I'm here at TED2013 in Long Beach, jacked up on amazing coffee and mind-blowing ideas from today's 4-minute TED fellow talks (the longer 18-minute talks start tomorrow).
I was only part-way through the first day when I had to take a moment to track down Baile Zhang, an assistant professor of physics at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, who had demonstrated his "invisibility cloak." Now I'll admit, when I first heard of Zhang's invention, I pictured - against common sense - an invisibility cloak similar to the one Professor Dumbledore gave to Harry Potter. So I was a little surprised when the cloak looked more like a tiny clear plastic box just a few inches high, reminding me of a magic trick prop my 9-year-old daughter might have. Nevertheless, the cloak's ability to conceal an object so that both the cloak and the object become invisible was astonishing. Zhang placed the cloak over a bright pink Post-it note and voila! Nothing! The pink paper disappeared. And the cloak itself wasn't really visible in the first place.
Very cool. To read more and view the vieo, click here.