Scientists change the speed of light, create invisibility

Klingon warship        AJC1 via Flickr

Forget the Klingon cloaking device. Cornell scientists have created a technique that doesn’t just cloak an object with invisibility, it masks the entire event. The masking effect works by bending the speed of light, for a very, very brief time. This renders the event entirely invisible.

Have I lost you yet?

While this may sound like science fiction, it stems from a Pentagon backed study and the result are appearing in Thursday's edition of the prestigious journal Nature.

The cloaking time we are talking about is incredibly tiny. They event hidden by scientists lasted 40 picoseconds or 40 trillionths of a second.

"A good way to think of it is as if scientists edited or erased a split second of history. It's as if you are watching a movie with a scene inserted that you don't see or notice. It's there in the movie, but it's not something you saw," said study co-author Moti Fridman, a physics researcher at Cornell.

Still following me? Want more. Read about it here.

Related articles

• Pentagon Scientists Use 'Time Hole' to Make Events Disappear (wired.com)

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