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Tuesday, August 01 2006 @ 01:41 PM Central Daylight Time
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 A research that was published on Monday reported that invisibility is possible in the not so distant future.
Dr Ulf Leonhardt, a theoretical physicist at St Andrews University in Scotland, says that the most plausible example is the Invisible Woman, one of the Marvel Comics superheroes in the "Fantastic Four."
Invisible Woman guides a light around her using a force field in this cartoon. The scientist stated that this might be the practice in the future. The example of Invisible Woman comes closest to what engineers will probably be able to do in the future.
Invisibility is an optical illusion that the object or person is not there. Leonhardt uses the example of water circling around a stone. The water flows in, swirls around the stone and then leaves as if nothing was there.
According to him, if you replace water with light then you would not see that there was something present because the light is guided around the person or object. You would see the light coming from the scenery behind as if there was nothing in front.
Leonhardt described the physics of theoretical devices that could create invisibility in the research published in the New Journal of Physics. It is a follow-up paper to an earlier study published in the journal Science.
He reported that at this time, the devices are still theoretical. However, scientists are making very good advances in metamaterials where the research published in the New Journal of Physics. He said that there are advances being made in metamaterials that mean the first devices will probably be used for bending radar waves or the electromagnetic waves used by mobile phones.
www.turks.us
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