X-Message-Number: 3596
Date: 04 Jan 95 23:27:15 EST
From: "Steven B. Harris" <>
Subject: SCI.CRYONICS Flash Cooling

Thomas Donaldson says:

   >>As for the Peltier effect, we might step back a bit from
what Coetzee is  saying ask the question he is trying to answer:
is there a fast way to cool  someone down? Here is a SPECULATION:
let's suppose we could find some nano- device which would
convert, alone or with other devices of its kind,  the heat in a
patient's body into (say) x-rays (which will pass through  
the body and dissipate that heat elsewhere). Heat goes with
infrared, ie. low frequency light waves. To detect that heat the
nanodevices would (I think) need to have a lower temperature than
the body they are attempting to cool. And for those who worry
about spectral lengths, I did point out that more than 
one such device may be involved. <<

     As I'm sure Brian will point out, with X-rays the problem
here is inefficiencies made necessary by the 2nd law of 
thermodynamics.  If you convert heat (low temp energy) to X-rays
(very high temp energy), you are effectively pumping heat up a
temp gradient with a heat pump.   This is permitted, BUT the 
efficiencies of going up a gradient that large are so bad that
you end up dumping 10's or 100's of thousands of times as much
energy into the body as you need to take out in initial heat, and
it ALL has to come out as X-ray (not just the heat there was at
first, but all the energy you dumped in, too).  No way to do this
with photons, as X-ray absorption of one kind or another in
normal electron-containing matter is going to deposit enough of
that energy going out, to get you.

    What you really need is to run the heat pump and convert all
your heat and refrigerator energy input into high temp NEUTRINOS. 
No law in thermo against that, and you really could theoretically
then get all that electric refrigeration energy you put in, back
*out* without it being deposited, sort of like in the last stages
of a star before it supernovas.  Of course you don't want new
elements in the body, so you have to cycle between nuclear
reactions that make neutrinos, and those that make antineutrinos,
so your lepton number is conserved.  Use little accelerators to
make short-lived neutron-rich isotopes and then let them decay
again, or something.  You have to catch all the decay energy to
recycle it into electricity again, of course, but that 
design will be done for nanoatomic batteries anyway.  Details
left to the engineering student to work out <g>.

                                      Steve

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=3596