Is Invisibility Possible? | James May's Q&A (Ep 1) | Head Squeeze
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.พ. 2025
- James May answers the question as to whether or not invisibility is possible. James draws upon quite a few interesting theories during this discussion.
Outtakes from this video: • Is Invisibility Possib...
James May's Q&A:
With his own unique spin, James May asks and answers the oddball questions that we've all wondered about from 'What exactly is one second?' to 'Is invisibility possible?'
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excellent sound design on the animations. very fitting and subtle effects
2.36 he should've mentioned the top gear episode of hammond driving that invisible car to celebrate 50 years of Bond.
the Belgium sense of humour XD lmao im dead
hes english
***** If you're referring to James may then yes i know he's english. he co-hosted top gear with jeremy clarkson and richard hammond
top gear went to shit imm ediately after they left.
grand tour where it at now.
Looking forwards to the nxt season :)
Mr.EDM LOL
James May rocks at explaining things!
Being visible to others has many benifits. Imagine you are invisible. Others have no way to avoid you. Think of all the times others make room for. People make better doors than windows.
Don't expect to see invisibility any time soon, or ever, as if it's invisible, you won't see it...
+DevilboyScooby Yes, that's the joke.
I like how this channel explains stuff and stays on topic unlike some other channels
That man has glorious hair
Maybe in THAT light lol..
I can make myself invisible, but it only works if nobody is looking :-)
You must be a weeping angel then LOL
A TV showing the camera angle of something behind it, eh?
Sounds like that top gear episode when Hammond went around in a ford van covered in TVs and cameras
I love that light refraction animation for some reason
3:20 I SEE WHAT YA DID THERE!!!!!
I see what you did there
Mohammed Jawid i see what you did there
i understood what you did there, haha i beat you.
I can listen to James may talk all day
we need more of these, please!
The Belgian sense of humor is in a lot of ways similar to the British sense of humor which is why I, being a Belgian, find it funny if you guys mock Belgium or the Belgian people/culture =P Having said that: thank you James May for making science so damn interessting! That's something that no teacher of mine could ever accomplish =D
Hans R. Shush
British sense of humour is different to the Belgium sense of humor as it has an extra U in it LOL
I glad I gave you a chance. Great video!!!
We might not SEE it anytime soon, BUT IT MIGHT BE THERE!
and the belgian sense of humor, you just made my day mr.may :p
I saw quite a cool trick. Some bloke set up a projector and put some random background image on it. He then made a suit (looked more like a rain coat) that was made of projector screen material. As he moved around in front of it the illusion of invisibility was surprisingly effective. Wasn't perfect but still pretty good.
On please.
His humors so transparent.
Even as a small kid I thought the invisible man story was crap. Not only will you not see invisibilty, but if you are invisible you won't be able to see. If your eyes have a refractive index of zero you will only have a general sense of light and dark. :-)
sure, i knew that when i was 2, like, duh?!
Stefan Lightle by 8 surely?
so then we make everything but your eyes invisible, and you're a floating pair of eyeballs. thats a really good point though, your eyes rely on being able to focus the incoming light by bending it, therefore if your eyes let all light pass through them then bam, no more sight.
I always thought nano technology would be the answer. an array of cameras the same size as the little bits of crystal on and LCD panel for example. now if we used something similar to oled technology with the flexible screens and make a material with an equal and even distribution of these tiny cameras and tiny light emitting units then perhaps a screen could be made thats capable of simultaneously displaying an image and recording it.
Make this material into a body suit
then you just have to program some kind of onboard system that lines up the feed from the cameras to the corresponding point on the screen on the opposite part of your body. and find a way to power it.
the R & D required for such a project would be staggering i imagine. developing a system that controlled the display perfectly so it adjusted the picture to make it appear as though you were looking at an empty space and not the wall behind someone being displayed on their body would take quite a long time.
***** True, typo, well spotted. I shall not correct it now you have commented. :-)
WOT?
Yes, invisibility does literally mean something that cannot be seen, and if you get too technical you can say that something behind you is invisible to you. But usually we use invisible for things that cannot be seen by direct observation. The proper word for something behind you is 'hidden'.
Also dark matter is not a hypothesis... if you don't take it into account galaxies should be flying apart, which is not what happens when we look up.
I love James May
I subscribed for James May.
Already exists, footage on here somewhere of a US soldier getting into a tank. The footage is slowed down, heat signature etc and is quite something. Bear in mind folks, if the government has not yet declared such things...how can James? Still, like the Q&A :)
"...invisibility is technically possible..but don't expect to see it any time soon." Haha, nice play on the words at the end.
i didn't know you thought we belgian people don't have humour; quite at the contrary we like to make jokes and stuff (une fois). Maybe not everyone laugh, tough.
