Not Actually a Time Cloak of the Day: Reports have been circulating that Pentagon-funded researchers at Cornell have created a “time cloak” that can make entire events disappear in time.
Not exactly.
According to the actual abstract of the Cornell research, as published in Nature, the devices uses lenses to flow a beam of light around an object, leaving the light unaffected and making that object invisible to an observer.
It can’t, as an AP story suggests, hide an art thief for the entire duration of a museum heist.
As commenters at PhysOrg and Reddit have pointed out, it’s more than a bit hyperbolic to describe the technology as “making an event disappear.”
That doesn’t mean it isn’t cool, though.
“You kind of create a hole in time where an event takes place,” said study co-author Alex Gaeta. “You just don’t know that anything ever happened.”
Of course, the hole only lasts 40 picoseconds, which is hardly enough for the type of large-scale invisibility technology people are describing. Even hiding a particle for a millionth of a second is going to be a challenge.
Sorry, everybody. Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak is still magic, not science.
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