Civic-Roger

Forget wrapping an object – say, Harry Potter – in a cloak of invisibility. How about hiding an event using time?

What may be a distant dream for this year's Indianapolis Colts has been demonstrated for the first time by a team of physicists at Cornell University.

The approach is dubbed "temporal cloaking," and it builds on experiments researchers have already conducted to demonstrate that they can hide objects from view.

Indeed, scientists had already succeeded at "spatial cloaking," which involves bending light around an object in such a way as to make it appear invisible. Temporal cloaking involves interrupting light to create a seeming gap in time in which an event can be hidden.

At this point, the time gap that the scientists created is so brief – about 50 trillionths of a second – that practical implications are barely a gleam in anyone's eye. But the researchers are interested in trying to lengthen the amount of time a beam's gap remains open, says Alexander Gaeta, who led the team reporting the results in the Jan. 5 issue of the journal Nature.

Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/tim...0#.TwhONjWXTEE

MPR

They are manipulating light, not time.

yoddbrowns

but light is faster than time it is difficult to manage but they are scientists they can do miracles right?

MPR

The speed of something is measured with distance and time. Time has no speed. It is simply a unit measurement which we keep track of by the motion of our solar system. Time cannot be sped up or slowed down.

It's an illogical statement to say something is faster or slower than time, because time has no velocity.

Scientists are stuck on the theory that the speed of light and time are connected, meaning if something travels faster than light, it is said to be moving forward in time. Light is approximately 300,000km per second. While that is fast, it is totally plausible for something to travel, say 400,000km per second. Though scientists would say that is not entirely possible for anything to travel faster than light, because light is the fastest observed velocity of anything ever recorded.

Where this becomes tricky to understand is that because light is not instant (it has a velocity), what we see happening at a distance and what is actually happening at the observed location can be two different things. To further explain, when you look at the sun from the surface of the earth, where you see it located in the sky is actually where it was 7 or 8 minutes ago. This is because it takes time for the light traveling from the sun to reach earth... approximately 7 minutes.

This is why they say that should anything travel faster than light would be traveling faster than time. But it's not. In reality, it only simply appears that way. We would never see something happen before it happens as that is not possible. If light were instant (infinite velocity), we would simply observe things the instant they happen.

I believe all they have done in this instance is delay light (slow it down) so that what we observe is what happened before or after an event, but not during the event. Again, this has nothing to do with speeding up or slowing down time. It is the speeding up and slowing down of light. That is all.

I urge everyone to be very skeptical of anything scientists claim. Over the past few years I have discovered rather alarming amounts of lies and misinterpreted scientific data. Much of scientists conclusions are large assumptions based on false presuppositions. There are major flaws in their methodology and a good portion of what is considered "science" these days is not actually real science. It is very difficult to make these things known to the public because of the implications the real truth exposes and brings to light....

Just be very careful and diligent with what you hear from "scientists"... Not everything they claim as fact is true.

TCR

very nice clarification of the difference between time and light