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Researchers at Cornell have designed, built and demonstrated the first "cloak" that hides events in time. The process relies on similar methods of distorting electromagnetic fields as invisibility cloaks, but it exploits a time-space duality in electromagnetic theory: diffraction and dispersion of light in space are mathematically equivalent. Scientists have used this theory to create a "time-lens [that] can, for example, magnify or compress in time."
The time cloak takes two of those lenses and arranges them so that one compresses a beam of light while the other decompresses it. That leaves the beam seemingly unchanged, but the diffraction and dispersion actually "cloak" small events in the beam's timeline. Right now, the cloak can only last for 120 nanoseconds, and the theoretical max for the current design measures just microseconds. But the prospect of being able to exist outside of time, even for just a few microseconds, should be enough to make even the most jaded tech nerd giggle at the possibilities.
Alternatively, it may be desirable to cloak the occurrence of an event over a finite time period, and the idea of temporal cloaking was proposed in which the dispersion of the material is manipulated in time to produce a "time hole" in the probe beam to hide the occurrence of the event from the observer. This approach is based on accelerating and slowing down the front and rear parts, respectively, of the probe beam to create a well controlled temporal gap in which the event occurs so the probe beam is not modified in any way by the event.
The first invisibility cloaks worked only at microwave frequencies but in only a few years, physicists have found ways to create cloaks that work for visible light, for sound and for ocean waves. They've even designed illusion cloaks that can make one object look like another.
Originally posted by starwarsisreal
Actually a guy named john titor predicted that we will have time travel tech. en.wikipedia.org...
The most immediate of Titor's predictions was of an upcoming civil war in the United States having to do with "order and rights".[7] He described it as beginning in 2004,[8] with civil unrest surrounding the presidential election of that year. This civil conflict that he characterizes as "having a Waco type event every month that steadily gets worse"[8] will be "pretty much at everyone's doorstep"[7] and erupts by 2008.
Originally posted by TupacShakur
The first invisibility cloaks worked only at microwave frequencies but in only a few years, physicists have found ways to create cloaks that work for visible light, for sound and for ocean waves. They've even designed illusion cloaks that can make one object look like another.
You can cloak sound and light? I can imagine the military in the future creating ghost-soldiers that are undetectable. Illusion cloaks that make one object look like another immediately made me think of Inception, when that guy is acting like the rich guys assistant or right-hand-man or whatever. For some reason the only uses that come into my mind are military related, such as disguising yourself as a 12 year old kid walking down the street and then BAM, you turn into a 240 pound man spraying bullets.
What are some good things that could come from this?....
I got one: there are those people that are so annoying that you wish you had a mute button like on Xbox, so you could mute people that piss you off instead of having to listen to them talk.
Originally posted by nightbringr
reply to post by RUSSO
Incredible!
I'm not sure what practical purposes this could serve, but it's amazing what mankind can achieve when we try.
Imagine what we could accomplish if our resources were all directed toward the advancement and technology and evolution instead of war?
I suppose ironically enough however, many of our advances are a direct result of military R&D.
I found the MIT Tech Review's summary confusing. I didn't understand the article it was based on fully, but the idea seems to be covered in the following paragraph:
Time-space duality represents the analogy between diffraction and dispersion that arises from the mathematical equivalence between the equations describing the diffraction of a beam of light and the one-dimensional temporal propagation of a pulse through a dispersive medium [17,18]. Similar to a spatial lens that imparts a quadratic phase in space, a time-lens can be implemented that produces a quadratic phase shift in time [19[21]. This time-lens can, for example, magnify [22] or compress [23] signals in time and has an equivalent of the lens law. Time-lenses can be created with an electro-optic modulator [18] or via a parametric nonlinear optical process such as four-wave mixing (FWM) with a chirped pump wave [19,20]. In the latter case the signal wave is converted to an idler wave with a linear frequency shift in time (i.e., a quadratic phase in time) [21,22].
I understand this to mean that the passage of time in observed space can be slowed down relative to an observer, rather as happens when observing a body falling into a black hole.
Originally posted by Yukitup
Nope. Doesn't work. And I ruined a good pair of eyeglasses proving it empirically. Still saw my watch between my two removed lenses.
Seriously though -- I'm s&f'ing even though I am too tired to even begin to understand what this really means... Hopefully my crack staff of ATS geniuses will have it figured out by morning...
BUMPedit on 14-7-2011 by Yukitup because: thought adding my watch (instead of "everything") was a hiccup funnier.
Originally posted by Daughter2
So exactly how would this work? Would it be just like an edit in a movie? Would be know there was a hole punched, like being on one side of the room and then suddenly on another?
the idea of temporal cloaking was proposed in which the dispersion of the material is manipulated in time to produce a "time hole" in the probe beam to hide the occurrence of the event from the observer.
Originally posted by AMANNAMEDQUEST
Maybe I'm tired, or that I'm a visual and hands on learner. I am having trouble wrapping my mind around this.