Time Cloak Unveiled

So it isn’t quite Doctor Who, yet, but perhaps it is a small step in that direction. Scientists have been able to build a temporal cloaking device. Time travel it isn’t.

Physicist Moti Fridman at Cornell University was able to cause light passing through a fiber optic cable to compress, than decompress, causing a hole or void to exist, long enough for there to be a lag between the two, reports PhysOrg.

Unlike other proven cloaking devices that work by bending light around objects, this cloaking device works by compressing the light passing through the optical cable by means of a special silicon lens that causes some of the light passing through it to speed up and some to slow down, which causes the waves to divide. Another lens, a little farther up the cable then causes the light to be put back together. The result is light emerging from the end of the cable that appears to be unaltered, which means, for the little bit of space between the lenses, things have or could have gone on, with no record of it occurring.

The site suggests two uses for this technology, one good, one bad.

While it appears the new technology might be used for signal processing application, it appears equally likely it might be used for both good and bad purpose as well. For example, if coded messages could be hidden in a series of these cloaks, it would be mighty difficult to intercept them, making for very secure communications. On the other hand, it also seems logical to conclude that such a hidden time lag, if it could be made to pulse on and off, over and over as a data is passing through, could be used to intercept data without there being a record of it.

It would also be the perfect hiding place; were you able to step between the two lenses then you would effectively be in a time void. However the first gap created was only 15 trillionths of a second and scientists predict that they will never be able to produce a void that lasts longer than 120 microseconds.