Absolute Zero Press Kit

 

Backgrounder

Absolute Zero - The history and science of the two documentaries

“For centuries, cold remained a perplexing mystery. Nobody had any idea what it was, much less how to harness its effects. Yet in the last hundred years cold has transformed the way we live and work. Imagine homes or super-markets without fridges and frozen foods; or skyscrapers without air conditioning, or hospitals without liquid oxygen. We take for granted the technology of cold. Yet it has enabled us to explore outer space and the inner depths of our brain.”

-- From the introduction to Absolute Zero.

Part One: The Conquest of Cold

The first, hour-long documentary shows vivid recreations of the scholars who have peppered the history of cold. Alchemists who controlled temperature and claimed
it was magic, scientists who died from exposing their own bodies to cold weather,
intense rivalries to reach the coldest temperatures, all are shown in realistic re-enactments.

The program begins with court magician Cornelius Drebbel boasting that he can turn summer into winter. In 1620, Drebbel promised King James the first of England that
he would cool the Great Hall of Westminster. In the film, British chemist Andrew Sydszlo, who has developed a theory as to how Drebbel manipulated the temperature
to his advantage, performs the role of Drebbel. Sydzlo shows rows and rows of ice mixed with salt -- an additive which cools down the mixture. Over this, he sends air
from a hand-cranked fan, a copy of one that he believes Drebbel may have built for
the same purpose. Standing in Westminster, the modern scientists measure a dramatic temperature drop.

In essence, Cornelius Drebbel created the world's first air-conditioning system. This
feat, says Sydzlo would have shaken the king to his core: "He would have been shocked. He wouldn't have known what's happening. He could in fact have been wondering whether it was some action of God or some sort of demonic force that was in action."

Manipulating the forces of nature was, of course, long thought of as a magical skill. Early scientists had to fight a social belief that trying to understand the universe was hubris that would lead to self-destruction. Indeed, it did lead to death in the case of Francis Bacon, considered to be the first scientist to undertake the study of the cold.
“For Francis Bacon, heat and cold turn out to be right at the center of his world view,” says science historian Simon Schaffer, a Cambridge professor. “They really mattered
in the seventeenth century for two reasons, one is the weather, and one is disease.”

Bacon was Lord Chancellor to King James, and he refused to accept the Greek beliefs that heat and cold were material things, fluid-like, which seeped into different objects to give them different temperatures. The Greeks believed that an object cooled down because this heat substance literally leaked out, while in order to become cold, an object must absorb the corresponding cold substance. Bacon set about to do experiments to see if this theory made sense -- but this work cost him his life. As he scooped ice and snow into a freshly-killed chicken to determine if it would help with preservation, Bacon contracted a fatal case of pneumonia.

The documentary presents the fantastic forays into understanding the cold that occurred in the 17th and 18th centuries. Robert Boyle was the first to suggest that the feeling of heat simply came from the animated movement of particles inside a given substance, and cold was attributable to less movement. Daniel Fahrenheit and Anders Celsius invented thermometers that allowed the study of temperature and the program even delves into the backslide of scientific understanding, when Antoine Lavoisier promoted a theory that instead of cooling resulting from particles slowing down, heat and cold came from a weightless fluid that he called caloric.

Robert Fox, a science historian and Oxford professor, points out just how seductive
this idea was: "Lavoisier sees caloric as a substance which is exactly comparable with ordinary matter, to the point that he includes caloric in his list of the elements. It's
very easy to talk about heat and to think of it as a fluid. Whereas to think about heat
as a vibration of the particles of matter, that's much more difficult conceptually."

Without understanding just what made cold, several important advances were nevertheless made. Two would be crucial: the discovery that there existed a coldest temperature, absolute zero; and the concept that one could purposely cool liquids,
gases -- or even rooms. In 1703 Guillaume Amontons first realized that, while there seemed to be no limit to how hot an object could get, there was a limit to how cold something could get. This is absolute zero 459.67 F ( 273.15 C).

While it wouldn't be until the end of the 19th century that the temperature of absolute
zero became a scientific goal, the idea of cooling down drinks, food, and buildings, served to help create fortunes.

In the early 1800s, on a farm in New England, Frederic Tudor brainstormed with his brother on what was so plentiful on their farm that they could sell it. "Certainly there were a lot of rocks," says historian Dennis Picard, who is director of New England’s Storrowton Village Museum. "But no one would pay money for that. And they came
up with the idea of ice because some areas did not have ice and it seemed kind of crazy at first -- but it paid off."

Tudor eventually became one of the richest men in America, by cutting up blocks of
ice and shipping them South and then around the world. Drinks with ice soon became
the height of fashion. It wasn't long before fashion gave way to the more practical. Frozen food -- for which we have Clarence Birdseye to thank -- air conditioning, and refrigerators, became standard household items by the middle of the 20th century.

Absolute Zero continues by demonstrating how scientists finally achieved an understanding of how cold is created. In the 1830s, when the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, scientists studied the way steam engines turned heat into motion.
They realized how connected movement and temperature were: the more atoms move about inside an object, the hotter it becomes. This energy can be induced in an object -- be it solid, liquid or gas -- in a variety of ways. It can occur by adding heat from a separate hotter body, increasing the pressure (a pressure cooker creates higher heats through increased pressure) or doing work on it (a drill creates heat through doing work on a piece of wood and creating friction).

In turn, scientists realized that things became colder as the atoms deep inside moved
less and lost energy. It was this insight that would fuel the next century's quest for absolute zero.

