A quick look at google indicates that invisibility research in the sciences, though multifold I’m sure, is focused on visual negation - Invisibility Cloaks a la Harry Potter. There are many other ways of thinking of this and reasons for this interest.
The notion of stealth has applications across the defence sector to be sure. But so too does it apply to aspects of power (government/economy), camouflage, microscopy and many other areas of science.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, however, suggests that science rarely sees the real world, instead opting for a vision of the world constructed through models of knowing - as do we all in every aspect of our lives - but forgets that what we see is transformed by these models and it is from these models that we extract knowledge, not from the real thing.
Invisibility, as a state and process, offers us an opportunity to consider the intersection of power, affect, seeing and hearing in the construction of these models.
