H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man

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The discussion centers on the feasibility of achieving true invisibility, inspired by H.G. Wells' "The Invisible Man." Participants propose theoretical ideas, such as a suit with microscopic cells that absorb and project light, allowing an observer to see the surroundings instead of the wearer. While some military applications have explored similar concepts, practical challenges remain, including the complexity of real-time image projection and maintaining visibility for the wearer. The conversation also touches on the potential of OLED technology for developing a fully invisible suit. Overall, the consensus is that while complete invisibility may not be achievable, advancements in technology could bring us closer to practical applications.
  • #31
Invisiblility-->US Army

I saw a little documantary on the discovery channel a few years ago where they showed this technology on a tank. It was pretty cool. It looked like the kind of object that one sees blured in the distance in a hot desert.
 
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  • #32
I think the way to go would have to be a bending light method and not a projector method. If a person could be wrapped from head to toe (not including their eyes) in a material that bent light around them, an invisibility effect could happen. Are there fiber optic cables that work with all frequencies of visible light? And if so what about an entire suit in which the cables were arranged so that the openings were on opposite sides of the suit.

Gabriel
 
  • #33
Originally posted by Allday
I think the way to go would have to be a bending light method and not a projector method. If a person could be wrapped from head to toe (not including their eyes) in a material that bent light around them, an invisibility effect could happen. Are there fiber optic cables that work with all frequencies of visible light? And if so what about an entire suit in which the cables were arranged so that the openings were on opposite sides of the suit.

Gabriel

In this case, Allday, you have the following problems:

1) Bent light produces a sort of "shadow" image, and so you wouldn't be invisible.

2) Your eyes would be visible, unless you bent the light in front of them, and then you would be blind.
 
  • #34
You build a high frequency sonar device with digital display infront of your eyes.
 
  • #35
Since all physical forms give off energy, would it be possible to develop a device to counter act these frequencies (not sure if that's the correct term). Almost like a cloaking device...trick the observer into not seeing? I was reading these posts and thought back to the old tales of Native American invisibility. There are stories of them being able to control their own personal energy in order to diminish the amount projected so they could have a successful hunt, or spy on a rival. I'm not sure I believe it is true or not, but it made me wonder if such a device could be possible, or if science even has a way to measure the energy levels of form (aside from heat signature) and the relationship to reflection of light?
 
  • #36
We see others by the light that is scattered off them. Light has not only frequency (color) but phase. The trick would be to match each scattered photon with a generated photon exactly 180o out of phase with it. Then the two would cancel. No scattered light and therefore invisibility. This need not interfere with your body processes that use absorbed photons - like seeing - since those photons are by definition not scattered.

To do that your body would have to infer the phase of scattered photons. I don't know how it could do that but maybe somebody else has an idea?
 
  • #37
Originally posted by selfAdjoint
We see others by the light that is scattered off them. Light has not only frequency (color) but phase. The trick would be to match each scattered photon with a generated photon exactly 180o out of phase with it. Then the two would cancel. No scattered light and therefore invisibility. This need not interfere with your body processes that use absorbed photons - like seeing - since those photons are by definition not scattered.


Ah, good point. The photons don't scatter, if their absorbed by the retina...but, I see other people's eyes...so, only some scatter and others don't? How could you possibly stop only those that scatter?
 
  • #38
Originally posted by selfAdjoint
We see others by the light that is scattered off them. Light has not only frequency (color) but phase. The trick would be to match each scattered photon with a generated photon exactly 180o out of phase with it. Then the two would cancel. No scattered light and therefore invisibility. This need not interfere with your body processes that use absorbed photons - like seeing - since those photons are by definition not scattered.

To do that your body would have to infer the phase of scattered photons. I don't know how it could do that but maybe somebody else has an idea?

But wouldn't that leave a big pitch-black outline where you stand? If the photons that would have bounced off your body are canceled out by matching, phase-inverted photons, the impact on an observers retina would add up to zero, yes? And zero photonic impact on the retina = total darkness. So these photons, which are not allowed to travel past, around, or through your body are therefore never reflected off other objects "behind" you (from the observer's point of view), and the observer still sees the objects as being blocked by the silhouette of your body.
 