Part Two: The Race for Absolute Zero

The second 60-minute documentary begins with a major competition at the turn of the 20th century--the race for absolute zero. In a filmed re-enactment, Scottish scientist James Dewar, a professor at the Royal Institution in London, is shown in a lecture describing his feat of turning oxygen gas into a liquid by bringing it down to the
ultra cold temperature of -297 F (-183 C). Liquefying oxygen had been considered impossible, since simple pressure changes had not worked as they had on previous gases like ammonia and chlorine. Oxygen needed to be both put under pressure and cooled externally.

But liquefying oxygen turned out to be simple compared to the next step. Dewar was locked in scientific combat with Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes to see who could liquefy hydrogen -- a feat that required bringing the hydrogen down to a temperature of 423.17 F ( 252.87 C). “Kamerlingh Onnes was younger than Dewar
and to a certain extent looked up to the Scotsman as his senior.” says historian Dr. Schaffer. “Dewar didn’t have the same – if you’ll pardon the expression – warm feelings towards his rival in the race for the cold.”

It would take many dangerous experiments -- explosions in the lab cost at least one of Dewar's assistants an eye -- but after 20 years of work, Dewar succeeded in 1898, coming closer to absolute zero than anyone ever had. He'd beaten the Dutchman fair and square.

It should have been a moment of nationwide triumph, but Dewar was up against a man who wasn't ready to rest. Indeed, Kamerlingh Onnes was the first to run the kind of large lab we often see today; his lab was the beginning of so-called "big science." He employed glass blowers and technical assistants in a giant lab that was more like a factory. With this wealth of resources, Kamerlingh Onnes set his sight on a more impressive prize: liquefying helium, which required temperatures at just 5 degrees
above absolute zero. Unable to get enough helium to study and depressed by his
lack of progress, Dewar wrote a letter to Kamerlingh Onnes to say he was bowing out of the race for good.

On July 10 of 1908, Kamerlingh Onnes discovered he couldn't get his experiment any lower than 5 degrees above zero -- and they were running out of the supercold hydrogen they needed to cool the helium. "It's getting very late in the day," explains author Tom Shachtman. "The team is down to its last bottle of hydrogen -- if they can't liquefy helium now they're going to have to wait for months to try again. And the temperature gauge is stuck at five degrees above absolute zero, and Kamerlingh Onnes doesn't know why that is!"

It took a colleague's visit to prompt Kamerlingh Onnes to consider that the temperature had stopped dropping because he'd succeeded. "He goes underneath the apparatus," says Shachtman. "And sure enough there in the phial is this liquid sitting there quietly. It's liquefied helium." Kamerlingh Onnes won a Nobel Prize for the feat; Dewar was so bitter that he stopped all work in low-temperature physics for the rest of his life.

The documentary goes on to show that work in low-temperature physics in the 20th century was not as contentious -- but it certainly was competitive. Using detailed
visuals, and special effects in which modern scientists overlap themselves around the room, the documentary presents the unique concept: the overlapping nature of atoms at temperatures near absolute zero. When these atoms superimpose over each other, they turn into a giant atom known as a Bose-Einstein condensate or BEC.

Physicist Dan Kleppner of MIT says that a Bose-Einstein condensate is very difficult to visualize. “They’re all overlapping. They are all doing the same thing, and what they’re doing to a good approximation is simply sitting at rest. They are everywhere at once. They’ve lost their identity and they don’t know who they are anymore. There’s nothing else like that in physics and certainly not in human experience.” BECs are a state of matter unto itself, as distinguished from solid, liquid, or gas. The existence of BECs
was predicted in the 1920s, but until 1995 no one had ever seen one.

In the 1990s several labs worked toward making hydrogen -- or lithium or rubidium or sodium -- so cold that one could spot this never-before-witnessed state of matter.
Two of the major contenders were a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
led by Wolfgang Ketterle and a lab at JILA (Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics) in Colorado led by Eric Cornell and Carl Weiman.

By combining these techniques with magnetic traps that also held atoms in their clutches and evaporative cooling (just as one's coffee cools as the steam evaporates off the top) Cornell and Weiman succeeded in bringing 2000 rubidium atoms down so close to absolute zero that they saw the first BEC on June 5, 1995. Four months later Ketterle created a BEC that was 100 times bigger, made of sodium atoms. Unlike the case of Dewar and Kamerlingh Onnes, this time all three men were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work. "There was a sense of competition," says Dr. Ketterle. "But, it was what I would call friendly competition. I mean can you imagine two athletes that are in the same training camps, they help each other, they even give tips to each other, but when it comes to the race, everybody wants to be the first . . ."

Until now, BECs have been interesting to scientists simply as a fascinating property of the cold, though some day they may well have some technological function. The documentary points out, however, a host of other technologies that the study of cold
may someday provide us, including quantum computing that could decode encryption problems in seconds as opposed to the centuries it would take current computers.

And along the way, of course, the 20th century’s research into cold technologies has already changed our world. As the documentary makes clear: “What these scientists eventually discovered fulfilled their wildest dreams. They made liquid gases that would later power rockets into space. They produced super-cooled electric circuits that could sustain an endless flow of current . . . They reached a place so cold that fluids seemingly defy gravity and creep over the sides of containers. The new technologies emerging from this research: super-fast transport, super-intelligent computers, and super-efficient energy – are just the beginnings of an ultra-cold future.”

For additional information about Absolute Zero and low temperature physics please, visit www.absolutezerocampaign.org.

Absolute Zero was based on the book Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold by Tom Shachtman. The documentaries were produced by Windfall Films in collaboration with Meredian Productions. David Dugan, producer/director, Tom Shactman, writer; Justin Badger, editor; narrator (TBA); Russell J. Donnelly, professor of physics, University of Oregon, Principal Scientific Consultant and Meredith Burch, executive producer and co-producer

Absolute Zero was made possible by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan foundation.

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