Not all monsters can be explained. In horror movies especially, it's often better to keep them partially obscured, or, in the case of The Invisible Man, encased in a technologically advanced suit that renders the wearer completely unseeable. But while the movie wisely avoids getting too bogged down in technical explanations, Adrian Griffin's (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) Invisible Man invisibility suit has substantial real-world precedent.
Described as an "optics groundbreaker," Griffin is a controlling, sociopathic tech luminary, who uses his invisibility suit to torment Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss), the woman who refused to submit to his totalitarian nature. But she has a big problem: nobody but she believes that Adrian has figured out a way to be invisible.
It seems they haven't been paying attention to the research of physicist David R. Smith, professor of electrical and computing engineering at Duke University, who, alongside R.A. Shelby and S. Schultz, made the first experimental proof of a material with a negative index of refraction, opening the door to new "metamaterials" capable of creating what they described as "nonintuitive optics." It's an approach that may one day make invisibility possible.
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