There has been work done over the past year or so by the Department of Mysteries at St. Andrews College. They also are working on levitation, which I talked about before. They created an invisibility cloak that worked in the microwave region. A group in the US has just produced an invisibility cloak that works in the visible spectrum. The technology works by converting light that hits the surface into plasmons which then move around the object like water around a rock in a stream.

There are a few disappointing caveats here. First, the technology only works in two dimensions at the moment. Controlling plasmons in three dimensions would be considerably more complicated and is unlikely to be done, according to John Pendry of Imperial College. Second, it’s not clear that the plasmons won’t reflect light themselves, which means an invisible object would have a glare on it similar to glass.

There are potential applications for computer chips, though, so we’ll see. As cool as invisibility cloaks are, there really is no good use for them. If you can think of one that isn’t just as evil in the wrong hands, leave me a comment. The only thing I can come up with involves the military or peeping Toms.