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Pentagon Scientists Use ‘Time Hole’ to Make Events Disappear

January 4, 2012

Soldiers could one day conduct covert operations in complete secrecy, now that Pentagon-backed physicists have figured out how to mask entire events by distorting light.

A team at Cornell University, with support from Darpa, the Pentagon’s out-there research arm, managed to hide an event for 40 picoseconds (those are trillionths of seconds, if you’re counting). They’ve published their groundbreaking research in this week’s edition of the journal Nature.

This is the first time that scientists have succeeded in masking an event, though research teams have in recent years made remarkable strides in cloaking objects. Researchers at the University of Texas, Dallas, last year harnessed the mirage effect to make objects vanish. And in 2010, physicists at the University of St. Andrews made leaps towards using metamaterials to trick human eyes into not seeing what was right in front of them.

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In the words of Nature editors, the research marks “a significant step towards full spatio-temporal cloaking.” But it could be decades before military personnel will basically be able to zap history, as it happens: According to Cornell scientists, it’d take a machine 18,600 miles long to produce a time mask that lasts a single second.

Pentagon Scientists Use ‘Time Hole’ to Make Events Disappear

Wired Hacks Use ‘Gee Whizz’ Ploy to Bamboozle Hungover Wage-Slaves

nordic wrote:
That's nothing. I can easily cloak an entire night's worth of my own activity, both spatio and temporal. It's called alcohol.

Stephen Morgan wrote:I'll believe it when I see it.

Stephen Morgan wrote:I'll believe it when I see it.

MacCruiskeen wrote:

Pentagon Scientists Use ‘Time Hole’ to Make Events Disappear

Like, totally awesome. In related news:

Wired Hacks Use ‘Gee Whizz’ Ploy to Bamboozle Hungover Wage-Slaves

To accommodate both the interest in discussing psyops and "keyword hijacking," and the concern over how such discussions often proceed here by way of subject disruption and "thread hijacking," I'm instituting the following:

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2. Original posts on the subject are still welcome in General Discussion.

3. One reply which introduces the subject to an unrelated thread will be permitted, but all subsequent discussion of "keyword hijacking" must take place in a new thread in either General Discussion or in "Psyops and Meme Management". A link to it may be posted in the original thread.

4. Subsequent off-topic replies will be subject to deletion.

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justdrew wrote:yeah, that story is REALLY about some folks taking DARPA for some good grant money. There's NO WAY to turn the little trick they've pulled in a special machine in a lab into a device that would function in the real world.

slomo wrote:

justdrew wrote:yeah, that story is REALLY about some folks taking DARPA for some good grant money. There's NO WAY to turn the little trick they've pulled in a special machine in a lab into a device that would function in the real world.

Welcome, my son, to the world of Science.