Blah, blah, blah

The military’s new stealth technology allows naval warships:

• to be virtually invisible to the human eye,
• to dodge roaming radars,
• to hide from heat-seeking missiles,
• to disguise their own sound vibrations,
• and even to reduce the way they distort the Earth’s magnetic field.

The next generation of warships would truly invisible by exploiting metamaterials. Metamaterials are engineered to have specific electromagnetic properties that are not found in nature: they make an object appear invisible by bending light around it so the waves seem to pass through empty space.

“If optical and radar metamaterials could be developed, they might provide a way to make a ship invisible to both human observers and radar systems, although the challenges of building a cloak big enough to hide an entire ship are huge,” said Chris Lavers from Britannia Royal Navy College.

In its 2009 Budget proposal, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to build “transparent displays” by “exploiting the optical plasmon phenomenology characteristics of nanoscale structures.” Not to mention “biomolecular computers.”

Creepy!