Hey to all in this thread, I just watched a program from Nova about the quest for absolute zero. It brought to mind several threads hanging loose around here. I would like to recommend the program and share with you how I think it is relevant in several unusual ways.
The program details a massive scientific effort that has been going on for more than a century: the quest for the Holy Grail of low temperature physics. The program highlights how science is practiced and how these researchers understood how, what and why they are doing what they do. During the late 1800s there was a fierce competition between James Dewar, Heike Onnes. Using high pressure techniques Dewar was to first liquefy hydrogen in 1886 achieving a temperature of 56K. In 1898 locked in an often bitter race with Onnes he achieves solid hydrogen at 14K. The program highlights the importance each man placed on being first and their struggle, as Platt would say, to be first. The bitterness of their competition was fueled by scarce resources. The equipment they used was very dangerous and prone to explode. Injuries in the labs were common and often severe. One of the labs was closed for a time by city officials concerned about public safety. This halted progress and gave the other side a jump ahead. At one point both teams face a shortage of liquid gas and squabbled ruthlessly for supplies. 1908 Onnes crushed Dewar by liquefying helium at 5K. Onnes won the 1913 Nobel Prize in physics and Dewar was driven out of the field. He went one to study soap bubbles. This competition illustrates the need to be first at the expense of others. Rugged individualists pitted against tooth and claw. To the winner goes the glory and to the loser a career change. On the pure science side we learn that ay 4.19K helium loses all resistance and becomes a super conductor. What this means is if we constructed a superconductive connection between New York and California a nine volt battery on one coast could power and iPod on the other. In 1937 it is found that at 2.2K helium looses all viscosity. A fountain of this superfluid once started would be able to flow essentially forever. Sometime in the early half of the last century Bose and Einstein proposed that at absolute zero, matter would take on a whole new state in which all of the particles become undistinguishable from each other and would exhibit certain quantum properties at a macro level. This new state was dubbed the Bose-Einstein condensate. In the last half of the past century a new round of competition among scientists began. Researchers at several labs began another furious race to achieve ever lower temperatures. The difference we see in this race is that although they all wanted to be first, they all cooperated in making progress together. Rather than trying to cut each other's throat, they supported each others effort. When you listen to their various accounts, you hear them all speak in almost reverential tones about the joy of discovery and their mutual regard for each. Eventually the Bose-Einstein condensate was created by all of them using lasers for cooling and magnetic fields to contain the liquid gases. Nobel's went jointly to researchers at several labs. The points made here for our purposes are: 1) Someone has to be first, but why and so what? In this case professional pride and commitment to the discipline seem motivation enough. In the earlier race Dewar did seem to have his eye on manufacturing processes but that does not seem to be the chief motivation. 2) The practice of science in terms of scientists understanding of what they are doing. Pursuing knowledge and or wisdom? By showing us two different styles of competition for advancement we get insight into how competition moves knowledge forward and how two very different styles of competition produce different outcomes. 3) The program provides some real insight into the nature of matter. Here the end goal is to place matter into an undifferentiated Absolute state and the results reveal some astonishing properties. The two hour program is available at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/zero/program.html Enjoy, Krimel Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