  • #39
Originally posted by Astrophysics
Here's an idea...you have a suit with microscobic cells, some of these cells absorb light some are light sources, those which absorb the light give the information (colours, intesity, etc.) to other cells on the other side of this suit. So if you look at a person with this suit on you'll see what you would see if this person wasn't there.
Naturally this is only theory and hardly practicle.


Instead of focusing on the object that is to be invisible. Maybe, focus on what is viewing the object (Or, maybe both). Find a way to alter the viewing mechanism. Poking the eye out is on the right track, but the viewing mechanism would be aware of this process.

Example: A large percentage of people wear glasses or contacts. What if the lenses could filter out certain components of light that where also being produced by the "microscopic cells". This is just one example, but I think the key is to focus on all of elements involved in the process of "being invisible".

Invisibility is in the eye of the beholder -- Joel A. Ringwald
 
  • #40
Human visability

Seems to me that Astrophysics and jringwald are on the right track.

The human visual system (shared by most mammals? animals??) has some hard-wired, low level processing capabilities - static parts of what's seen are filtered down (so 'motion' is immediately noticable), edges trigger special signals, etc. That's how low-tech invisibility (a.k.a. camouflage) works.

So a faster, cheaper, better path to an invisibility suit (than what's been the subject of most posts in this thread) may be ways to achieve better camouflage:
- more 'realist' mimicry of natural backgrounds (colours, patterns)
- better disguise of movement
 
  • #41
Here It Is...

http://www.chameleo.net/news.html

Just happened upon this fourm, and it seems that I did not see the US Patent mentioned.

Surprise! The suit is better than you can ever imagine! In a room in a your house with normal light, it is "impossible" to tell if someone is there with you.

BUT this suit is really NO big deal, it's being used by ALL police departments in the US. It's the other componet that comes with the suit that will blow your mind! Any comments?
 
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  • #42
that is a great site goscott4.. so if i have this idea right..if you could mimick the radiation of heat energy produced from an object and convert it into light waves--a suit could be used just like the skin of a chameleon, in which it responds to the amount of heat or temperature. adaptive camo-technology--that is awesome..
 
  • #43
First of all, I am 16, so don't take any of my theories too serious, this is just my thoughts from reading the majority of the posts on this thread...

I think the whole agrument rests on the meaning of invisibility. I see some of you take it literally while others take it as an advanced stealth. I believe a suit that could even make a blurred image of the surroundings where the wearer is (sorry, that was choppy) would greatly decrease the chance of being seen. I don't think it is anywhere practical to send an agent like 007 into a high security enemy base and sneak around undetected because of his invisible suit. It is, however, practical to have a distorted image of a soldier when he's near an enemy (say, 100 yards) or maybe even for a sniper. Prehaps even a blanket of some sort could be used by a sniper...if a photograph of a lot of ground could be transferred into the blanket it could be laid over the user and a create a camo that could adapt to any environment. This wouldn't allow for grealy mobile camoflauge, but never the less it would only help out. I think we need to take some small steps in this field instead of shooting for the complete invisible suit like on Die Another Day.

Also, on the argument of sight for the wearer, if the tiny little itsy bitsy cameras can project an image that they see onto the other side, what's to stop them from projecting a second image into some type of eye piece for the user, say a thin pair of glasses or maybe even a pair of contact lenses, however crazy that sounds, lol.

Thanks for wading though all that, if you did...

Email me at kyle14g@hotmail.com if you want to chat privately!

Thanks for the time,
 
  • #44
Stealth

I hope someone hasnt mentioned this yet ( I have only read 2 pages of this so far), but the designer of the stealth bomber was asked a question by top United States Military Leaders " How do you make something invisible?". His answer being, "You have to alter the planes." And so the planes of the Stealth Bomber are very different from the angles on other planes. I wonder if this could be applied to an invisibility suit. Like someone said, Making something invisible to the naked eye is worthless, this could be applied to a "projection suit" and therefore made "invisible".
 
