Time Cloaking: Scientists Use Lasers To Erase Time From History, Believe It
By Digital Afro Lead Editor: Stephen Brown
We always like to display how science fiction is slowly becoming a reality. Inventions like the invisibility cloak” are bending our view of what is possible in the sciene & technical realm. Well, if being able to be invisible makes your mind tingle, how about a time cloak that could make events in history vanish? Believe it.
Researchers at Cornell have designed, built and demonstrated the first “cloak” that hides events in time as if they never happened.
In theory, if you pull light waves apart in time, and then compress them back together, it is possible to create time pockets and hide physical or data objects inside the gaps. The process relies on similar methods from the invisibility cloak of distorting visible spectrum fields, but uses the time-space duality in electromagnetic theory: where diffraction and dispersion of light in space are mathematically equivalent. Scientists have used this theory to create a “time-lens [that] can, for example, magnify or compress things in time.”
*The shifting principals are based on the bending of light known as Diffraction:
-Below: This is an example of Diffraction, the bending of light to shift an object in the visible spectrum. Scientists are using this principal, and two opposing lasers to shift an object in the electromagnetic spectrum, so that it exists outside of regular time.
The time cloak takes two electromagnetic lenses and arranges them so that one compresses a beam of light, while the other decompresses it. That leaves the beam seemingly unchanged, but the diffraction and dispersion actually “cloak” small events in the beam’s timeline. Right now, the cloak can only last for 120 nanoseconds, and the theoretical max for the current design measures just microseconds. However, the prospect of being able to hide an object outside of time, even for just a few microseconds, is enough to make even the most cynical person oogle at the possibilities.
