[ExI] Help with freezing phenomenon

[spike]

From: spike [mailto:spike66 at att.net] 
...
>...Water expands as it freezes.  In a conventional freezer the outer layers
freeze first, so as the internal layers freeze and expand, the outer layers
are placed in tension and are filled with tiny cracks.  We might suppose the
presence of microcracks in fish could degrade its sushiability...spike

And of course microcracks wouldn't do a brain any good either, so let me
*expand* on the idea a bit.

The recent tragic shooting of the politician in Arizona reminded me of a
common medical procedure in a traumatic brain injury: opening the skull to
allow swelling of the injured brain.  If a cryonics team were to split the
skull front to back to allow slight expansion during the freezing process,
there might be a secondary benefit: it would allow insertion of a reflective
heat sink between the hemispheres of the brain.

The previous post on this topic suggested using destructive interference
with pi-phase synchronized low level microwaves.  To be more specific, we
might shoot for the very high end frequency for tissue heating: about 4
gigaHertz.  Then we might imagine inserting a reflective stainless steel
plate between the hemispheres of the brain, carefully avoiding damage to the
corpus callosum, to act as a heat sink and a microwave reflector as well as
a temperature control device.  If we collimate the microwave beam with
something as simple as a catadioptric collimator, we use the reflected
microwaves from the central plate to interfere destructively with the
incoming non-reflected beam to let the center of each hemisphere freeze and
expand first, before the periphery of the brain.  I specified 4 GHz because
that makes a wavelength of about 7.5 cm which is about what we want for
destructive interference to take place at or near the center of a
hemisphere.

The presence of the highly conductive polished stainless steel plate would
also help with the process control, by allowing extremely precise
temperature monitoring and control as the brain is gradually and slightly
supercooled to perhaps -5C before tissue freezing begins.  Since it doesn't
harm a brain to have its hemispheres slightly separated, we might imagine
cooling coils inside the stainless steel plate itself.  We might also
imagine the plate in two or more pieces, to completely accommodate the
corpus callosum.

None of this is particularly difficult from a technical perspective.

The reflector notion greatly simplifies the control task of synchronizing
two microwave sources.  In this latter scheme, the same collimated microwave
beam interferes with itself after being reflected from a central plate
inserted between the hemispheres, allowing the center of each hemisphere to
cool slightly more than its surrounding tissue, and this entire discussion
is making me yearn for sushi.

Max, shall we get out the green notebooks and see if Alcor wants to gather
up some patentable notions?  The reason in this special case actually
transcends the making of money (if that can be imagined.)  Rather the reason
for documenting and patenting would be to prevent some commie from patenting
the notions and disallowing us from using them.  In this spirit I freely
donate any and all intellectual property residing in my particular brain
regarding cryonics to Alcor and encourage other hemispheres to do likewise.

spike