Proposed space-time cloak to "hide" events?

Physicists today proposed making a tiny "pocket in reality" that can hide entire events. Strange but true! However, the device can only be created inside an optical fiber under very specific conditions. The "space-time cloak" is built upon recent invisibility cloaks made from metamaterials that can manipulate some wavelengths of light around an object so that it can't be seen. The space-time cloak bends light not just in space, but also time. Don't get any bright ideas about editing history though. From Nature:

McCall and his colleagues have calculated the precise properties of the metamaterial needed to build a space–time cloak that would be perfectly invisible, and there are fundamental problems that prevent it from being constructed. The theoretical calculations work only in a vacuum, and to create a space–time void of even a few minutes would require a cloak bigger than Earth because of the space required to recombine the accelerated leading edge and slowed trailing edge of the light wave. Worst of all, the theory requires the metamaterial to boost light rays beyond the fundamental speed of light.

Undeterred, the team has designed a less efficient version to be built from optical fibres – inside which light can be accelerated and slowed without breaking the fundamental speed limit. Lasers would be used to control the fibres' refractive indices, opening and closing the temporal void. The fibre-optic cloak could hide events only from observers standing directly ahead of the oncoming light waves, and it could not fully block all reflections from light travelling through the cloak while it is turned on, so some light might bleed out. A distant observer looking down the optical fibre would not spot the hidden event, but they would notice the background light getting brighter and dimmer. McCall hopes that a fibre-optic cloak creating a space–time void around 30 centimetres long, to hide actions taking place over a few nanoseconds, could be built within the next year.

"Space–time cloak could hide events"

• [DJBudSonic]

  I love to see articles like this – I am hoping to make it on the presenter list for our next Ignite function. My topic: ” Advances in Invisibility”

  I think a big breakthrough will come when we begin to manipulate light different ways for it’s different states, that is, treating both the particle and the wave at the same time. For instance, if we can guide the wave of light around an object without re-arranging or dispersing or changing the speed of the particles of that same light won’t we be getting somewhere?

  Hey who said that? Is there someone else in here? That’s not funny – show yourself!

  BWAHHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

• [Anonymous]

  Muad’Dib will not be amused.

• [badvoodoo]

  Good news, everyone! And there’s no way this could backfire on us, oh my no.

• [Anonymous]

  “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

  Joeseph Goebbels.

• [gerg]

  sounds pretty much like the tech described in Red Dwarf for the stasis booth ;)

• [Emo Pinata]

  It’s great to see by “cloaking” they mean “make it obvious something is going on” and by “could be made” they mean “probably could not be”.

  This really is just lame, and I doubt they will be able to make this within 10 years without just claiming it works with questionable proof.

• [Bill Albertson]

  I want one of these no-spheres before physicists figure out how to make haploid worm vectors, which produce time-penetrating psychotropics, that can be grafted to human flesh.

• [Anonymous]

  Make these spaces? Why? They already exist – where the heck do you think my car keys are?

• [Teufelaffe]

  I really wish people would stop referring to the speed of light as a “limit”. It’s already been determined that light can and does move faster than c, and that what is currently called the “speed of light” is really just the slowest light can travel while still remaining light.

  • [Jake0748]

    Maybe I’m ignorant or just not well-read enough, but, do you have a citation for your statement that “already been determined that light can and does move faster than c, and that what is currently called the “speed of light” is really just the slowest light can travel while still remaining light”.? I’m really interested.

  • [Wingo]

    I am not a scientist (IANAS?), but I play one in my armchair… and I’m not so sure about that. Wouldn’t something going faster than the speed of light be essentially time traveling, or cease existing in our dimension or something wacky like that? E = mc2 and all of that?

    Maybe I’m totally missing something or don’t know enough about quantum mechanics, but it seems like going faster than c would break the space-time continuum or some shit.

    • [The Hamster King]

      I suspect that Teufelaffe is thinking of experiments that have shown that it’s possible for the phase velocity or group velocity of a pulse of light to exceed c in certain circumstances. However the photons themselves are still limited to c, as is the speed of energy and information transport.

• [planettom]

  What happens in the space-time cloak stays in the space-time cloak!

• [igpajo]

  That all makes perfect sense.

• [Anonymous]

  sounds like somebody else’s problem.

• [Anonymous]

  Inventing cloaking before inventing the bird of prey!? What’s the point there?

• [turn_self_off]

  void in head, growing…

• [mdh]

  I agree the area would be obscured, but when you slow the light down do you not get some sort of doppler effect that would dim the light from the ‘cloaked’ area? or shift the colors or something?

• [mdh]

  oh. right. rtfp.

• [Chris Furniss]

  Neat! Now let’s focus on that pesky world hunger problem.

  • [CANTFIGHTTHEDITE]

    Hahaha, that’s enormously more complicated in the application phase than building a space-time cloak, and far less profitable. But thanks for playing.

    I’d settle for a cloak of resistance, though.

• [sindbad]

  Maybe every alien civilization has constructed a Dyson sphere made of this stuff around their planet/system.

  • [Nadreck]

    Yeah, the Skrulls used one to try and hide from Galactus but it didn’t work out in the end.

  • [AnthonyC]

    The longer the period of time you want to hide, the larger the cloak would need to be. No fixed-sized cloak of this type would hide a civilization forever, and given that they say an earth-sized cloak could only hide a few minutes, I’d be surprised if a solar system-sized cloak would be worth building, if it’s even possible.

    That said, all of those classic mega-structures are awesome. Dyson spheres (or swarms), Dyson’s eternal intelligence, space elevators, space fountains, launch loops…

• [Anonymous]

  Does an event even happen if it’s unseen?

• [Nadreck]

  Great! Now I can hide from that nosey guy at the North Pole and he’ll have no excuses to not give me that pony for Christmas.

• [VICTOR JIMENEZ]

  Why nobody thinks of the problems with the Hounds of Tindalos?

  Those pesky creatures hate time travel…

• [enkiv2]

  Could you use the Primer method and get a longer time period by building these inside of each other?

• [Anonymous]

  For visual thinkers, like me, this animation might be helpful for getting what this is about:

  http://www.nanowerk.com/news/id19015.gif

• [The Hamster King]

  It doesn’t change the flow of time.

  Imagine the beam of light is a freeway. If you want to dance a jig in the road without being run over you need to create a gap in the cars. The previous metamaterial “invisibility cloak” was like a detour sign, routing the flow of traffic around the spot where you want to dance.

  This new technique is like a worker with a slow/fast sign. He signals one group of cars to speed up, and the next group of cars to slow down. That opens up a moving gap between them, allowing you to dash briefly out into the road and do your dance. Eventually a second worker with a fast/slow sign slows down the fast cars and speeds up the slow cars, erasing the gap.

• [Boba Fett Diop]

  They’re all going to be pretty mortified when they create one of these things and Rassilon comes strolling out.

• [hassenpfeffer]

  They could streamline their research by become Guild Navigators or surviving the Bene Gesserit spice agony.

• [semiotix]

  space–time void around 30 centimetres long, to hide actions taking place over a few nanoseconds

  Make it the size of a bank vault and a few minutes, and all the plot holes in my caper-movie script will be fixed!