万花筒 2010-03-30&04-01 真的有隐身斗篷？（在线收听）

-It's an amazing technology, and the trick to it is really creating a material that can bend light waves. In this case it's infrared waves. So we can't actually see them, that's next.

-Well,let's see, I think we got a graphic here that describes how we see things. This as you can tell the cloak way I adopt here, refraction and reflection, tell me what about we are looking at here.

-This is the way to think about these cloaks is...if you can imagine how air goes over an airplane wing, so that it's neither being absorbed or reflected it back if light doesn't reflect, you can't see the object that is bouncing on. So that's really the secret here. What makes this particular study really interesting is you've been able to do it in three dimensions, so that you can't see the object when you look at from different angle. So before they could do it with they could do with light coming in one angle but that would mean that if you move to a slightly different view you could see the object of course, that really wouldn't pass for Harry Porter.

-Now what is this? Is this a discovery? Is this an invention? Is this the advance of existing scientific technology? What's happened clearly we don't have an invisibility cloak, is it being some advance here that we are talking about?

-Well, we have... there has been advance. I think one of the things that's really interesting about this is that they've managed to do in the, uh, using infrared waves and as I mentioned the sort of holy graph is being to do it with visible light waves, and before they were doing it with microwaves. So we are getting eventually getting closer and closer to having a really practical technology that we can scale up and be able to,you know cloak actual objects that's supposed to be so small we can't see them in the first place.

-Right,so it doesn't matter so much. All right other than being able to cloak my good friend Harry who is supposed to be on this segment. What really are the practical applications? If we could succeed in cloaking larger objects, what...where would you use it?

-Well, you can use it for ...obviously for military purposes, for entertainment purposes, but there are some other applications you could make super fast objects, you can make super powerful intendants. So there are a lot of things we can do with the technology that aren't so Harry Porter like.

-And going back to Harry Porter for a second, we talk about invisible cloak, is this the kind of thing that has consumer application would it be generated by a computer in your house or just say, large lab sort of thing?

-Right now, it's still in the lab, but it really is physical material. It's made of these crystal structures with air pockets in sort of looks like if you can imagine a pile of wood, so it would be, you know, a physical object.

-And it would still be there, you just couldn't see it, we are not actually getting rid of it. (Exactly.) We just can't see it, OK.