Invisible Time

On a 1997 episode of the British fake-news program Brass Eye, there was a “story” about scientists who conducted physics experiments with time; one involved having two mice give birth to a nanosecond, another consisted of isolating and blowing up a fortnight (“The clock on the wall was throwing up,” claims one witness to the experiments).

The Pentagon's new time-cloaking technology could one day lead to sneaking into changing rooms undetected. Or invisible fighter jets.

But now, Pentagon-backed physicists really have made time disappear. Only they haven’t blown it up, they’ve just made it invisible. And it wasn’t a fortnight, it was 40 picoseconds (that’s 40 trillionths of a second to you and me).

Previous cloaking technology has involved making objects appear invisible. This is accomplished by bending light around an object. This new method involves tinkering with the speed of light beams. By slowing some down and speeding others up, the scientists were able to make those 40 picoseconds appear invisible.

The possibility of this concept was theorized by Martin McCall, a professor in theoretical optics at Imperial College in London. "It is significant because it opens up a whole new realm to ideas involving invisibility," McCall says.

There’s a long way to go before such technology is practical. Even if they manage to pull this off for, say, 40 trillion times longer, that’s only a second.

But if scientists are able to combine physical cloaking with event cloaking, the possibilities seem limitless. We’re talking Invisible Man. We’re talking Star Trek. We’re talking blowing up a fortnight. 

If things keep moving in this direction, there may soon be a whole bunch of things we’ll never see. And considering this research is backed by the Pentagon, we can’t imagine it could ever be used for anything bad.