#temporal cloaking

[nightriser-blog]

[illusionaryoverload-blog-blog]

Pentagon scientists use 'time hole' to make events disappear

Soldiers could one day conduct covert operations in complete secrecy, now that Pentagon-backed physicists have figured out how to mask entire events by distorting light. A team at Cornell University, with support from Darpa, the Pentagon’s out-there research arm, managed to hide an event for 40 picoseconds (those are trillionths of seconds, if you’re counting).

They’ve published their groundbreaking research in this week’s edition of the journal Nature.

This is the first time that scientists have succeeded in masking an event, though research teams have in recent years made remarkable strides in cloaking objects.

Researchers at the University of Texas, Dallas, last year harnessed the mirage effect to make objects vanish. And in 2010, physicists at the University of St. Andrews made leaps towards using metamaterials to trick human eyes into not seeing what was right in front of them. Masking an object entails bending light around that object.

If the light doesn’t actually hit an object, then that object won’t be visible to the human eye. Where events are concerned, concealment relies on changing the speed of light. Light that’s emitted from actions, as they happen, is what allows us to see those actions happen. Usually, that light comes in a constant flow. What Cornell researchers did, in simple terms, is tweak that ongoing flow of light - just for a mere iota of time - so that an event could transpire without being observable. The entire experiment occurred inside a fiber optics cable.

Researchers passed a beam of green light down the cable, and had it move through a lens that split the light into two frequencies, one moving slowly and the other faster. As that was happening, they shot a red laser through the beams. Since the laser “shooting” occurred during a teeny, tiny time gap, it was imperceptible. Sure, the team’s got a ways to go before they’re able to mask 30 seconds of action, let alone several minutes. But the research certainly opens up new possibilities.

For one, masking super-quick events, like those that occur with data transmission, could help conceal covert computer operations. In the words of Nature editors, the research marks,

“a significant step towards the development of full spatio-temporal cloaking.”

"Demonstration of Temporal Cloaking"

But it could be decades before military personnel will basically be able to zap history, as it happens:

According to Cornell scientists, it’d take a machine 18,600 miles long to produce a time mask that lasts a single second.

By Katie Drummond

source: Wired.co.uk

[j-b-a-blog]

"A team of physicists at Cornell University has created a wrinkle in time. Actually, it’s more like a teeny tiny moth hole in time. Inside it things can occur that are entirely undetectable, at least to ordinary observers. It’s as if they never happened.

This phenomenon, known as “temporal cloaking,” is the latest addition to a world that once existed only in children’s literature and science fiction — a place where objects are invisible and events are unrecorded."

[nofatecon]

Physicists at Cornell University, with support from DARPA, the same government organization that is helping fund Boston Dynamics' terminatoresque robots, have successfully masked an event by manipulating light, a concept known as temporal cloaking.

For the sciency folks out there, check out the article in Nature. For the rest of us, Wired provides a great summary of the experiment and results.