Tuesday, March 01, 2005

What a misleading headline

news @ nature.com writes:
Engineers devise invisibility shield — Electron effects could stop objects from scattering light.
The article goes on to say that
a particular shield only works for one specific wavelength of light.

An object might be made invisible in red light, say, but not in multiwavelength daylight.

And crucially, the effect only works when the wavelength of the light being scattered is roughly the same size as the object. So shielding from visible light would be possible only for microscopic objects; larger ones could be hidden only to long-wavelength radiation such as microwaves. This means that the technology could not be used to hide people or vehicles from human vision.

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