X-Message-Number: 1472
Date: 20 Dec 92 04:22:45 EST
From: Andrew Davidson <>
Subject: CRYONET maser refrigeration

The recent posts on Cryonet have not made very good reading.  Only the more
technical posts have been of value, I feel.  In a lighter vein, here is an
extract from "The Inventions of Daedalus" by Dr David Jones (ISBN
0-7167-1412-4 AACR2) which I reread yesterday and highly recommend.

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YOUR TINY MIND IS FROZEN

Various optimistic souls nowdays are getting themselves frozen down in
liquid nitrogen, in the hope of being revived in better days to come.
Daedaus is sorry to point out that, at the moment, this cannot possibly
work, because rapid and uniform freezing and rewarming are required.  Now
while it is possible to warm up a body quickly and uniformly by either
dielectric or microwave heating (which penetrate evenly), current 'cold
bath' cooling methods remove heat only through the skin.  The frozen zone
moving slowly inwards must create the same type of havoc as trying to stop a
complex and interlinked machine a piece at a time.  What is needed is some
inverse process persuading the body to give up its heat as microwaves.
Daedalus now points out that this is the essential of maser action, and
proposes to achieve it via that well-known chemical tool, proton magnetic
resonance (p.m.r.).  Protons (hydrogen nuclei - the commonest nuclei in the
body) tend to align themselves with an applied magnetic field.  The
alternative alignment against the field requires higher energy: in fact for
strong enough fields the energy-difference between these two states
corresponds to that of microwave radiation.  Now, says Daedalus, suppose the
field is suddenly reversed.  All of a sudden, the protons will find
themselves aligned against the field.  The tiniest microwave stimulation
will then trigger their descent to the stable alignment, with accompanying
maser-emission of microwaves.  By spin-lattice relaxation, the energy thus
lost will be subtracted from the heat of the sample; and the process can
then be repeated.

Daedalus has not yet called for volunteers for combined maser, refrigerator,
and radar-emission duties.  Instead his pilot studies use earthworms (just
the right size anowave heating.  They should complete the
interrupted time-lapse and then obediently get knotted.

(New Scientist, 14 November 1968)

Progress has been maintained on the cold front initiated last week in
DREADCO's laboratories.  Daedalus's magnetic maser for instant
people-freezing recalled those enigmatic quick-frozen mammoths of Siberia,
some of which still have half-chewed grenery in their mouths.  Daedalus sees
this as a natural instance of his rapid-freezing mechanism, presumably
occuring as a result of one of the reversals that the earth's magnetic field
made during the Ice Ages, coupled with solar microwave irradiation via the
disurbed ionosphere.  Daedalus reckons that such rapidly frozen creatures
must still be in suspended animation, and is now negotiating to send a party
to Siberia with powerful microwave-heating gear to pulse them rapidly back
to life.  What a challenge to biology and animal psychology such a
prehistoric animal would be, with its full set of stone-age reflexes!  But
it may not be so simple.  Information can be stored in the brain in solid
material form: `hardware' like interconnections between cells, chemical
substances representing specific memories, etc.  But it can also be stored
as `software': recirculating groups of nerve-impulses, electric charge
patterns, and so on.  The brain's hardware should survive freezing intact.

But its software will almost certainly all brtbeat and so on must be hardware in
any
animal; but refelx and memory may not be.  If they ARE hardware, the
resuscitated mammoth will recognize the party as dangerous humanity, an
attack it in a rage.  But if they are software the mammoth will recall
nothing of its previous life.  With the total naivety of the new-born it
will then identify itself with the surrounding creatures and accept itself as
human.  Thus the experiment has powerful implications for people-freezing.
Daedalus suspects that the versatile human brain is nearly all software, so
the eventual defreezee will not recall why he opted out in the first place.
Perhaps the maser-fridge has most potentiality as a latter-day equivalent of
the Foreign Legion, for those who wish to forget.

(New Scientist, 21 November 1968)

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Is there anything to these ideas?

Andrew Davidson

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