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Gravitational cloaking

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Thu, 2011-09-01 13:27

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Gravitational cloaking

A paper showing how to hide objects (or rather, make them look arbitrarily small) by bending spacetime: http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.3793 The cloak is nice since it also makes projectiles and everything else miss. This might be something for aliens with gate-manufacturing abilities, the demands of exotic energy and managing spacetime are about equal.

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Thu, 2011-09-01 16:10

750

Re: Gravitational cloaking

So use this to sneak something close to a station, and then launch a slow, inert object towards the place. Slow in that it do not have the inertia to cause any real damage (and so be ignored by early warning systems). inert in that it shows no real interesting energy readings and so can be written of as just another bit of debris. Only when it comes close enough will it pop open to release the morphs inside that will then go for a infiltration.

Fri, 2011-09-02 20:01

Covariant

Re: Gravitational cloaking

Geh. Tensors are a little bit beyond me, but this may have another interesting effect. Say that there are naturally occurring gravity cloaks like this on the scale where quantum effects come into play. Well, one of the problems with string theory has always been where the extra dimensions are hiding, because they seem to be way too small to be realistic. Would we be able to notice if there were gravity cloak bubbles consistently hiding other dimensions? Gravity being the curvature surface of space-time, I could see it having a "texture" hiding all sorts of stuff. Hmm. Must learn the maths behind the bullshit I'm spouting to see if it makes sense.

Sat, 2011-09-03 11:21

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Gravitational cloaking

Covariant, you are going to like tensors - covariant tensors are a big deal :-) The hidden dimensions "hide" in a different way: they are curled up so that they are too small to detect. Imagine that there was a extra direction you could move in, but that you could only move less than a nanometer into - and that everything already made use of it to keep part of its stuff. Of course, gravtech that allows you to expand these hidden dimensions allow all sorts of dangerous tricks. Not just hiding, but changing the types of elementary particles there are (since their behaviour is partially determined by the shape of these extra dimensions). Oops, for a nanosecond all protons in your enemy became unstable and disintegrated... lucky you equally quickly surrounded yourself with a gravitational cloak so the nuclear fireball missed you.

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Sat, 2011-09-03 14:14

Covariant

Re: Gravitational cloaking

Interesting. That gives me some ideas for how to run ETI tech in a way that is still "hard".