Crackpot Invention

Some of my closest allies have been privy to my certain burst of genius from my brain cooked into an astounding invention or a neat plan for a inspired money spinning business proposal. Some of them have seen the light of the day as other like minded; and “brilliant” may I add; people have actually implemented them successfully not with any help from me though.

For example; back in the old days of dial up connections when broadband was unheard of and you had to wait ages for the page to load up and the WWW was made acronym for World Wide Wait, I had commented to my boss that if we could buy up some bandwidth from the satellite and use the Cable TV wire, to hook up a network, we could sell premium connectivity at premium prices. My boss demurely passed off the idea with some explanation that I don’t remember now. We anyways were in the software development business and not in IT / Network Support business. Anyways a few months later somebody opened up this service right in our office neighborhood and soon we were one of their customers. Sometime later during a casual tea break, when we were chatting up about something, I reminded him of my idea and the fact that the vendor was following almost the exact business model which I had suggested to him. All he gave back was a nod and a smile. There are quite a few like this one. (Ceiling fan that breezes up the whole room, travel agency based on multi level marketing, doors, furniture and storage made of plastic and many others)

But this claim of mine hasn’t got much validity since what was said was verbal and no record of it was made. Which brings me to what I wanted to write in this blog today.

I have had this idea with me for quite some time. So I decided to look up Google before venturing out to write about it. I didn’t get very good results. I got a lot of results on The Invisible Man motion picture, Hollow Man motion picture, about snipers using camouflage uniforms.

Some forums had people discussing (after watching Hollow Man) ways to be invisible. They mentioned the fact that jelly fish, a certain kind of frog and many deep sea aquatic animals are in fact translucent and they use this characteristic of theirs as a neat survival tactic to avoid being eaten up by bigger fishes. So the idea was to basically try and turn your skin by some method into transparent tissue. I don’t really see much practicality in that unless you wanna turn man like the Hollow Man ;). Some discussed chameleon like features others discussed magicians and their tricks but that’s venturing out of topic.

Then I came up with this link:

• http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/02/07/japan.invisible.ap/

And then this:

• http://www.time.com/time/2003/inventions/invinvisible.html

Pretty amazing I would say and my idea is along the same lines. Maybe I should stop calling it “my” idea as a matter of respect for these gentlemen who seem to be genuine scientists. The articles came in 2003 and nothing much has been reported since then. I say 2-3 years that have passed since then should be enough for them to make more news. I hope they do succeed.

I will explain how I have approached this invisibility suit. What we see is basically light in different wavelengths being reflected from any surface. How we are able to comprehend the existence of anything is processing the reflected light coming from that surface.

So a sofa reflects light in a certain way and the reflected light when it reaches our eyes, makes us aware of its presence. A glass on the other hand just passes the light through it and we are able to see on the other side and that is what it makes it transparent and almost invisible.

So all we need to do to make an invisible suit is to make a fabric which will capture the light from one side and emit it from the other side and in effect make the object inside invisible. Simple isn’t it?

We have light sensors which accurately convert light into data as we can see in scanners. We have diodes or crystals which emit light as seen in LCD monitors the world over. All we need to do is make a super fast scanner and a very big LCD screen and that should do. Except that it is not a suit yet. So to do that, we will need to make miniature crystals and sensors and line them up side by side into a fabric. Then we will need software which will calculate which crystal should emit light from which sensor. And presto, we are done.

Except alas that software will be a lot longer than the line which I used to describe it and will take a hell lot of time to develop. Also if someone manages to make all this and also somehow manages to put all that into one single suit along with the computer which will run that software, you have two more problems.

One, the person who will wear that suit will have to be still for the program to work properly. I think the computing power which will be able to process all that “light” will take up some rooms for years to come though its amazing how capable desktops these days are.

Two, even if the future succeeds in incorporating that much processing power into a single chip, we still have external forces like dust, mud etc factoring into making the person visible.

But I guess if the gentlemen are able to reach the level which we are discussing here, it will be quite amazing.

Quite a crackpot invention I’d say !!

I would like to close this with a quote by Frank Wilczek who has been awarded with the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction," to quote the citation by the Nobel Committee.

"In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for you." - Frank Wilczek