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Invisibility


Even since the beginning of human society, humans have loved the idea of invisibility. From Greek mythology to the movies of today, we are fascinated with the possibility of walking unseen!
In the Mass Effect universe, invisibility is used by military snipers and soldiers. It's a textbook version of invisibility that cloaks the person as if  he/she is wearing an invisible skin tight body suit.

However, the process of making an invisibility cloak is much more cumbersome.
Gif Source
Gif Source

Here is a graphic of one the characters you meet in the game. She is a thief and has an invisibility cloak. Of course a more realistic cloak would not be as simple and efficient.
 Here is another graphic of invisibility cloaks in the game. They are being used to run into enemy lines.










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This image shows a kid wearing a cylinder around his head. This would be similar to what the cloak would be, except that it is a giant cylinder around your body. Very different from what we want a cloak to be.

 Scientists are starting to discover exactly how to make invisibility possible. Physicists at Duke University showed that they could bend microwave radiation around an object and form at the other end. That proved that it just might be possible to now bend light around an object, and not just microwaves.


One of the main problems that scientists have had is that some light will be reflected and some of the cloaks will only work with a certain bandwidth because of the magnetic fields they use.


However, an experiment done by UC Berkley researchers actually bent light around a bump, making it invisible to the human eye! According to the Dally Californian the cloak is:

"A covering made of thin layers of silicon oxide and silicon nitride that sits on a silver mirror...The cloak not only covers an object hidden below, but also bends light away from the bump the object creates to flatten the image viewed by the human eye."


There is a downside however, the cloak only works on objects that are microscopic. And if they ever wanted to make a person invisible, they would need to have a cloak the size of a room!


"It only works to create the illusion of invisibility on microscopic objects roughly 300 nanometers in diameter — about the size of a red blood cell."


"Scaling up this technology for a human-sized “invisibility cloak” would be difficult. If the current cloak were scaled up, it would need to be the size of mid-sized room in order to work for one person."


   Author and famous physicist Dr. Michio Kaku also talks about invisibility in his book Physics of the Impossible. He says that:
   "Given the enormous strides made so far in achieving invisibility, it clearly qualifies as a Class I impossibility. Within the next few decades, or at least within this century, a form of invisibility may become commonplace."
(33, Physics of the Impossible)
   Overall it is unlikely we will ever see an invisibility suit, but an invisible cylinder is very possible. Soon we might all be able to buy our own invisibility cloak!