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my brother and I are working on a story in which a being's atoms vibrate back and forth so rapidly that it appears invisible, like a plucked guitar string or a plane's propellor. Is that theoretically possible?

Thanks for any help!

Lukas Wright
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I guess in principle you could reduce a "being's" visibility by vibrating it fast enough to confuse the eye. Some problems with this:

-You'd have to vibrate the whole object coherently, not the "atoms" individually. Basically you're just shaking the person really hard. Which would probably kill them.

-The necessary vibration rate is in the sonic range. So it would be very noisy.

-Even to the human eye, the object wouldn't be completely invisible, just blurred (same goes for a propeller).

-The reduction in visibility is because the human eye samples information at a finite rate. Video cameras, etc, wouldn't necessarily have this problem.

AGML
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