Okay, the war over “invisibility cloaks” has officially begun. A team of Chinese scientists have just announced that they’ve figured out how to defeat invisibility technology — and render “invisible” objects visible.

You may remember the famous experiment in 2006 in which Duke University scientists created an “invisibility cloak” — a wave-morphing shield that allowed them to render an object mostly invisible to microwave beams. (Check out a video of their original demonstration here; it’s pretty cool.) This generated endless news stories that breathlessly invoked Harry Potter; more hilariously yet, it set off a mini-boom in researchers frantically working on their own invisibility cloaks.

Now the counterattack has begun! Next week, a team of Chinese researchers will publish a paper called “The Anti-Cloak” in the journal Optics Express (PDF copy here). In essence, they did some calculations and figured out that if you coated an object with the right anisotrophic materials — stuff that reflects light in different ways depending on the direction the light comes at it, kind of like velvet — then the invisibility cloak wouldn’t work. (To be precise, you’d need “anisotropic negative refractive index material that is impedance matched to the positive refractive index of the invisibility cloak.”) Presto: The invisible becomes visible!

As they put it in their press release:

While an invisibility cloak would bend light around an object, any region that came into contact with the anti-cloak would guide some light back so that it became visible. This would allow an invisible observer to see the outside by pressing a layer of anti-cloak material in contact with an invisibility cloak.

I have to say, I laughed out loud with delight when I heard about this paper. This is the sort of perfectly demented, cackling scientific duel you normally only encounter in golden-age comic books. Freeze ray vs. anti-freeze ray! Antigravity vs. supergravity! At this rate we’ll wake up to find CNN footage of rival teams of scientists in 80-storey-tall mechas, duking it out with tachyon-particle cannons over the desolate ruins of Tokyo, and arguing about who’s got more citations.