QED do you want me to bite myself for being stupid and offending you? I really will if you want me to.
Sure, knock yourself out. If it helps you to decide the best course of action, however, you should probably be aware that I wasn’t actually offended in any way, shape or form.
[Moderating]
This kind of comment is inappropriate for GQ. If you have a problem with another poster, take it to the Pit. I might say, however, if you are going to be this hypersensitive you are apt to have a lot of such problems around here.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Jinx and everyone, back in thermochem, we were obliged to mathematically prove the laws of thermodynamics. Yup, they’re all there. Never saw so many partial integrals and derivatives in your life.
The upshot is that YES, you can get to absolute zero, but only with an infinite number of steps. Which doesn’t stop anyone from getting dramatically cold.
I suspect you can get small numbers of atoms very close to AZ by magnetically suspending them - I think scientists have even found a way to dampen their natural vibrations. If I recall correctly, when you do this, the atoms all kind of smear together into some kind of probabalistic blob…
The answer to both would be a certain person with whom I went out on a date in 1981.
An interesting point is that even if there was a substance cooled to exactly 0K, there’s no way to actually measure that temperature. Any measurement technique would necessarily add some amount of energy to the sample. The best we can do is find an upper bound for the substance’s temperature.
Couldn’t one meaure the radiation coming off the substance without transferring energy to it?
What radiation?
(In addition, would radiating not self-disturb the substance by Newton’s Laws and the inherent momentum in radiation so that the substance would no longer be at 0K?)
I apologize everyone, I wasn’t feeling too good when I had that outburst and when that happens I get mad and inflict pain on myself tot ry and make otehrs better (and I interpret everything I do, including something somebody likes as hurting them), I don’t know why it happens it jsut does.
Anyway on topic -
As a response to above and the post he quoted. If something at Absolute Zero wouldn’t it have (as Ludovic said) nothing to radiate, as it would have no energy to be transferring (or am I missing something).
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How do they cool things down to within a fly’s asshole of absolute zero anyway? If I want to enjoy a refreshing beverage, I cool it down by putting it in the refrigerator, or by otherwise surrounding it in something that is colder than itself. But I dont think this would work once you get down to supercold. Do they have a giant heat-sucking vacuum, and if so, how does this giant heat-sucking vacuum work? Or is it something else?
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love
yams!!
The answer to this type of question usually starts with, “They use lasers.”
I must admit, as soon as I hear, “They use lasers,” I assume I won’t be able to understand the rest of the explanation, so I don’t even bother reading it.
Just curious, how many significant figures are the result of these extrapolations? Seems to me that it would be limited to how accurately one measures temperature, pressure, and volume. Then when people claim to be within thousandths of a degree of 0K, are they exceeding the accuracy to which we know 0K in the first place?
In this case, that’s exactly the answer, actually. Laser cooling.