Patrick Elliott <kag### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Not really. You are not trying to cloak the stuff that isn't there, just 
> the stuff that is, which includes light, EM, and possibly your own 
> signals. Interestingly, one of the recent Star Wars books did it right, 
> in that cloaks, as we can do them, don't just leave the thing inside 
> invisible, they render everything inside unable to see out, so there was 
> a whole fleet, sitting and waiting, for a scout to finally slip in at 
> their coordinates and say, "Ok, time to move", in the mean time, they 
> all sat in the, literal, complete dark, looking at a black wall, with no 
> idea what was going on outside.

That reminds me of the fridge logic about the Invisible Man story (and all
of its incarnations, such as the movie Hollow Man).

How is the invisible man able to see anything?

We see because our eyes focus light onto our retinas. Now, the invisible
man's eyes neither focus light, nor do their retinas catch any of it. The
light just goes through without modification.

Even if the retinas did catch light (which they don't because they would
by definition become visible if they did), it would still not help him see
anything because his eyes are not focusing the light properly (if they did,
they would also become visible as a distortion, like floating lenses; no
matter how transparent the lenses are, you can still see them due to how
they distort the background.)

Even if invisibility of a human were physically possible, it would make the
person completely blind.

(The only pseudoplausible way out of this conundrum is if the invisibility
were only on the visible light spectrum, but his eyes could still catch eg.
infrared ok. However, that would require a physical modification of the
retinas to be able to see infrared light, which would be a problem all in
itself. Also, I think it would probably also break some law of physics if
his body were to let visible light through unhindered but react to infrared
light normally. This is probably something physically impossible.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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