For as long as human beings have been writing about fantasy, myth, and science fiction, the dream of invisibility has always been a top priority. There would be so much you could do or accomplish, under a stealthy guise, if only you didn’t have to worry about being seen. While Star Trek brought the idea of a cloaking device into the popular consciousness, and Harry Potter brought with it the widespread idea of an actual invisibility cloak, there haven’t been many useful applications of invisibility-based technology on a large scale. In fact, the closest we’ve come to achieving actual invisibility has been through the development of stealth technology, which only bestows a rudimentary invisibility at far longer wavelengths than human eyes can perceive by making the your target effectively smaller than the device itself.

The invisibility to radar, which is microwave-to-radio wavelength electromagnetic radiation, might have been the first step, but recent developments in metamaterials have extended this even…