(male narrator)
Some things you don't
want to see.
(Describer) In animation...
Like big,
ugly power lines,
sprawling
waste treatment plants,
or your unwashed laundry.
You can't help
but look at them.
Down the road,
there could be another option.
What if these objects
could disappear?
Hiding things in plain sight
isn't exactly new.
The military has been doing it
for years with camouflage.
Nature does it better.
Animals like chameleons
can change to match
whatever color
they need.
Both principles work
to hide something
by matching
the background.
If the background changes,
the effect is lost.
Cloaking research aims
to get a cloaked object
to appear invisible
with a changing background.
We see this rock
because waves of light
bounce off and travel
to our eyes
and to our brains,
and we see the rock.
Imagine if that rock
were in a stream.
The water would be flowing by
and hitting it,
but immediately
afterwards,
the water would curve
around the rock
and combine
on the other side.
If you were downstream,
you'd see water
(Describer) Downstream.
that came
from the rock's other side.
Researchers want
to make visible light
behave kind of like
that water,
to flow around the object
that's cloaked.
How?
With metamaterials.
Metamaterials are a type
of nanotechnology.
This material would control
the portion
of the electromagnetic spectrum
that we can see.
When light streams past
the object to be hidden,
it goes around it.
Theoretically, observers
would never know it's there.
Scientists have done this
with small objects,
smaller than the width
of a human hair.
When these metamaterials
get better,
they'll be able to hide
bigger things.
Cloaking is cool, but what would
we do with this technology?
Remember, the military
likes hiding things.
Cloaking would be like
camouflage on steroids.
Police could hide out
and catch bad guys,
or hide anything
you don't want to see.
One day it could even hide
power lines
or piles of laundry.
For now, if you don't want
to look at dirty laundry,
you probably shouldn't
leave it on the floor.
