Program Reviews

Absolute Zero received excellent press coverage during its summer premiere
on the BBC in Great Britain. Here are a few reviews:

From the EVENING STANDARD

Having been quite useless at any form of science at school, I am always drawn to those brainy documentaries that investigate the unbelievable advances mankind has made by understanding natural phenomena and harnessing them to our advantage.

Absolute Zero: The Conquest of Cold (BBC4) was one such, providing a guide for the intellectually challenged to the way in which we eventually realised that ice was not an evil but a force of nature with many benefits.

The story began 400 years ago with an alchemist called Cornelius Drebbel, who demonstrated an early form of air conditioning to a doubtless startled King James I.

By means of talking heads and remarkably atmospheric reconstructions we were led through the chilly worlds of Farhenheit, Celsius, Linnaeus and Farady as they attempted to understand, control and measure degrees of cold. Francis Bacon, I was distressed to hear, died as result of catching pneumonia in a doomed attempt to perfect the freezing of chickens.

Much more successful in that line was Clarence Birdseye, who went ice fishing in Labrador and noticed how the fish stayed fresh as a result of having been naturally fast-frozen. Before Birdseye, freezing compartments had only been used for water because food did not react well to the process, so we can hardly begrudge the man a packet of frozen peas in his memory.

Without understanding any of the complexities of refrigeration, I did grasp the fact that we depend upon ice and the cooling process to an extraordinary degree. It allows food to travel from where it is produced to where it is consumed. It makes life bearable in unpleasantly hot climates. Without air conditioning, skyscrapers would not be a feasible proposition as windows cannot be opened above a certain height.

This was the first part of two programmes, the second of which is broadcast tonight. If you want to know about the race to discover True Zero, then you might want to watch it. Without the fear of contradiction, I can safely say it is the coolest thing in the world.

From The Guardian

Absolute Zero was physics meets limbo dancing - with some great characters thrown in

Sam Wollaston
Wednesday July 25, 2007
The Guardian

It's hard to imagine how the pitch for Absolute Zero (BBC4) went, something like this, maybe: "It's about scientists' attempts to understand temperature. Yeah, I know it sounds a bit pointy-heady, and it's true there isn't anything physical to get a grasp of, or even look at. But there are some interesting characters involved, and they strive to go lower and lower down the temperature scale, so it's kind of like physics meets limbo dancing ..."

A hard one to sell. But whoever was doing the pitching was very good at it, or whoever was being pitched at was very enlightened, or both, because it got made. And that's a good thing, because it's great.

True, I did get a bit fuddled by the science. Energy can be converted from one form to another, but can neither be created or destroyed. And heat only flows from hot to cold? Are you sure? Those are the laws of thermodynamics? I see. Sort of.

But then there are some great characters to get involved with. Like Count Rumford and Antoine Lavoisier. The Anglo-American physicist didn't agree with the great French chemist's ideas about heat, and set about disproving them, which he did. Lavoisier was then beheaded in the French revolution, and his wife went and married Rumford. So Lavoisier ended up losing his reputation, his head and his wife, in that order. Careless.

And there's Frederic Tudor, the ice man, who went to the ponds of New England in winter, harvested the ice, then shipped it to the Caribbean, India, even China, and made an absolute mint. And Clarence Birdseye himself, who went fishing in Labrador and found that he could defrost his catch much later and it was still good to eat. So he cut it into little rectangular prisms, which he covered in orange breadcrumbs, and he, too, made a mint. There's a lot of money in temperature.

It also profoundly affects the way we live. Architecture, for example, that's all about temperature. And air conditioning - it killed community. Once people sat out on their porches and chatted to other people; then air conditioning was invented, and they went inside and chatted to no one. See, it's fascinating, even if you don't totally get the laws of thermodynamics.

In the second part, tonight, we're brought into the present day, and we're going to follow the men with the white coats as they try to go even lower. To absolute zero, in fact, which in layman's language means flipping freezing. Or to limbo dancers, it's the floor. I'm weirdly excited.

From The Independent

Among other things, a two-part history of the scientific investigation of cold, explained why we habitually think of cold as "lower" than hot. Apparently, Anders Celsius's first thermometer assigned 100 degrees to the temperature of melting ice and zero degrees the the boiling point of water, but a few years later Linneaeus came along and tuned the scale the other way up. Why he thought it made more sense that way wasn't explained, or perhaps I missed it while trying to wrestle with the alien concept of cold as a physical substance that could be added to objects or taken away from them.

For many years this was the prevailing orthodoxy about cold, and Absolute Zero told the often fascinating stories of how various scientists stumbled away from that paradigm, to the one we cherish, in which heat (and its absence) is just an energy state. Most of the tricky narrative here is carried by Simon Schaffer, whose own energy state (High and often manually expressed) provided the producer with a blank canvas for some other rather satisfying CGI graphics. But he had to share the honours as resident enthusiast with Dr. Andrew Szydlo, a man who delivers the line "We are about to undertake an exceedingly dangerous experiment" with an unmistakable sense of relish. Didn't look all that dangerous to me, but it was fascinating all the same.

From times2

The BBC certainly knows how to produce a good history lesson, cherry-picking the most interesting tales from across the centuries to illustrate its central subject. This two-parter (Absolute Zero) -- which begins the "Science You Can't See Season" -- starts with the story of cold, how we learnt to understand and use it, and how taming it shaped civilization. For instance, did you know that air-conditioning was first demonstrated in 1620 in the Great Hall if Westminster? Or that it made the building of New York's skyscrapers possible almost 300 years later? All will become clear if you watch, and the narrative concludes tomorrow with the search for absolute zero.

From the Guardian

Absolute Zero

9pm, BBC4

Kicking off the Science You Can't See season, the story of pioneering scientists in search of absolute zero is enthralling and baffling in equal measure. As the perplexing and pleasing properties of the cold are explored by altruistic eggheads as well as entrepreneurial profiteers, the inventions of air-conditioning and refrigeration are, hard as it might be to believe, actually made really interesting.