

Invisibility-Cloak Breakthrough: software has enabled metamaterials to work with a broad band of freqs - nickb
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/21971/?a=f

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electromagnetic
This is cool, except these metamaterials will have much more use in science
than they ever will in the fields people _imagine_ they would.

Militarily speaking, cloaking isn't a practical thing. From what I understand
the first 'cloak' was like 10-20% of the objects volume. This means to cloak a
plane it has to be 10-20% larger in certain spectrum's. Not only that, but the
plane would be forced to be subsonic, the fragile structure of a metamaterial
(literally they're hollow structures) would be destroyed at supersonic speeds
and even if it wasn't the heat generated by going supersonic (friction heat)
would cause it to expand and distort the 'cloak' into different wavelengths
and efficiencies.

This might be used for UAV's and maybe armed UAV's, however, if they ever make
one that cloaks the visible spectrum I believe there would be great use in
hiding security devices, like an infrared camera or sound recording devices.

I think it's an amazing breakthrough, just the uses are going to be extremely
different than anything ever seen in a movie. I mean I've read newspapers
describing it like Harry Potter's cloak of invisibility, which is quite
laughable as a fabric made of a metamaterial that could cloak a human would be
like a foot thick and probably wouldn't survive any form of movement.

The epitome of stealth technology for a person would more likely be akin to
the cloak Frodo has in the LOTR, which doesn't make him disappear but makes
him look like the dirt he's hiding on, it's just an advanced form of
camouflage not pure fantasy.

