Time, Space, Invisibility, Cloaking… Chris Nolan Has A Plot For A New Movie.

I found two VERY interesting articles online today here and here and my eyes are just now uncrossing themselves.   They involve Time Cloaking and Illusion Cloaking, respectively.  Yes, you read that right.  They are now able to cloak time AND make one object look like another.

Let’s touch on the first article for a moment.  Basically, the first article is talking about TIME CLOAKING.  Yes, the ability to make a (very) brief moment in time appear as though it never even happened.   Essentially, in electromagnetic theory there is a duality between space and time:

“In particular, the diffraction of a beam of light in space is mathematically equivalent to the temporal propagation of light through a dispersive medium. In other words, diffraction and dispersion are symmetric in spacetime.”

So, in essence, if you can make a lense that focuses light via diffraction, you can use dispersion to make a lens that focuses TIME.  And that, my friends, is mind fucking.  What they are doing is using an electro-optic modulator to create a time lens.  They use two “time lenses” in series and shine a beam of light that has no idea what the hell is about to happen through them.  The first lens compresses the light while the second lens decompresses it.   This in effect creates a literal “hole in time”.  Anything that occurs in that “hole” is unrecorded in time itself, thereby “cloaking” time.   It’s done in such a fashion that to the observer, the light coming out of the second lens is undistorted and their is no idication that anything happened.

The period in which time is cloaked is extremely brief, lasting only nanoseconds; however, given the exponential rate at which science and technology progress today, in a few years people will probably be cloaking time all over the damn place. Mark my words, banks will be robbed in this manner at some point in the future.

Now, on to the second article.  This one is about illusion cloaks.  An illusion cloak pretty much makes one object look like another.  Here’s how:

Take an invisibilty cloak.  An invisibility cloak works by bending light around a particular bit of space thereby making any object inside that space effectivly invisible.  Everything that you can see in the world looks the way it does because of the way light reflects off of it.  In essence, light gives things their shape and color.  If there is no light reflecting off of a particular thing or surface, if the light is bending around the object, you can’t see it.  This is all accomplished with what are called metamaterials.  These newly created metamerials are artificially engineered to have properties not found in nature and can basically bend light in anyway imagineable.

These same metamaterials can be used to make one object in a space look like another.  From the article:

“The trick is to create a material in which the permittivity and permeability are complementary to the values in a nearby region of space containing the mouse we want to hide. ‘Complementary’ means that the material cancels out the effect that the mouse has on a plane lightwave passing through. So a plane wave would be bent by the mouse but then bent back into a plane as it passes through the complementary material, making the mouse disappear.

The second step is to then distort this plane wave in the way that an elephant would. This means creating transformational material that distorts a plane lightwave in the same way as an elephant. So anybody looking at this mouse would instead see an elephant.”

Making… a mouse… look like an… elephant.  And then there’s this:

“The researchers have even found a mind-boggling application. Their idea is to create the illusion that a wall has a hole in it, and then use the hole to look through the wall.”

Ok, so now basically they are creating one of these.   Every episode of Loony Tunes where Wile E. Coyote tries to use an hole in a bottle courtesy of Acme to try and catch the Road Runner is now becoming a reality.  Or Portal.  With Artificial Intelligence and machine self-awareness now looking like a reality, I’m sure GlaDOS is right around the corner and instead of playing laser tag, you’ll be able to play a real life game of Portal.

All of this is very, VERY cool.  Now all we have to do is sit back and wait for Chris Nolan to devise a movie where an insanely crazy, albeit successful, heist is conducted by some expert team (more than likely consisting of a reunited cast of Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy in some respect) using illusion cloaking in conjunction with time cloaking, time travel/teleportation (because this whole invisiblity thing and time travel/teleportation go hand in hand a la the Philadelphia Experiment) and portal guns.  They are hired by a powerful corporation  to steal a rare alien substance from a remote, classified, extremely highly guarded government laboratory that can transmute living elements.

Immediately after this picture was taken, Levitt fell through a hole in the floor and became invisible. His current whereabouts are unknown except to him and Christopher Nolan.

In this heist a plain old invisibility cloak won’t work.  No.  This particular lab has thermal imaging cameras, so even if you are invisible they could still see you.  Of course, there would be a point where they were discovered and mayhem ensues.   What you don’t know is that before hand, they traveled forward in time, saw themselves get caught (but not far enough forward in time to see themselves escape, so they don’t know if they get away or not) and created carefully created portals on ceilings and floors with their portal guns so that when they were being chased, pursuing guards and scientists would fall through the hole in the floor and then end up coming out of the whole in the ceiling BACK THROUGH THE HOLE ON THE FLOOR, thus falling in an infinitely loop.  But in a typical Nolan mind fuck twist, the wasn’t the future for the dimension that they were currently in.  When they went forward in time it was in a PARALLEL DIMENSION and the whole process caused that dimension to “overlap” ours.  So when they try to steal the substance, their “future” selves have already taken it and set a trap that kills them to cover up the evidence.  See, you didn’t know that the overlap occured, thereby making the “future” team aware that the “past” team had seen them conducting the heist.  This is all ENTIRELY plausible.

Fuck Yeah.