Harry Potter-inspired Invisibility Cloak Can Hide Humans And Satellites

A Harry Potter-inspired invisibility cloak can now make information vanish by creating holes in time. These holes are big enough to hide a human or a satellite orbiting the Earth.

"The once fanciful invisibility cloak has now assumed a prominent place in scientific research," the paper states, written by researchers at Purdue University.

In the journal "Nature," researchers say they can create a way to hide the data between a sender and a receiver to outside observers. The cloak, called the "time cloak," creates these holes in rapid succession, The Huffington Post reports.

In other words, the time cloak bends light to tears holes in time, The Daily Mail explains. The cloak could send secret messages via fiber optic cables.

This discovery could be used to create hyper-secure Internet communications. It can also be used to block communication between criminals or terrorists.

Joseph Lukens, lead author of the research paper, told Nature: "It doesn't just prevent eavesdroppers from reading your data - they wouldn't even know there was any data there to hack."

A more commonplace use of the time cloak will be to avoid data traffic jams at connection points in networks, Lukens added.

According to Martin McCall, a theoretical-optics researcher at Imperial College London who was not involved in the study, the technology is a significant discovery.

It does make it possible to do these things at telecommunication data rates," McCall told LiveScience, The Huffington Post reports. "And as we all know, once the tabletop demonstration has been shown, it's then a matter of technology - the miniaturization, the efficient system engineering - tend to follow."