too late....

Hmm...actually the speed of light has been known to be variable since the late 1800's. Every time you look throught water or any kind of refractive matter you're seeing distortion because light is being slowed down. It was theorized and later confirmed in the 1800's that the speed of light is dependant upon its medium. The commonly quoted speed of 186,000 miles per second is the speed of light in *vacuum*. In air or water or glass it is measurably slower (about 1/3 slower). In a Bose-Einstein condensate (I think this is what you're mistakenly referring to), it is almost a standstill (38 mph).

Regarding invisibility, there was a very good article in a recent Scientific American about how active camouflage can work. In a nutshell, the most primitive way to achieve a level of invisibility is a responsive display surface and camera mounted on opposite sides of a fairly regular solid. This seems closest to what ruthenium is described as. The problems are: 1. humans are *not* fairly regular solids. *at all*. 2. you can only camouflage yourself from one point of view at a time. 3. If this is built into clothing, how do you take wrinkles and creases into consideration? Clothes are constantly changing position relative to the wearer.

A more advanced system would use billions of microscopic fish-eye lenses connected to equally small projectors to display the corrected image. This makes the active camouflage effective against more than one viewer at a time. A *much* more advanced system, not mentioned in the article, could consist of molecular nanotech-based lasers, each smaller than a skin cell, covering the surface of a user. Such an array of lasers could realtime-holograph a corrected image, painting the picture of the scenery opposite that laser wavefront by wavefront, a few photons at a time. This systems has the added bonus that you *don't even cast a shadow*.

Regardless of the active camouflage scheme, there are a couple of big problems they all have in common. The brightness of a midday sun is incredibly intense. To mimick this luminousity, an active camo display would have to dissipate huge quantities of energy. Consider the difference between an electric arc lamp and the sun. Clearly the camouflage would have to burn even hotter than the arc lamp to generate sufficient luminousity. You're also going to run into computational problems, again you're dissipating too much energy. The end result is a cloak that is nearly transparent in the visible spectrum but is incredibly bright to IR imagers. Very advanced molecular nanotechnology may lessen these problems considerably. However, thermodynamics states that active camo will always be dissipating more energy than the background in one wavelength or another. No matter how advanced your tech is, the only fix to this problem is temporary at best: a big 'ol heatsink to store the energy for later dissipation.

Actually, that would be a halfway between a trode-rig and a datajack, more or less. Kevin Warwick has the 'real stuff' and has done all kinds of stuff with it (basically, his implant is something of a combination datajack/vcr/simlink - all on the experimental level, of course)

I could've sworn it was 32.7 miles per hour, but I'm not a physicist, so hey.

I didn't mean 'impossible' to science - there's always someone who thinks it's probably possible, eventually. I meant by conventional wisdom and the science that the average citizen believes in.