Five days into 2012 and we’ve already got fancy new technology. A team from Cornell University have developed a light-distortion device that can mask events as if they hadn’t happened; they managed to use light distortion to hide an event for 40 picoseconds. Which, granted, is 40 trillionths of a second, but the research is groundbreaking in the extreme.

The team at Cornell published their findings in this week’s edition of Nature; their research is largely funded by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – that is, the Pentagon’s scary-futuristic research branch.

Folk have managed to mask objects before, by bending light around objects to make them invisible to the human eye; in the case of masking events, though, the trick is to change the speed of light. Which is straight out of Futurama, but anyway:

Where events are concerned, concealment relies on changing the speed of light. Light that’s emitted from actions, as they happen, is what allows us to see those actions happen. Usually, that light comes in a constant flow. What Cornell researchers did, in simple terms, is tweak that ongoing flow of light — just for a mere iota of time — so that an event could transpire without being observable

So it’s the part about altering the speed of light to make an event entirely unobservable – rather than just invisible to the human eye – that’s breaking ground here.

That being said, it’ll be a long time before the research allows for an appreciable cloaking periods; according to the Cornell scientists, it’d take a machine 30 000 kilometres long to mask time for a single second.

Still. Future.

[Source: Wired, NG]