X-Message-Number: 8098 Date: 17 Apr 97 13:44:27 EDT From: yvan Bozzonetti <> Subject: CRYONICS The limits of recovery Late or soon, we will be able to recover well preserved cryonics patients. There is a risk: At that time, cryonics operators may feel they have a good understanding of what is possible and what is not. Most of the first patients and sub optimal freezing operations may be doomed as definitively impossible. Nanotech repair atom per atom may end as a pipe dream, so that such cryonics case would be discarded because of the success of a first generation recovery. So I think it may be important to keep in mind the possibility of recovery systems not based on biology, biochemistry or nanotech. As an example, I'll take an extreme case, the socalled hamburger state. Assume a corpse has been turned into such a state or indeed any similar one. Now, if we could reverse time, at least in a localized domain, we could send the matter on its time reversal course and get back the full ordered system: a living corpse. This is *simply* a reversal of the second thermodynamics law about entropy. The time arrow is indeed defined by the impossibility to reduce entropy in a closed system. If the *closed system* contains two componements, the hamburger and a black hole, most of the entropy is locked on the black hole surface. If the ham and BH have similar masses, more than 99.9999 per cent of the total entropy is on the BH. If a very small part of the ham mass falls on the BH, the BH surface expands and its entropy is proportional its surface. Because the system is closed and that experiment may be done without adding entropy to the system, the big gain on the BH must comes from the ham. This one would be cooled to absolute zero temperature without be able to give the requested entropy amount. It would then have no other solution that going back into time to pay the bill. At first that seem impossible: all we can see in a given volume would evolve back in time. The BH would be smaller than an atom and would look indeed negligible. Well, in reality, the largest chunk of entropy would have increased and there is no probmen with physical laws. At that level, this is a think experiment, because nobody has a BH at hand. On the other hand, we may not need a real black hole to exploit the phenomenon. There is the abstract of an interesting physical paper: >>>>\\ Paper: gr-qc/9703076 From: Benni Reznik <> Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 13:39:30 MST (20kb) Title: Origin of the Thermal Radiation in a Solid-State Analog of a Black-Hole Authors: B. Reznik Comments: 13 Pages, 3 figures, Revtex with epsf macros Report-no: LAUR-97-1055 \\ An effective black-hole-like horizon occurs, for electromagnetic waves in matter, at a surface of singular electric and magnetic permeabilities. In a physical dispersive medium this horizon disappears for wave numbers with $k>k_c$. Nevertheless, it is shown that Hawking radiation is still emitted if free field modes with $k>k_c$ are in their ground state. \\ Someday, that information could be useful for those cryonics operators who will have to think about the possibility or not of recovery of such or such case. Yvan Bozzonetti. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8098