People have been intrigued with the concept of invisibility since the Star Trek cloaking device could hide entire spaceships, since Harry Potter was stalking around Hogwarts in an invisibility cloak, and since that time I told a lame joke in front of my boss. (Why did the whale feel lonely while sitting alone during lunch? Because he felt whale-ianated. Now you have to feel the burden of the embarrassment, too.)

Well, scientists have also been looking into this phenomenon. In 2006, physicists at Duke University successfully tested the first “invisibility” cloak that bends microwaves from the background around an object and restores them on the other side. Imagine an elephant standing in a moving stream of water: the water upstream bends around the loveable creature but then reunites as one streamline, so if you were standing further downstream watching the water, you wouldn’t even know there was an elephant there. Talk about a way to hide the elephant in the room. Badum-tsh. 

Back to the science. This wave-bending was a huge breakthrough because if we could discover how to bend visible-light waves (which are also electromagnetic waves but have slightly higher frequencies) instead of microwaves, then we could fabricate materials to make objects disappear in front of our eyes.

In 2015, Xiang Zhang and his team at UC Berkeley created a special metamaterial (a synthetic material with properties not observed in natural materials) to help the invisibility quest along. The metamaterial is a film decorated with itsy-bitsy gold nano-antennas; these gold bricks are more than 3,000 times smaller than the width of a piece of hair, and yes, “itsy-bitsy” is a scientific term. When they wrapped an object in the film and shined a light on it, it scattered the light, making it look like they were just shining a light on a mirror.