Does a career in teleportation or time travel beckon?

The slightly unusual research has been undertaken by the Big Bang Fair, the annual STEM education and careers event.

The research involved a panel of top UK scientists as well as a group of 11 to 16-year-olds. Both groups were asked the same questions about when four futuristic technologies, based on popular science fiction, would become a reality.

The students predicted that invisibility will not be around until 2071, while the scientific experts believed that devices could be created by 2030. Chris Phillips, professor of experimental solid state physics at Imperial College London, said: “One way to create an ‘invisibility cloak’ is to use adaptive camouflage, which involves taking a film of the background of an object or person and projecting it onto the front to give the illusion of vanishing. We’re actually not that far away from this becoming a reality.”