Good channel, good video, thanks ! :)
Saw You on V sauce, Love all Your Shows.
0ne of the funniest episodes ,congrats !
3:20 "but don't expect to see it any time soon." Isn't that exactly what we want?
"But don't expect to see it any time soon"......... good one.
"Make something disappear by moving it into the past a bit" - So, essentially, be invisible *there* by simply being *not there yet* but *here* instead. Got it.
What he said, to be "invisible" in broad daylight speaking wise, light has to completely pass through you, its importend to note, PASS TROUGH and not "ignore" you. They are completely diffrent meanings.
The things exsisting today aren't "invisibility" suits, it's tehnical term is "cloak(ing)" suits, example from a distance you could be very hard to spot, but if one would pay extreme attention, the one would ask him/herself are they seeing something or is thier mind playing tricks on them.
Also, as old as the game Crysis is and as very long ago it has been when I played the original game, you were not *invisible* you were *cloaked* The voice literally said *cloak engaged*
Now, Im not a nazi or a picky pecker when it comes to things, however please, do take this as a lesson to learn to respect on the things you say, so you don't embarrass yourself infront of others.
+Semtexxify "Pass TROUGH". Fail, piggie.
Captain Slow, You are so much fun on TopGear.
This man is a god
here's still hoping I can one day get a hold of a Stealth Camouflage system, straight out of Metal Gear Solid
Or Predator. 😉
That camera thing is exactly what Hammond did in the James Bond Special on Top Gear.
Yes, it is possible. It happened to me once. It's also happened to others. Former talk host Art Bell did an entire show on it and opened phone lines for people to tell their stories. It was one call after another of people telling their stories. It can happen, but how it happens I haven't a clue.
I'm surprised there was no mention of the blindness that might theoretically occur from invisibility.
If all the light is bending around you, then your eyes would theoretically be unable to 'absorb' some of the light waves, leading to blindness.
So while no one would be able to see YOU while you're invisible, you wouldn't be able to see much either.
The air is actually clear, but the reason why it's blue to us is the light bouncing of the particles in the air. I'll explain further; The light spectrum ( The rainbow. ) has many all the colours that can be seen from the naked eye. Red is the longest and blue being the shortest, every colour in the air gets bounced by the particles but blue the most because of it being the least strong, the shortest. This makes the sky blue to the eye anyway. Also 'air' is a word for the gases surrounding us.
The Belgian sense of humor is only invisible in the figurative sense.
Sincerely,
a Belgian.
Only one. Stop being illogical and facetious. It is unproductive.
I guess he just didn’t want to hit on the German sense of humor again! So take the neighbor with the same flag colors....!
Invisibility is possible, but don't expect to see it anytime soon. James, the Pun Master.
2:35 Like what Richard Hammond did on his 'invisible car' in that one Top Gear episode.
"Invisibility IS technically possible, but don't expect to see it anytime soon.." I see what you did there!
I am very much in touch with my own beliefs, thoughts etc and i am more than independent on my views. However, i look at all evidence on a subject and make my own conclusions on any given subject. Especially in the past year or so i have found myself compelled to educating myself on subjects such as conspiracy's and a bit further from what we are told is normal. i don't expect people to take one word for anything, i ask those in doubt of anything to look at both sides of everything in life :)
the best part of these videos is the end when the muzak is playing and james is begging for subscriptions.
This joke has probably been said already but thats a funny looking Tom Scott xD nice red shirt!
We really got a good sense of humor!
Mirrors don't refract light, they reflect it. A blanked covered in thousands of tiny mirrors would basically be like a sheet of shiny aluminium foil, you'd see yourself (or a deformed version of yourself) reflected back when you looked at it.
Using optic fibre you could theoretically carry light around an object, but the effect would only work from a specific angle, and would cause some loss of brightness, so it would be pretty easy to spot.
Air is the name given to the atmosphere used in breathing and photosynthesis. Dry air contains roughly (by volume) 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.039% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases.
From Wikipedia
Good for you!
Excellent!!!
Thank You⚪
absolutely, with the tinkerbell superman supernet
the time portal idea might be kinda dangerous though: stand perfectly still, enable it, move back and time, and you will create a paradoxon by telefragging yourself before enabling the portal.
also you would need to somehow know when to reappear, so why not just jump into the future (while still hoping nobody walks where, or rather when, you would end up)
Even if someone were to be invisible, a expected side effect would to be blind to because that's how the eyes work, absorbing light.. To bend light around someone or make them transparent would make them also blind.
