http://news.yahoo.com/now-see-now-dont-time-cloak-created-184955175.html

So now we can mask an object and an event. Though I still am not sure how this works. If you slow down the light... won't I go temporarily blind?

Not to be cynical but how much money will they spend on this to find out it has no practical application. So we can "hide" something for a trillionth of a second. We're like juggillions of dollars and thousands of years away from being able to time warp a robot killer.

Not to be cynical but how much money will they spend on this to find out it has no practical application. So we can "hide" something for a trillionth of a second. We're like juggillions of dollars and thousands of years away from being able to time warp a robot killer.

I was thinking similarly. It's not like it bends light, it just slows light down if I'm reading correctly. So you'd see a huge black spot moving around.

I have invented the blanket, time lens now inferior.

With new technology you never know how its going to evolve. I can imagine in the beginning computers really weren't cost effective. But years of research and development they are an integral part of our everyday life. You can't knock something for not seeing immediate use for it, we would still be in the stone age if it wasn't for that.


-Edit, on a related note I remember being younger and learning some math I thought was useless and that I would never use. I always used to mention how it was useless and I would never need to use it. Now I find myself eating my own words because I literally use it everyday in my job, studies, and hobbies.

With new technology you never know how its going to evolve. I can imagine in the beginning computers really weren't cost effective. But years of research and development they are an integral part of our everyday life. You can't knock something for not seeing immediate use for it, we would still be in the stone age if it wasn't for that.


-Edit, on a related note I remember being younger and learning some math I thought was useless and that I would never use. I always used to mention how it was useless and I would never need to use it. Now I find myself eating my own words because I literally use it everyday in my job, studies, and hobbies.

I totally get that, I mean I get excited when we make breakthroughs. But I mean let's be realistic, this is a bullshit project with like 0.0000001% chance of producing something with a practical application. There's so many other "out there" projects with a real chance of becoming something useful in our lifetime, not sure why we would waste money on this one.

Essentially, what they have seemed to have done is that, for a very short moment, make recorded events happen with a similar effect as if the events took place at a much farther distance. When we see a star exploding as a supernova 800 light years away, the distance of the star means that the event happened at least 800 years ago. Unless I understand wrong, because with that example, you still see the event, but it was just delayed from our point of view. I especially don't get the part where they "speed up" the light beam to complement the slow down.

Essentially, what they have seemed to have done is that, for a very short moment, make recorded events happen with a similar effect as if the events took place at a much farther distance. When we see a star exploding as a supernova 800 light years away, the distance of the star means that the event happened at least 800 years ago. Unless I understand wrong, because with that example, you still see the event, but it was just delayed from our point of view. I especially don't get the part where they "speed up" the light beam to complement the slow down.

I wonder if it has to do with the wave property (waves that are of the same frequency but with 180 degrees difference will cancel each other)? But yeah, I was wondering that as well

It sounds (from the rather dumbed down article) that all they did is block light for 40 trillionths of a second via fancy means. I don't get the time cloak point. They slowed light down and sped it up (nothing new; we've done this before) and created a gap in light. How is this "warping" time? If they pulsed the light for 40 trillionths of a second, they would have created the same effect.