Invisibility cloak a near reality?

Researchers at Purdue University have stepped into the world of Harry Potter, Star Trek and other sci-fi stories. Using mathematical theory developed in the United Kingdom in 2006, Purdue engineers have developed a way to cloak an object. Well, actually, they have developed a way to cloak an object that only contains a single color. The design currently only allows for the cloaking of a single wavelength and can make a red-ish wavelength “wrap around” an object so it appears as if the object isn’t there.

The theory is absolutely brilliant and simple. As a youth, watching Star Trek reruns, I always believed cloaking was just a really cool and completely impossible thing. It was fantasy with nothing scientific about it. But think about it. What would it take to cloak something. You would need a way for the light waves behind the object to be visible to the viewer in front of the object. When you think about the fundamentals of eyesight, the mathematics become a reality.

So this only works for a single color. What about other colors? If it can only be done for one color, then it’s pretty pointless, right? Even if an object is painted a single color, there are all kinds of shades and shadowing that would prevent the cloaking from really working. When asked about getting the theory to work for other wavelengths/colors, Vladamir Shalaev said, “It is clearly doable. In principle, this cloak could be arbitrarily large, as large as a person or an aircraft.”

Check the article from Space Daily for additional details.
Wow! Wouldn’t that be incredibly cool! The real question is how would you use an invisibility cloak?