About time

We all heard so many great things about the "future" when we were growing up. Ronald Reagan promised us star wars, Michael J. Fox teased us with the hover board and The Jetsons made us believe that robots with attitudes would be doing our laundry. Yet, here we are in the year 2008 and I haven't seen anything even close to that. I feel like it was common knowledge that we would at least have flying cars by now and still we have nothing. In fact, before today I couldn't have thought of one invention that seemed "futurey".

Luckily, some nerds at Berkley have been spending millions to give people like me some hope for a sensationally fictionalized future.

"Scientists have created two new types of materials that can bend light the wrong way, creating the first step toward an invisibility cloaking device. One approach uses a type of fishnet of metal layers to reverse the direction of light, while another uses tiny silver wires, both at the nanoscale level. Both are so-called metamaterials -- artificially engineered structures that have properties not seen in nature, such as negative refractive index."

So, light is bending and stuff is happening. I want to know if I can go to the store and buy an invisibility bodysuit. Again, my dreams were dashed.

"We are not actually cloaking anything," Valentine said in a telephone interview. "I don't think we have to worry about invisible people walking around any time soon. To be honest, we are just at the beginning of doing anything like that."

Nothing soon, but they did say that they are at the beginning, so I have some hope. I wonder though, if I were one of these scientists and I created a cloaking device I'm not so sure that I would tell other people about, so why would they? Don't you think that they would want to do a little spying before releasing it?

You know what I would do?



Nope. I would have something to do with this...



But what?