cphoenix@csli.stanford.edu (Chris Phoenix) (08/09/89)
Heat is the large-scale manifestation of movement of molecules and atoms. If you slow the atoms down, you make the thing cooler. Could something be built that would "grab" individual atoms and let them go *very* gently? Perhaps you could create an intense localized electric field, which would polarize and attract some atoms, then gradually decrease its intensity to let them go. Repeat lots of times, and... Since they're polarized on the way in, you could slow them down by making them go through a magnetic field, then remove the magnetic field before you decrease the electric one... This may be way off base, so could someone tell me if it works? Also, can anyone think up a chemical or mechanical way to do it? Thirdly, can anyone estimate how much cooling power such a thing could provide? This seems to have an advantage over other methods of cooling. All the ones that I know of (compressors and thermocouples) have to have a "hot" side as well as a "cold" side. The sides have to be explicitly connected for it to work. With this new device, if it works, the "hot" side would be at the generating station, and the only connection would have to be one for power. (I'm not naive enough to think you can get cooling for nothing :-) Have fun... Now that I think of it, I have heard of something like this being used to get very low temperatures--put a bar of copper (or something) in a strong magnetic field (or something) and then very slowly decrease the field strength. I don't think I got the idea from there, though, because I first thought of it in terms of mechanically "grabbing" the molecules. -- Chris Phoenix | I'm a paranoid schizophrenic! I'm after me! cphoenix@csli.Stanford.EDU | "More input! More input!" For every idiot-proof system, a new improved idiot will arise to overcome it. Disclaimer: I want a kinder, gentler net with a thousand pints of lite. [Consider grabbing a baseball someone threw at you (and thus slowing it down). This generally entails having your hand originally moving much slower than the ball is. Imagine an assembler arm catching a passing atom. The arm is moving more slowly than the atom. Consider the arm as a molecule--a slowly moving molecule is a cold molecule. If we juxtapose a cold assembler with a hot atom, we should expect to get a cold atom. The problem would be to keep doing it without warming up the assembler. --JoSH]