By Crewman Becky | November 17, 2010 - 10:21 pm

You may remember us reporting on advancements in cloaking technology in earlier articles . It seems that they’ve come up with new applications for this budding tech. A new mathematical theory takes current cloaking technology in several directions at once. One of the new applications can potentially cloak events in both time and space.

In a paper published in the Journal of Optics, McCall said metamaterials made it theoretically possible to manipulate light rays as they enter a material so that some parts speed up and others slow down. This could create "blind spots" in time, masking an event. While the accelerated light arrives at a space before an event has happened, the rest of the light doesn't reach it until after the event.

Another use of this theory can even help lead to our positronic friend Data.

McCall said the theory could have practical implications in the future for quantum computing by opening up new possibilities for signal processing."If you have two channels that are carrying information, one of which has a continuous stream of bits on it, our technique can interrupt that stream and then process the other channel as a priority. So it can act as an 'interrupt without interrupt.' The original channels can then be seamed back together as if they'd never been interrupted."

Personal communicators, automatic doors, cloaks & holodecks…now if they could just get on the replicator technology we’d be set for Thanksgiving dinner.

Read the full article here