  • #45
Another thing:

I also am 16, so do not take my post as seriously as you would have I been an adult.
Also, please respond to my post. Comments? Suggestions?
 
  • #46
The planes technology was first concieved by a soviet mathematician "back in the USSR". He reasoned that if you could get the reflected rays of a radar beam bouncing around in just the right way, they would interfere with each other and, after the manner of waves, destroy the return signal, so the radar would never see the aircraft. The mathematician figured how to do that with flat planes arranged at carefully calculated angles.

After the fall of the USSR, the technology came to the US, and was applied and improved. The basis of the whole thing though, is that there is only one radar beam looking at you. Sort of like being illuminated by a single penlight in pitch blackness. If you can frustrate that one beam, you're home free.

As you can see, the same thing wouldn't work in the open daylight, with light coming at you from all sides.

But I wouldn't be surprised to hear that some engineer hasn't built a stealth kit car that is invisible to police radar.
 
  • #47
Just as with anything else i think the identification of what the original 'post'er meant by invisibility is the question.

Personally I don't agree with the direction leaning towards the alteration of perception. In theory it sounds great but we all don't percieve things the same way. At best i think the hopes would be something like a hilucinagen that could maybe confuse you enough not to care that the person is visible but to ever actually make someone invisible through that means is like trying to take the experiment out of the lab. The conditions are no longer going to be the same and from the get go your already at a deficit in your research.
 
  • #48
i don if it's true (it could be a lie)
i heard that some time ago don't know where
but some scientist managed to make some of the skin of
a mouse (or was it a guinie pig) invisible
by injecting something into it
it was only the skin so you could still see
it's inside.
 
  • #49
When I was reading PREY by Micheal Chrichton (I love his books) I formulated my own theory with no help just like the microbe thing a cloth of nanorobots, every other one is a reciver that recives the light and sends it to a picture thingy nanorobot that is like a LED, it projects its share of the scenery around it. So when you look at someone wearing the cloak you see a projected picture of the other side of the cloak. For the person wearing the cloak there are LED nanobots covering the inside projecting a picture of what it looks like outside so the person can see outside

By da way: How do those black fabrics covering a face when wearing a halloween costume work, you can't see in but you can see out.
 
  • #50
The way that things will be made invisible, will be to use microwave to skull transmissions, that tell the looker, they can't see the object. Much like Obi Wan Kenobe, says those aren't the droids you are looking for. That is the cheapest, and most likely method.
 
  • #51
i'm not sure if this is obvious, but i believe there is a flaw in the invisibility-suit approach; depending on where the observer is standing, the background behind the "invisible" person will be different. this would mean that your little light-emitters would have to send different pictures to different directions.
if the suit only projects the image of what is directly behind the suit, an observer standing at a slight angle would be able to distinguish the suit from the background.
that would be a fat lot of use, wouldn't it??

if i,ve missed something obvious, please let me know.
 
  • #52
Not all that obvius, but the suit I saw under development for the millitarry had cameras pointing in all directions. And each camera was connected by fiberotptic cable to a video screen no the opposite side of the soldier. So when viewing the suit from any direction, the observer would see a projection from a camera which was on the opposite side of the soldier, pointing in the same direction the observer is facing.
 
  • #53
in reply to the invisible suit thing:

in terms of an invisible soldier, he doesn't have to be completely invisible, he just has
to blend into the background...and not move much. the processing power really isn't
that great. just enough to fool the human eye at a few dozen yards.

but that doesn't really make him invisible now does it? just hard to see.

now then how to truly make someone invisible? help me out on this you nifty science folk.

if I'm not mistaken most everything that we see, touch, experience is matter. matter, while
seemingly solid is mostly just empty space. the vast majority, something like 99.99999 percent is empty space. would there be a way to make that matter vibrate at such a rate
as to let light pass through and not reflect off that .0000001 percent? not likely that you
could use such a thing on a living subject. osha and peta might have something to say
about that. however on a given solid object this should be theoretically possible. just
dont have the science to get there yet.
 
