In Harry Potter, the term they use to describe the force that allows them to do so many amazing things and that powers their devices is referred to as magic. But what exactly is magic? Is it a mystical force? Or is it something so technologically advanced that we cannot hope to comprehend it at our current level of understanding? If some of today’s technology was sent back into the past a couple hundred years ago or maybe even less than a hundred years ago, then it might have very well been called “magic”. Now, some of the “magic” in Harry Potter is being made possible using today’s technology. Harry’s invisibility cloak, for example, has a real world counterpart.
Although the real world device, developed by scientists at University of Tokyo, has many limitations, it can fool people into believing that the user is truly invisible, which is only really what it needs to do, but only under certain circumstances. In addition, the magical teleportation systems know as apparition and the floo system may not be so magical after all. In the past 16 years, ever since researchers at IBM confirmed that teleportation was theoretically possible, scientists have been working on making it something practical. In 1998, scientist first teleported a photon and in 2006, scientists had already teleported a cloud of atoms through a laser beam. Teleportation will require extensive use of nanotechnology to be able to manipulate objects on the atomic scale. Although teleporting something the size and complexity of a human, or even a cell, will take many 
years to realize, I’m sure that human ingenuity will one day prevail.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKPVQal851U
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5174735/
http://science.howstuffworks.com/teleportation1.htm
http://science.howstuffworks.com/invisibility-cloak.htm
http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportation/
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