London: It's unlikely to occur by swallowing a pill or donning a special cloak, but invisibility could be possible in the not too distant future, according to research published on Monday.
Harry Potter accomplished it with his magic cloak. H G Wells' Invisible Man swallowed a substance that made him transparent.
But a theoretical physicist at St Andrews University in Scotland, Dr Ulf Leonhardt, believes the most plausible example is the Invisible Woman, one of the Marvel Comics superheroes in the Fantastic Four.
"She guides light around her using a force field in this cartoon. That comes closest to what engineers will probably be able to do in the future," Leonhardt said.
Invisibility is an optical illusion that the object or person is not there. Leonhardt uses the example of water circling around a stone.
The water flows in, swirls around the stone and then leaves as if nothing was there.
"If you replace the water with light then you would not see that there was something present because the light is guided around the person or object. You would see the light coming from the scenery behind as if there was nothing in front," he said.
"What the Invisible Woman does is curve space around herself to bend light. What these devices would do is to mimic that curved space," Leonhardt explained.
Although the devices are still theoretical, Leonhardt said scientists are making advances in metamaterials—artificial materials with unusual properties that could be used to make invisibility devices.
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