Question: Is it possible that there is a material that is invisible ( like the invisibility cloak )? If not, is it possible to make one with our technology today? Like a suit made of metal with display screens that adapt to our surroundings sight-wise. Kind of like the dinosaur from Jurassic Park that can camouflage.

Anna Kalorkoti answered on 18 Nov 2019:

Great question! We could certainly try the “display screens that adapt to the surroundings” approach, like the invisible car in that James Bond film (I don’t actually remember the name of the film, just the fact that there was an invisible car). However, you’d need very good screens—probably better than anything we currently have—and you’d also need to be able to update what’s on the screens very quickly. There’s also the problem that two people looking at the car from different angles would expect to see different things “behind” the car, but a screen can only show one thing at a time, so how well the car is camouflaged would depend on where you were standing. This hasn’t stopped people from trying, though: google “mercedes invisible car” if you’d like to see an example!

Another way we could try to make something invisible is by bending light around it, so that it looks as though the light has travelled straight through and that there’s nothing in the space. This is actually something that science has already sort of done, but there are a few problems: the “cloak” has to be a lot bigger than the thing it’s hiding, and so far we’ve only managed to hide things that are very small. There’s also a lot of different types of light (or “electromagnetic radiation” to use the sciencey name), only a small fraction of which we can see with our eyes (and some animals can see kinds of light that we can’t!). The light-bending cloaks that we’ve made so far all work with one specific bit of the electromagnetic spectrum, and in most if not all cases, it’s not the bit we see with our eyes—but people are working to change that!