Modern Invisibility like Harry Potter

Some researchers at Carnegie Mellon have announced that they have created an invisibility cloak for colloid particles. A colloid is a type of mixture in which two or more substances are evenly interdisperced throughout each other. Common examples of colloid substances, which can be sollid or liquid, or very rarely gaseous, are whipped cream, milk, paints, and certain types of glass such as ruby glass. Michael Bockstaller and Krzysztof Matyjaszewski of CMU showcased their results in Advanced Materials Magazine. The technique they have developed works specifically on nanoparticles in a colloid, the colloid itself is really not all that important, and this has applications from "aerospace to cosmetics." The issue they successfully managed to address was that the nanoparticles inside colloids generally give a undesirable milky colour to the resulting mixture, and their technique shrinks the visible size of these particles by a factor of over a thousand.

How did they do it? They are "controlling the density, size, and composition of polymers" that are attached to the inorganic particles. To explain it more simply, they are controlling the characteristics of the stuff that clumps around the nanoparticles, and this, if done propperly, can cause the particles to appear transparant. It is important to note however, that this will not actually create an invisibility cloak, and that the media may take this slightly out of proportion. What this will do is to eliminate the colour changing effects of creating a colloid, but the colour of the original material is remains intact. So if you start out with a mettallic colour, you're not going to change that.

While on the topic of invisibility, researchers at the University of Liverpool have come up with a potential mechanism for a cloaking aeroplanes that would make them appear invisible at close range. They also mention Harry Potter, although, likely because this raises the search engine optimization for their research. Upon closer reading however, one may notice some caveats, such as that light must travel in waves as opposed to beams, which is not so helpfull because light does both. Indeed everything has both particle and wave characteristics, as is explained to us by Schrodinger and Heisenburg. This is very interesting however, as it uses a certain kind of metamaterial to bend the electromagnetic spectrum around the object, giving the impression of seeing through it.

In terms of potential mechanisms for an invisibility cloak, I would put my money on the blokes from Liverpool, because attempting to make a invisibility cloak out of a transparant material seems to me like it would simple just be a cloak that was invisible, not a cloak that makes the wearer invisible. While bending the electromagnetic spectrum around the user strikes me as something form the realm of science fiction, it also seems more likely to me than a cloak that would allow viewsers to see through both sides of it, ignoring anything in the middle by way of transparant colloids.

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