James May!!!
loving the background music :) where is it from +britlab?
the thing with the screen infront of you from a camera was richard hammonds idea!
I saw a thing once where someone pointed out that the eyes only work because of reflection off the retina, and if you're invisible, you'd also be blind. Might have been a vsauce vid?
I used to be naturally invisible. Even when I was standing or speaking, nobody noticed me. Then I realised invisibility wasn't really a good thing.
The military uses refraction panels on tanks though... And they are developing a special type of cloth that will interlace light through carbon strands.
press pause 1:37 that teachers head LMAO
When he started talking about H.G. Wells I started thinking about Warehouse 13 so I was REALLY confused for a minute when he said "he." xD
2:33 so thats where Hammond got the idea for that van...
seen that good spot man!
3:18 Nice pun, May xD
Yes, recently there IS a real-life invisibility cloak, developed for military use. It bends the light around the person so it seems like the person is invisible.
O_O! Oh my gosh! I just read that book!
"I give it 15-25 years max. If you're still around remember that I said this" I shall count the hours, Sir
Hahah, very nice vid James
James May must have seen the ad for the 2019 Samsung TVs back in 2013!
Apparently the U.S military is working on a cylinder like object that will bend light around to the other side much like 2:50
So far, it's only been successful in microscopic scale with non-visible light.
Fantastic
i was thinking of having the mirrors face in on itself so it refracts the light back to the eyes, and happening along each and every fiber optic cable, but i see what you mean.
The word "hidden" means something that is concealed (i.e., deliberately placed beyond something else, so that the other item blocks your line of sight to it). If something is behind you there doesn't have to be anything between it and you; you can't see it simply because it's not within your cone of vision, not because there's something blocking the view.
P.S.: "Dark matter is a type of matter hypothesized in astronomy" [...] "theorists still don't know what the correct explanation is" (NASA)
A few months ago this was released by a company called hyper stealth, its call Quantum Stealth, it bends light around the material making the person seem invisible check it out,
search "Quantum stealth"
Didn't expect that name to find here!
And I meant James May from this video!
That would be so cool
That was very good, I hope to be invisible some day. But I dont think james will ever be invisible with thoose shirts.I love tour shirts though.
What is it about bones that really enables us to see them clearly through x-rays? I've always wondered what sort of molecules in our bones absorb the rays so well compared to everything else.
It it exists, it can be detected. Until then, it's just an hypothesis, a practical tool for some calculations (kind of like the square root of -1). If dark matter wasn't supposed to be detectable, there wouldn't be so many ongoing experiments to try to detect it.
Based on the way our eyes work if you were invisible you would also be blind
Surely the law of thermodynamics means that if you were invisible in all wavelengths of light then you would slowly freeze to death as you would lose heat as black body radiation (which could be detected of course but assume that it is isn't for now) but never absorb any?
Firstly- 1:27 How much did I understand correctly?
"The human body *will* actually allow us certain amount of light through - which is why it's amusing to put a powerful torch next to your cheek, and illuminate your mouth in a scary way."
Secondly- why did they draw the professor's head to look like a doughnut? I find it rather amusing with the scream.
And lastly, I think Jeremy would actually plan to try invisibility to childishly troll James. Get the picture?
"CLARKSON - you insufferable oaf!!!"
- a foreigner
Lol, nice usage of Manneken Pis.
how much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck would chuck norris. awesome accent at the end!
what about a subtle mix of both optic fiber and mirror? the mirror would be semi-transparent, letting the light gain where the optic fiber lost it?
Transporting something away doesn't make it invisible... It makes it visible somewhere else
I would not have said it better!
how do birds deal with the refraction in water when they are looking for fishes?
Could you please answer this question?
Invisible literally means "cannot be seen". If it's behind you and you don't have a mirror, it's invisible (to you). Otherwise there's no such thing as invisibility, because everything that exists "can be detected" in some way.
then you are seeing the contrast, not the thing itself
its a shame that james may no longer does these videos but i guess hes off doing better things.
There are many things in the atmosphere, but basically it is made up of two different elements which are gases. Measured by volume (not weight) completely dry AIR contains approximately 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen with about 1% of everything else.
How can a mirror make you gain light? If that worked, we'd be using mirrors instead of lightbulbs and saving a lot on electricity bills. ;-)
If you want to keep the original brightness, you need a powered light source (ex., LED screens on one side, and a camera on the other). People have already built this, but, again, it only works from a very specific angle (and, even from that angle, doesn't work against radar, heat vision, etc.).
Interesting
Actually, just recently some lab created a fabric that bends light around it, making it seem invisible.
I think we're fairly close to invisibility cloaks.
or maybe...they already made someone invisible but just can't find him