  • #54
any 'flat' display system would fail because your depth of field changes from the same exact angle depending on what distance you are at. For an awesome example of this check out the 'vertigo effect' made famous by alfred hitchcock. however, if the object to be made invisible were very small one could construct a larger three-dimensional light distortion area out of some sort of carefully designed glass and then 'fade' the glass from distortionless at the edges to bending light around a small area in the centre and thus the difference between any adjacent areas would be negligible to the low-resolution human eye. That's my proposed method.

sincerely,
jeffceth
 
  • #55
  • #56
I canot tell you everything. Everything is possible we are now so advanced we can compute to infinet so go out side and injoy life once you find what you are looking for it not really what it is it's somthing else to fill the void it's called the code @ www.beyond-science.com
 
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  • #57
if you are just concerned with making someone/something invisible to human sight then you can just take advantage of how our brain processes the images...but this has already been done in the form of camouflage. Obviously camo only works when there is a background for you to hind against, if youre out in the open you are spotted easily because of the edge of your body, the patterns on camo are designed to break up the edge of your body (since this is one of the processes of the brain to look for edges in order to help recognise objects).

cucumber, i think that's what other people have said, only skim read this myself, but its also something i thought of a few years back and why i think having a suit with tiny "cameras" and LEDs (or whatever) isn't really practical.

For it to work you need to decide what kind of resolution you want the suit to have, ie for a given area on the suit how many photons it registers for the ones it ignores. Eeven the photons it ignores need to be absorbed and not reflected. This will tell you how many (and how small) and your detectors and emiiters need to be on the suit. The photons that are register at a given area on the suit also need to be coupled with the information of which direction the photons came from...off the top of my head I am not sure this is possbile or at the very least i think it would be impractical. Then you have to send all this info about what colour light is hitting where and from what direction etc etc, then send this info to the approriate emmitters.

Now you have the problem of getting the light emitted in the correct direction. Also not forgetting all this needs to happen quickly because if the suit has a low "refresh rate" then its easily noticable.

I suppose the military can do with camo, and they can do without having complete invisibility, i mean all you need to do is fool someone for a few seconds before you shoot them or something lol
 
  • #59
www.davidicke.net/mysteries/history/philexp.html[/URL]
(4 pages following...)
 
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  • #60
How did you like the luminous jacket done by Japanese engineer recording images from the back? I know US army has been interested in this optical system since they saw PREDATOR film. In the case of Philadelphia experience it's interesting the fact Nikolai Tesla was associated to it...someone who wasn't even mentioned by Dr. Kaku in Hyperspace, so the book mentioned in that site (not the one written by Berlitz) is a must if the author was one of the survivers. The effects the dielectric breakdown in the air near surface of the water were imitated in a film with Kirk Douglas about trasatlantic SS.Nimitz, the green cloud (like the green jacket of the photograph which is not a hoax). That was part of the magneto refraction and resonance optical invisibility in Philadelphia-Montauk-Rainbow experience. It's interesting the fact that the experience resulted in crazy people, vanishing and appearing again and even melting bodies to the metal, similar to this other odd experience:
www.amasci.com/freenrg/pyrexp1.html
www.amasci.com/freenrg/grado.html
SO, PLEASE, DR.KAKU, WHEREVER YOU ARE, SINCE YOU HAVEN'T MENTIONED NONE OF THIS BUT WERE PARTICULARLY INTERESTED IN THE ODD EXPERIENCE OF CASIMIR LIQUID EFFECT, IT'S YOUR TIME TO RE-CREATE THOSE EXPERIENCES USING TESLA COILS..but, please, this time take notes or make a diary in case you literally loose your head or the ticking of time is affected in particular circumstances related to the Moon, eclipses, solstices, equinoxes, etc. If you die in the temptative (cos the experience is dangerous, at least you're going to be remembered like the man creating mini black holes to travel into space-time:
www.keelynet.com/unclass/hardy1.htm
 

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