Sunday, November 2, 2014
Scientist Say Time Travel and
Cloak Of Invisibility Are In Our Future
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Bending or deflecting
light is already a reality
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WELL this
is exciting news if ever we heard it: time travel is going to be an actual
thing by the year 2100 (maybe). That's if a bunch of UK scientists are to be
believed, anyway.
A number of physicists from Imperial College London and the University of
Glasgow have predicted that time machines could actually be a legitimately
possible thing within about 85 years, and that teleportation could be just
another mode of transport by the year 2080. So we can all look forward to
telling Ryanair to do one in 70 years time, then.
And in the most exciting part of the research, which comes from The Big Bang UK
Young Scientists & Engineers Fair - or maybe just the part that tells us
this might all be a great big elaborate joke *checks calendar to make sure it's
not April 1st* - an invisibility cloak a la the wonderful Harry Potter himself
could be ready and available to use within 15 years. FIFTEEN YEARS. Which is
basically nothing.
But - and this'll shut the doubting Thomas' amongst us RIGHT up - apparently
prototypes of invisibility cloaks are already in existence, with the science
behind them seeming to be pretty sorted.
Imperial College physicist, Professor Chris Phillips, explained. "One way
to create an 'invisibility cloak' is to use adaptive camouflage, which involves
taking a film of the background of an object or person and projecting it onto
the front to give the illusion of vanishing," he said. Which is basically
what we would have said if someone asked us how we thought it would work, too.
Ahem.
Excitingly, he revealed: "We're actually not that far away from this
becoming a reality – rudimentary technology versions of this have already been
created (see photo above). It's entirely feasible that we could see a 'Harry
Potter'-like invisibility cloak within the next 10 to 20 years."

And Dr. Mary Jacquiline Romero, from the University of Glasgow's School of
Physics and Astronomy also had the presence of mind to explain how teleportation
would work for those of us who aren't quite of the same scientific brain-power
that she is.