X-Message-Number: 1093
Date: Mon, 3 Aug 92 09:19:38 EDT
From:  (Perry E. Metzger)
Subject: CRYONICS: Re: Possible thawing process [Lofstrum]

From:  (Keith Lofstrom)

>Regards temperature:
>Do I pull rank here?  Well, I'm a microcircuit designer, who studied
>superconductivity in school.  While it's true that the structures I work
>with are hundreds of nanometers in size, I have had a chance to work with
>these large structures for a while.  I am working in an area in the
>transition region between bulk handling and individual handling of
>electrons ( the charge that makes it from a dynamic RAM cell to the
>sense amp can be measured in the thousands of electrons).  Thermal
>problems - where the electrons jiggle from where you want them to
>where you don't - is a hell of a problem.

No, you don't get to pull rank. We aren't building nanoelectronics. We
are repairing cells. There is a giant difference. Drexler et al have
pretty much shown that thermal jiggling on the atomic scale (not the
electron scale) isn't an issue.

>The biggest problem with nanotechnology is observation.  Bucko, when a
>wavelength of light is 1000 times the size of what you are looking at, AND
>there is enough energy in that light quanta to tear a hole in what you are
>looking at, you use something else to do the looking.  And believe me, you've
>GOT to look (I'll eat my words if you can find a machinist that will work
>in the dark, with no sound, and no sense of touch) because you don't know
>what you are going to find.

Sorry. Your cells work fine operating by touch. 

>I bet a cookie that the processes to look at
>things will be "acoustic", that is, you yank on something and see how it
>moves in response, then infer the structure.

Your cells operate just fine without having to do such things.

>If it is moving thermally,
>it will mask out the tiny echos you are looking for.

Your cells operate just fine without having to do such things. This is
rapidly becoming tedious. Why don't you just read EoC and be done with
the topic?

>Solids? Glass?  You are going to be working in vacuum, in tunnels you have
>constructed through the frozen cells.  There won't be any liquid water around,
>so wet chemistry is not going to happen.  I am assuming you are doing 
>machine work at this scale, not bulk chemistry.  Pick up a radical from the
>toolbox, and bond it into place.  Who needs viscosity, or Brownian
>motion?

No one does. However, what does any of this have to do with the claim,
still totally unsubstantiated, that we would need to be anywhere near
to liquid helium temperatures to get interesting work done?

>You want things to move when you want, and stay put when you don't.   
>Macroscopic heating and cooling stresses are absurdly simple to take care
>of - you just put the right things in the right places at the small scale,
>and you don't have any macroscopic stresses.

You might as well present evidence on why my cells can't work given
that they are operating at room temperature. As I've said, the thermal
motion compared to the other things you are worrying about appears
insignificant on the atomic and molecular scale at LN2 temperatures.
Why should we believe your claim that we have to go colder in the
absense of any evidence at all?

Perry

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