• Question: Do you think invisibility will ever be physically possible? What about teleportation?

    Asked by мocнιĸarage to Jackie, Michele, Oliver, Vicky, Yelong on 17 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Jaclyn Bell

      Jaclyn Bell answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      To make something invisible it needs to be invisible to all colours of light. There is research into invisibility cloaks but so far they are only invisible in certain types of light. I hope one day it will be possible 🙂 but how long it will take I am not sure! Teleportation would be amazing 😀 and I think it will be possible in the future… maybe not with organic lifeforms… but if you think about it 3D printers are like teleporters – you have something on screen that you want so you print it and get a physical copy of it – thats pretty cool.

    • Photo: Oliver Brown

      Oliver Brown answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      Both are already *sort of* possible, just not in a very useful way.

      We can disguise transparent objects quite easily by submerging them in a material with the same refractive index. There are a few more advanced methods which aim to engineer materials that bend the light around an object, but it’s hard to get that work from all directions, and there’s active camouflage which projects an image of what’s behind an object on to the front of it — but that’s not very convincing at close range.

      We can teleport a quantum state of a particle using a pair of entangled particles, and a particle of the same type as the one whose state you want to send — but it doesn’t really scale up to a whole object.

      So, ‘yes’ — but it probably won’t work as well as you’d like it to, and ‘no’ — at least not as far as we know right now!

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