Kember.net

Invisible and blind

Posted 18 January 2006, 16:02. (Filed under: Common-sense by Andrew)

This was a bit of a revelation to me. Clearly a lot of other people had thought of it, but I’d never twigged:

If you’re invisible, you must, by physical necessity, be blind too.

Wikipedia has quite a lot to say on the matter:

According to the laws of physics as presently understood, an invisible person would necessarily be blind, no matter how their invisibility were achieved. In order to see light, it must be absorbed by the retina, but in order for a person to be invisible, the body must not absorb any light. In fact, according to the no cloning theorem of quantum mechanics, they could not even make a copy of the photons so they could see one copy and allow the other copy to pass through or around them.

This appears to be an inevitable drawback which would always offset the advantage of invisibility, even if a practical method of becoming invisible were discovered.

Quite so. In which case, my favourite super-power must revert to ability-to-fly.

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