like it has disappeared.