Applelicious

ex-genius:

Military successfully ‘cloaks’ event by altering the speed of light.

Speaking as a scientist - Holy Shit!

Now don’t put on your tinfoil hat just yet - DARPA (that’s the defense advanced project research agency, the team of evil geniuses that brought you such wonders as the Internet and the Predator drone) only accomplished a time-bend of about 40 picoseconds, which is incredibly short. Shorter than your first high school sexual experience short. Way shorter. We’re talking really short. Okay I’ve made my point.

And all this time-bending took place inside a fiber optic cable. So, they’re not going to be sending time-cloaked special forces into the next global hot zone any time soon. But the point is, they’ve proved it’s possible. To quote their research:

This approach is based on accelerating the front part of a probe light beam and slowing down its rear part to create a well controlled temporal gap—inside which an event occurs—such that the probe beam is not modified in any way by the event. The probe beam is then restored to its original form by the reverse manipulation of the dispersion. Here we present an experimental demonstration of temporal cloaking in an optical fibre-based system by applying concepts from the space–time duality between diffraction and dispersive broadening.

Hats off to you if you understood five consecutive words of that. For the rest of you: Basically, by speeding then slowing the speed of light temporarily, they can create a time-hole in which nothing can be seen. We can only see things that light bounces off of, and if you deflect, slow, or block that light, voila, nothing to see here.

But the implications reach far beyond invisible super soldiers. We’re talking about speeding up and slowing down the speed of light using a “time lens”. Albeit ever so slightly, they DID that. If one buys into theories concerning the connection of the speed of light, time, and gravity, this could prove to be groundbreaking research for things like, say, antigravity, or perhaps, I don’t know, time travel.

But.. alas, we’re far away from practical applications. If this is the discovery of the flame, we’re a long time before the invention of the flamethrower. Or the match, for that matter.

Caveats, hyperbole and pseudoscience aside - Holy Fucking Crap.

(clickthrough for incomprehensible scibabble)