Star Trek-like cloaking devices proposed by physicists

[jayfish]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060503-6744.html

Physicists Nicolae Nicorovici from the University of Sydney, Australia, and Graeme Milton, from the University of Utah, have proposed that devices called superlenses could be used to create a type of cloaking device. Using a principle called "anomalous localized resonance," superlenses placed very close to a small object could mask its reflected light waves by resonating at the same frequency, much like how noise-canceling headphones mask sound waves by creating a sound that is at the same frequency but inverted in phase.

So what are superlenses? As they say on Mythbusters: Warning! Science Content ahead!

Anyone who has ever stared at a seemingly "broken" plant stem in a tall glass of water has experienced the laws of refraction. Light bends as it crosses a boundary from one medium (air) to another (water) and the eye is thus fooled into thinking that the submerged part of the stem is somewhere that it is not. Bending light in transparent materials has all sorts of practical applications, most notably in making lenses. From a contact lens in your eye to the focusing laser in your DVD drive, lenses are all around us.

Chalk-up another fiction to fact story for Trek. That leaves transported tech and warp-drive to be made reality.

Jay

[salvorhardin]

1. Presumably we need to discover the transtator

Which is supposed to be at the heart of all Federation technology.

[trotsky]

2. Don't forget artificial gravity.

And no matter how damaged a ship gets, the anti-grav NEVER fails. Unless you're the Klingon Ambassador, of course.