[geeks] engage your cloaking devices!

[Michael Parson]

On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 11:18:33AM -0400, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>> Thu, 19 Oct 2006 @ 21:19 -0400, Phil Stracchino said:
>>
>>> Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>>>> http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CLOAK_OF_INVISIBILITY?SITE=VANOV&SECTION=HOME
>>>>
>>>> Pretty nifty.
>>> But, unfortunately, of no discernible practical use.
>>
>> Neither were the first transistors...:)
>
> I frankly severely question whether there will *ever* be a practical use
> for a "cloaking" technology that can only hide an object from one
> frequency in the EM spectrum at a time, and which requires placing the
> object to be hidden inside the cloaking device, while the cloaking
> device itself *remains perfectly visible*.
>
>
> "This is just a random cloaking device that just happens to be sitting
> here by sheer random chance.  Nothing to see here.  Move along."
>
>
> There are, I'm certain, useful applications of metamaterials.  This
> isn't one of them.  It's a laboratory parlor-trick, and nothing more.

It's the next step, they're not there yet, but they're slowly making
progress.  This version may not have the application, but maybe one
of the future versions might.

>From what I understood from the article, this has more of an application
in radar stealth than anything else, which is highly applicable.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org