We can be heroes, pt. 2
The wimpiest of the Fantastic Four, The Invisible Woman could, surprise surprise, turn herself invisible. Somedays, you just wish that all women were invisible.
How is invisibility achieved? First, we need to know how visibility is achieved. We see things because light bounces off them and hits our eye. Light waves hitting the back of our eye gives us the shape and the colour, seeing them twice from slightly different perspectives (because we have two eyes) gives us the dimensionality, and seeing them 24 times a second (the natural frame rate of our eyes) gives us the movement. The car, tree or burning orphanage bounced light in our direction.
Light. It's crazy stuff. It's the fastest thing in the universe, and it crossdresses as a particle or a wave depending on what the weather is like. Hell, it might not even weigh anything. We'd be lost without it and yet we only have half an idea of what it is and how it works. Is that half enough for us to work out how to hide the objects that it normally reveals? Maybe.
Some things are naturally invisible, like air. Air molecules aren't invisible because our eyes aren't good enough to see them, they're invisible because they're smaller than visible light's wavelength; light misses hitting them. Who cares if we can't see some crap molecule? We want to hide human beings! That is a little trickier, but studying naturally invisible things gives us a really good hint in where to start. Light has to somehow miss the object that you want to hide.
All the materials that man is familiar with either absorb light or bounce it away, until metamaterials came along. Using "metamaterials", a ring (or more effectively, a sphere) is put around the object to "hide" it from light. This is new to me too, so here's an expert diagram made by experts.
What the fuck is a metamaterial? A metamaterial is something that has been specially designed to take in light waves from any angle, reflect them in such a away that the light never goes through the focal point, and then reflect the light out the other side like nothing ever happened. Metamaterials aren't made of magical alien technology found at the Roswell crash site, they're just alternating layers of reflecting stuff, very carefully engineered.
It's early days yet, at the moment metamaterials only work to hide microwaves from tiny objects. However, diverting visible light using this method is certainly possible, and eventually the clunky ring design will evolve into something figure-hugging.
Making invisible people is a big technical problem, but it's nowhere near as bad as the social problems that I can see happening. I can think of a few constructive uses for this technology, and a hundred nefarious ones. People disappearing at will, a planet of ghosts. Cool? Hell yeah! Would I want to live there? I don't know.
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Yes, I'm glad Dr Dooshy can't see that 'regular object'. I hear it gives him funny feelings.
The implications this research could potentially have for the pornographic industry (particularly motion picture) are mind bogglingly. This technology could potentially redefine pornographic cinematography in mere decades!!
It's pretty much been done with dildo-cams, glasses and glass objects, and speculums. I don't think it would change the industry that much. If there's a niche market to be exploited in teh porn industry, garaunteed it's already being milked (so to speak). Although, the porn industry has been responsible for speeding up technological advancement in the past, the internet itself being one major example.
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