Your idea of an “invisibility cloak” is probably something out of Harry Potter or Predator, but researchers have developed a cloak that reflects light around it using golden antennas rendering the object being covered invisible. While that may seem like a great invention that can be used to mask our soldiers or weaponry or even whole military camps, it’s currently in development stage at about 80 nanometers wide (a human hair is 100,000 nanometers wide!) and only big enough to cover an irregular shaped object 36 microns across, or little more than one-thousandth of an inch. If you’re not amazed at how tiny that is, something’s wrong with you. No offense. Just sayin’.
Anyways, the researchers were quoted saying: “”The tiny object appeared to be invisible because the gold antennas controlled the scattering of the light that reflects off of it, the scientists explained… With the proper tuning of the gold bricks, it’s not hard to make the reflected light look like anything you want — either the background of the object (a floor, for example) or something else entirely,” Zhang [director of materials science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who created the cloak] told Live Science. If the cloak were big enough, theoretically, you could drape it over anything. “You could cover a tank with it and make it look like a bicycle…””
I believe if this invention were to grow to a usable size (when it’s fully operational) and put into a war zone with our soldiers, it could revolutionize war and stealth as we know it.
From the article “Ultrathin ‘Invisibility Cloak’ Can Match Any Background” found on LiveScience.com