Blink and you miss it, or maybe you never saw it at all.
Scientists at Cornell University have been playing around with time again, and they've managed to "hide" an event by bending the surrounding speed of light. It's not so much an invisibility cloak as it is a time cloak, something that covers its tracks so the human eye isn't even aware that it has missed anything.
The scientists took the speed of beams of light and sped some up while keeping the others the same. All the beams of light were moving too fast for the human eye to track, of course, so the scientists used machines to do the tracking. But the beams that were moving faster created a gap in space and time. The slower beams would be a bit closer to what our human eyes would be able to process, and the machines tracking the slower beams perceived no difference.
Yet something happened, for 40 picoseconds, at least. (That's trillionths of a second.) Except that nothing happened, depending on which instruments you check.
So what's the big deal? A whole 40 trillionths of a second is anything to sneeze at. (In fact, a sneeze takes a lot longer than that to go through all of its motions.) Well, the scientists say they're aiming to make the time gap bigger, like maybe in the millionths of a second. They'd still need machines to prove that that happened. Come to think of it, they'd need machines to prove that it happened even in "real" time, since our eyes wouldn't pick up the difference anyway.
Read more about it in this week's Nature.
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