Countdown with Keith Olbermann: October 19, 2006

OLBERMANN: Scientists at Duke University have tested an invisability cloak, an advanced version of which might someday be able to hide a space craft from an enemy like in “Star Trek” or make a person invisible as in “Harry Potter.”

The breakthrough in our No. 1 story in the COUNTDOWN is a bit more modest than that. What scientists have achieved is to essentially hide a copper cylinder from detection from microwaves, by covering the object with a cloak. In this case a meta material made of 10 fiberglass rings covered with cooper elements which redirected the electromagnetic waves. The researchers at Duke and the Imperial College in London don't claim to be anywhere near Harry Potter territory, though scientists do believe that cloaking radar waves and cloaking ultimately light waves is theoretically possible.

And we have these dudes on the Internet demonstrating through TV trickery, of course, what it might look like. The cloak of the future, a blanket of nano material which would pass the light waves around the object creating the illusion of invisability. It's an illusion.

Once again, as we always do, when science really confuses us we turn to the chief astronomer at the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, Derrick Pitts.

Thanks again for your time tonight, Derrick.

DERRICK PITTS, ASTRONOMER, FRANKLIN INSTITUTE MUSEUM: My pleasure, Keith.

OLBERMANN: Well, how serious is this? I mean, great. It can't be seen by microwaves. I don't use microwaves to see. Did they oversell this by describing it as an invisibility cloak?

PITTS: Well not really. The reason why they describe it as an invisibility cloak is because it was impossible or difficult for them to at least to detect the microwaves emanating from the source that they had placed behind the copper cylinder. So in a sense, it really was invisible, although we typically tend to think of invisibility related to visible light, but it this case it works the same way.

OLBERMANN: What analogies can you draw, you've done this for us before, to sort of reduce this down to normal terminology in terms of how this actually worked?

PITTS: The easiest way to think of this is to imagine two things, No. 1, imagine what a mirage looks like down a road where you look down the road and can sort of see a shimmery patch out in front of you that really is a reflection of the sky above and now other thing to do is to imagine the flow of a stream of water around a rock. As the water comes down the rock it splits behind the rock, comes around the rock, and comes back together in front of the rock. So in a sense the water you see in front of the rock sort of looks exactly like the water behind the rock, and that's what this is really doing. It's wrapping that mirage that we spoke of just a moment ago, right around the copper cylinder so you can see what was behind the cylinder.

OLBERMANN: All right, so where do they go from this? Is the next thing trying to hide stuff from radar waves or what?

PITTS: Yeah. I'm surprised you can see me because I have a little box here that I was testing to make myself disappear, but I guess that's not working. OK, yeah, the next thing to do with this is really to see if it could possibly be applied to some technology like radar that might be used on defending fighter aircraft. But that's a big process that has to be taken care of, but it's possible that it actually could get to be that size or you work in an application that big.

OLBERMANN: All right, and speaking of size, the really cool, real- life inadvisability cloak that you could somehow become invisible with, is it an all or nothing proposition? Does size apply to that? Could we small cloak small things first, or, you know, forks, pens, softballs, the answers to the test, then move on to big stuff that would really freak people out like hiding whole people?

PITTS: Yeah, the real problem though is that the way in which this process works, the mechanism that allows to it work, it's easier to manipulate this when you're working with microwaves because of the size of the wave length, you can actually work with the cloaking material itself—you can actually work with that by hand and move the stuff around to make the cloak. But to do it for visible light wave lengths, the visible white wave lengths are so much smaller, Keith, that it makes it really difficult to manipulate that. So the difficulty with the visible light is the capability to actually work with the very very tiny stuff. It's like—it's really the—an advanced application of nano technology, and in this case I'd say nano, nano technology, very, very small.

OLBERMANN: So you're not betting on this? We're not going to see this in our lifetime or 1,000 years from now?

PITTS: Well, I'm not betting on it right away. I would say that we'll probably see the move in technology toward the—attempting the capability to make it work for light waves, but it's a ways off, yet.

OLBERMANN: Yeah, and then the fun really begins when we start becoming invisible. Derrick Pitts, chief astronomer of the Franklin Institute, and for our money the new Mr. Science. Thanks again, Derrick.

PITTS: My pleasure. Thank you.

OLBERMANN: That's COUNTDOWN, for this the 1,265 th day since the declaration of “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois joins us tomorrow. I'm Keith Olbermann, goodnight and good luck.