What would you do if you were invisible? Hopefully not torment your ex.
That is the situation facing Cecilia Kass (played by Elisabeth Moss) in a reimagining of the H. G. Wells novel The Invisible Man.
The film begins with Cecilia escaping an abusive relationship with a rich and controlling scientist. Soon after, Cecilia鈥檚 ex kills himself and she is set to inherit a large part of his wealth.
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But there is a twist. She is able to keep the money only for as long as she remains sane and keeps out of the hands of the law.
Of course, the abusive ex isn鈥檛 dead, he has made himself invisible and uses his newfound undetectability to abuse Cecilia further, tormenting her in increasingly terrible ways. The film is haunting at times and dotted with jump scares loud enough to make your heart pop. Moss plays the role impeccably, utilising the expressions of angst she honed in The Handmaid鈥檚 Tale as life becomes more and more desperate when people refuse to believe her.
Beyond the title and the plot involving a man who is invisible, the film bears little resemblance to the 1897 classic novel. And more than 100 years later, turning a human invisible is still impossible.
There is a fundamental physical limit related to invisibility that we can鈥檛 break, says Andrea Al霉 at City University of New York. He and his colleagues found that there is a trade-off between how invisible a cloaking material can make an object and the size of the object it can cover.
Unfortunately, the upper limit for the size of something that can be made invisible is much smaller than a human. Al霉 says he and his team recently managed to make the tip of a scientific instrument completely invisible, but anything larger than around 500 nanometres 鈥� around a hundredth of the width of a human hair 鈥� comes up against the limit.
Cloaking materials work by bending light around an object so that it appears 鈥渋nvisible鈥�. One of the starting assumptions of the physical limit is that the material doesn鈥檛 give light with which it comes into contact a boost of energy, which a battery-powered cloak could do.
Relaxing this assumption, Al霉 and his team surpassed the 500-nanometre limit, but only by a bit. Al霉 believes that it may be possible to beat the upper bound by an order of magnitude, but that it will never be possible to make something human-sized completely invisible.
However, if it鈥檚 not true invisibility you are after, there are visual tricks you can use instead. Stage magicians, for example, can use a series of well-placed mirrors to make someone seem to disappear from certain angles.
The invisible man in the film supposedly uses a suit filled with tiny cameras to become invisible. Though a set-up like this may be able to give an impression of invisibility from certain angles, it wouldn鈥檛 be good enough to sneak about as the plot demands.
The Invisible Man is on general release from 28 February
