‘Time cloak’ can make events invisible
Scientists have created a lens of not just light, but time. Their method splits light, speeding up one part of light and slowing down another . It creates a gap and that gap is where an event is masked.
Their time cloak lasts an incredibly tiny fraction of a fraction of a second. They hid an event for 40 trillionths of a second, according to a study appearing in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature.
This is the basic idea: If you can make sure that light doesn’t scatter off or reflect off a certain object, that object is invisible. Now, assume that an event occurs, but the lights are switched off at that precise point of time. You don’t register that event. What researchers mean to do is to create this gap in the continuum of light, which then becomes akin to making a small hole in time itself.
Another way to think of it: it’s as if scientists edited or erased a split second of history. It’s as if you are watching a movie with a scene inserted that you don’t see or notice. It’s there in the movie, but it’s not something you saw, said study co-author Moti Fridman, a physics researcher at Cornell.
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