It was some time back. And I was reading this old Discover magazine we got from my uncle (or perhaps grandfather).
And there was this interesting article on cryogenics. It seems when you freeze an animal or person using anti-microwaves, they have a better chance of surviving (in the article, they were talking about Woolly Mammoths that were preserved that way).
Anyways, this is accomplished, the article goes on to say, using something called a “reverse polarity magnet”.
What on earth is a reverse polarity magnet? And where to you get one?
As I said, I read the article some time ago (and when I read it, the magazine was already old). I don’t recall the term “anti-microwaves” per se. But that is definitely what they were talking about–microwaves in reverse, in other words. But I clearly recall reading the term “reverse” or “reversed” polarity magnets.
Again, does anyone know what I am talking about? Thank you in advance for helping solve this mystery:).
Well, leaving aside the woo aspects, reversing the polarity on a magnet isn’t that difficult. If it’s an electro-magnet you just reverse the power leads after shutting the thing down. You can, of course, do this in better ways but that’s probably the easiest. A bar magnet can be reversed as well, though it takes a bit more to do that. And, of course, the poles of the Earths magnetic field shift over time (and have shifted over the life of the Earth myriad times in the past).
No idea how this would do anything for reviving or freezing people or wooly mammoths or the like, but that’s how you could reverse the polarity.
(Microwaves are just radio waves, so not sure what an anti-microwave would be…something that instead of exciting molecules would instead slow them down, so I guess the most prosaic way would be to make something cold :p)
My guess is that irradiation with microwaves during freezing may help keep the crystal structure disrupted enough that the formation of ice crystals is reduced, or their size reduced - something that would be the proverbial good thing if you wanted to survive the process on being thawed out.
A quick Google of the idea turns up “Microwave assisted freezing” - and at least one paper on the subject.
However anti-microwaves makes no sense, and as described above, reversing the polarity of a magnet is rather trivial, and seems to have little to do with the idea of ice crystal reduction.
Microwaves are just made of miniature photons, aren’t they? There’s no such thing as an anti-photon.
Is time quantized? Are there time particles? (Chronons?) Are there time anti-particles? If you embed your frozen mammoth or your frozen grandmother in an anti-time field, will it safely undo the freezing?
I don’t think that it makes sense to say that photons have a size, except in the sense that light has a wavelength. And as wavelengths go, “microwave” is a bit of a misnomer. Microwaves have wavelengths longer than, for instance, visible light.
Well, there is and there isn’t. The photon is its own antiparticle, so a photon and an anti-photon are the same thing.
There may be such a thing as a chronon (a quantum unit of time). I don’t think that would be a particle, though.
As for the concept of an “anti-microwave”, in my kitchen we refer to that as the “fridge”. I’m not sure what happens if you stick your grandmother in it, but I suspect that she won’t be too happy.
Was it an April issue of Discover? I recall an April fool story from a few years ago about an anti-microwave that will freeze foods in seconds. It was an online news source, either the BBC or The Register if I remember correctly.
This has got to be a joke story based on the tired old B-movie trope of the heroes (kids sometimes) saving the day by reversing the polarity on some fantastic gadget. It usually involves flipping a switch, turning a dial, or (in one Godzilla-type movie) pulling out one component and switching it with another. How the kids figure it out is never explained.
The effects of reversing the polarity are always extreme violations of physics. We’ve had threads about it. Here’s one.
[I give Doctor Who dispensation. He always reverses the polarity of the neutron flow, which at least gives a nod to the impossibility.]
