What Not to Do If You Turn Invisible. Ross Welford

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      Two hours later, and I’m still invisible.

      I have had a long, hot shower, wondering if perhaps the invisibility could be washed off – you know, like a coating or something? I scrubbed and scrubbed to the point that I was quite sore, but still the soap lathered up on what looked like nothing, and when I rinsed off there was still nothing, only wet footprints on the bathroom floor.

      Since then, I have been wandering around the house, wondering what to do, how to deal with this, and I’m not making any progress.

      The crying has stopped. That’s not going to get me anywhere, and besides I’m tired of it. I don’t mind admitting, though, that I am completely, utterly, one hundred per cent

      TERRIFIED.

      Terrified squared. Cubed.

      Roughly every five minutes I get up and check in the mirror.

      And then I go back to my laptop and search the internet again for topics including the words ‘invisible’ or ‘invisibility’.

      Most of the things that I try to read are fantastically complicated, involving mathematics and physics and chemistry and biology that are way beyond what we do at school. All the same, it seems that people have been trying to achieve what has happened to me for decades.

      On YouTube there’s a clip of James Bond with an invisible car.

      ‘Adapted camouflage, 007,’ says Q, walking round Bond’s Aston Martin. ‘Tiny cameras on all sides project the image they see onto a light-emitting polymer skin on the opposite side. To the casual eye, it’s as good as invisible.’

      Then he presses a button and the car becomes invisible.

      You know what? Up to right now, I would have said that that was just silly. The clip itself was in an internet list called Top Ten Bond Baloney.

      But now?

      Now I’m not so sure.

      If it can happen to me, why not a car?

      What I have managed to work out is that there are two ways that something could be invisible.

      Are you ready for this?

      I’ll keep it simple.

      First you have to understand how we see stuff. Things are visible because light rays bounce off them and go into our eyes. So if there’s a tree in front of you, the light hits the tree and is reflected onto the back of your eye, and after some nearly instant clever stuff in your brain, you see a tree.

      So the first way to make something invisible is to cover it with a ‘cloaking device’. This makes the light bend round the tree and keep on going, like sticking your finger in a stream of water from a tap: the water bends round your finger, and carries on below as a single stream.

      Lots of scientists say they are very close indeed to developing cloaking devices, especially for military purposes. I suppose they mean making invisible tanks, or ships or planes or even soldiers, which would be pretty cool, actually.

      Are you still with me?

      OK, the second way is to make the light pass straight through the object. This is how glass works and if you’ve ever walked into a glass door like I did once at the Metrocentre, you’ll know how effective it is.

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