Einstein, Spock, and Pie

This is one of the wallpapers on this laptop. Each of these people -- and yes, I know one's fictional -- is a hero of mine. Each regarded the cosmos as ultimately knowable.

The magazines and books are starting to pile up again, which never used to happen to me -- and as a result of one, I got to thinking about stasis fields. If you're not a sci-fi fan, here's an explanation: a stasis field is a method of preventing change to whatever is within it. It can be thought of as a fog; inside the fog, milk doesn't go bad, people don't age, things don't decay. Essentially, entropy ceases. I wondered, briefly (there's that ADD again) how a stasis field might work, and for some reason that led me to wondering how one of the 'bio-beds' in Star Trek would work. That's more 'wouldn't this be cool' stuff. Those are more than beds; at a minimum, they execute non-invasive evaluations of the physical systems of the person in the bed, and, in an advanced mode, affect the state of those systems. Someone who's ill and untreatable at the moment could be put into a biobed and the stasis field energized, at which point they're 'frozen in time'. Need an oxygen-saturated atmosphere? The bed can provide a non-permeable shield around the occupant, with oxygen kept at high saturation inside. Very gee-whiz stuff.

I wondered, briefly, how one would work, and got the very vaguest outlines in my mind -- well, for blood pressure, you'd need a way to measure the pressure of a vessel without touching it; perhaps something to do with the elastisticity of the vessel under pressure and not (ie, systolic and diastolic)? Could some kind of spectrum analysis show that? --- and then I started thinking about something else -- in this case, the pie shell that I need to make some time next week. Been a while since I've done that.

But still -- that fake tech stuff is fun to think about, isn't it?