Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Hogwarts enrollment soon opened up to scientists?

Watch out Harry Potter you may be "the most powerful wizard of this time" however, some of the "most powerful scientists of this time" are right on your tail. They have created a cloak of invisibility of their own!

Okay, okay, okay. So, This team of scientist weren’t able to make Daniel Ratcliff disappear for real, but they can make things such as a grain of sand and even an ant disappear. Those things aren’t people but hey, that is pretty darn impressive for the average human being to accomplish! (Average meaning muggles or non-wizards). I'd say they’re on the right track to creating a life size invisibility cloak that we could all use.

Obviously they did not create these "carpet cloaks" using wizardry, so how did they? This team gathered calcite prisms, which are a type of naturally occurring crystals to build the carpet cloaks. Understandably, the carpet cloaks don't truly make things vanish in thin air, but what it does is manipulates the optical properties of the calcite prisms, with the help of a small mirror notched into the base of the device. Anything at the bottom of the carpet cloak, hiding behind the bent notched mirror 'disappears'. It appears to ‘disappear’ because at the right angle the bent mirror can look like a flat plane.

The chance that all of us will be tip-toeing around invisible any time soon, is not high considering the carpet cloaks only work on objects as big as 1-2 millimeters, and it is definitely not made of magical cloth. Someday though, maybe we'll uncover another secret to the world of wizardry, turning science into a kind of magic itself.

"Carpet Cloak"


Analysis of post:
In attempts to arouse and fulfill, I used a title where people would have to wonder what on earth I was talking about, and want to read my blog. To fulfill the arousal I made sure the title had to do with my blog was composed of, in a sense. I used pictures to show what I was trying to explain so that the reader could visualize exactly what I was describing.

2 comments:

  1. I enjoyed the way you presented this article, i was developing questions that kept me reading and by the end they were all answered. It would be neat if they actually could make things disappear into thin air though.

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  2. Nice. Well written with great pictures.I really liked the title as well, which is what drew me in.

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