Kgnu - How On Earth

This podcast provides extended version of our interview with Janos Perczel about his new Invisibility Cloak. Background: An undergraduate  at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland has overcome a major hurdle in the development of invisibility cloaks by envisioning an optical device that would allow the cloak to hide things against CHANGING backgrounds.  The Institute of Physics and German Physical Society's New Journal of Physics, published the study today, and the lead author, Janos Perczel, spoke with us about it from Hungary, via Skype,.  But first -- putting aside Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility for a moment, in real life, scientists have cloaked some palm-sized objects . . . but not especially well.  Here’s Janos Perczel. Perczel It depends on what you mean by an invisibility cloak.  The sort of stuff you see in Harry Potter films has never been made yet.  There have been experiments to test the theory but these experiments have always featured invisibility in some reduced form. So far, cloaki