Pentagon-backed ‘time cloak’ stops the clock
Ummm…
Short form seems to be that scientists at Cornell U hid an event that lasted 40 picoseconds. This was done by splitting a beam of light within a fiber optic cable… speeding part of the light up, slowing part of it down, and creating a “time lens” in between where an event was hidden.
Umm.
An obvious problem with scaling this up to a “real world” scale is the whole “speed up light” thing. It can be done in fiber optics, because the speed of light through the dense glass can be really slow compared to the speed of light in a vacuum, thus giving a lot of room for growth. But the speed of light in *air* is pretty much the speed of light in vacuum, at least as far as Everyday Stuff is concerned.
On the other hand, the article points out that the process could be used to make data transfer in a fiber optic cable invisible. This would be data that could not only not be decrypted, it would be data that a potential hacker or eavesdropper simply doesn’t know is there.
Three guesses who funded this. Hint: it rhymes with “DARPA.”