From: Forrest Bishop (forrestb@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Mon Dec 02 1996 - 14:20:22 MST
You wrote:
>
>(great subject, BTW)
>
>On Mon, 2 Dec 1996, Lyle Burkhead wrote:
>
>> Suppose you want to build a cell that acts as a refrigerator. The
cell
>> contains a vacuole within which the temperature can be reduced to a
>> point near absolute zero. How could this be done? What mechanism
>> could the cell use to pump heat out of a small region?
I cooked up something I called "Active Insulation" last year, after a
conversation with Marvin Minsky. The idea
is to counter an incoming phonon (or one vector component of the
phonon) with an anti-phonon, analogous to noise cancellation.
One problem I ran into with nanomechanical implementations is the noise
from the mechanism itself.
>- if you just keep a single atom very still, have you created
>efficient cooling?
Yes- of that single atom. Its thermal energy was 3/2kT before the
stilling, then its new temperature is derived from same.
>I think we need something like drexlerian nanotech for this, proteins
>don't work well when temperatures change. In this problem, the
hardest
>part seem to be how to insulate the vacuole from the surroundings. My
>suggestion would be a nano-dewar: two geodesic diamondoid spheres with
>vacuum between them, kept concentric by electrostatic forces.
>
A good start! Usually one wants to transfer material in and out of the
dewar, so some lid or tube is needed.
>I think this is a rather fun problem, but I don't see much use for it.
>What applications do you have in mind>
Minsky had something really cool in mind, but I can't remember right
now what that was.
Forrest
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