Blackhacker

Found this cool piece of Trek tech via slashdot. A cloaking device !!!!

The idea of a cloak of invisibility that hides objects from view has long been confined to the more improbable reaches of science fiction. But electronic engineers have now come up with a way to make one.

…the invisibility shield proposed by Alù and Engheta in a preprint on arXiv1 is more ambitious than this. It is a self-contained structure that would reduce visibility from all viewing angles. In that sense it would be more like the shielding used by the Romulans in the Star Trek episode “Balance of Terror” in 1966, which hid their spaceships at the push of a button.

Pendry warns, however, that the concept as it stands is “no magic cloak”, because it would have to be delicately tuned to suit each different object it hides. Perhaps even more of a drawback, he points out, is the fact that a particular shield only works for one specific wavelength of light.

An object might be made invisible in red light, say, but not in multi wavelength daylight.

And crucially, the effect only works when the wavelength of the light being scattered is roughly the same size as the object. So shielding from visible light would be possible only for microscopic objects; larger ones could be hidden only to long-wavelength radiation such as microwaves. This means that the technology could not be used to hide people or vehicles from human vision.

…but this might work as radar or microwave cloak, becoming the ultimate weapon against speed traps.
hmmmm Doing 120 down I295 and no worries ….

dap: /.