Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold (33 page)

The use of ultra-low temperatures in basic research on the structure of matter entered a new phase in early June 1995, when a team of physicists at a research coalition of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, led by
Carl E. Wieman and Eric A. Cornell, had an experience paralleling those of Faraday in 1823, Cailletet in 1877, and Onnes in 1911. While conducting an experiment at the lowest temperatures they could reach, they produced a blob of material never seen before. In this instance, the blob was what had eluded scientists for seventy years, a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC)—that gas of atoms whose existence had been postulated by Einstein in the 1920s but that had not been definitively known to exist until 1995. The temperature was 170-billionths of a degree above absolute zero, and the blob was not even seen directly, since it was immediately destroyed by a laser probe flashing through it, but its image remained on a computer screen. Further experiment reduced the temperature to 2-billionths of a degree Kelvin, more than a million times colder than interstellar space.

This was a highly significant event—combining the production of a form of matter that no one before this had been certain could be generated on Earth with the reaching of the deepest and most profound cold, a cold almost beyond imagining.

Only weeks later, another BEC was created at Rice University, and within months, others were brought into existence at Stanford and at MIT. Physicists were elated over the possibilities of using BECs to study the mechanisms behind superconductivity and superfluidity—superfluid helium was believed to have some of the characteristics of a BEC—and to examine other aspects of atoms and elementary particles. "If you want to speculate wildly," Cornell told a reporter, "you could imagine an atomic beam analogous to a laser beam—one that could move or deposit single atoms to build a molecule-size structure."

That wild conjecture became reality in less than two years, in January 1997, when a team headed by Wolfgang Ketterle at MIT created an "atom laser" from a BEC. In 1998 Ketterle's group was able to magnetically manipulate a BEC-based atomic laser to do what Cornell had predicted: move atoms around, and form complex molecules. It was an indication that whatever could be postulated in terms of subatomic particles at ultracold temperatures might well be realized in the near future.

In February 1999 a team at Harvard headed by Lene Vestergaard Hau used the BEC and laser-cooling techniques to produce an environment only 50-billionths of a degree above absolute zero and to slow the speed of light to a mere 38 miles per hour. As with Ketterle's atomic laser, no immediate applications were expected from the Hau group's feat, but it was believed that in ten years' time, many practical uses might be developed. In mid-June of 1999, the MIT group announced another breakthrough. For the first time, the scientists had quantitatively measured zero-point motion in a BEC.

As the research on subatomic particles goes forth in the coldest temperatures imaginable, opening up possibilities for studying and manipulating the subatomic building blocks of matter, so do projects in other scientific fields that rely on mastery of the cold, among them some of the most advanced projects now being conducted. To study the farthest reaches of the universe from Earth, electronic detectors chilled by liquid helium have recently been set up near the South Pole, in an ambitious astronomical project, AST/RO, the Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory. And to study asteroids and other solid bodies in deep space, an unmanned probe has been launched, powered by a new propulsion system inspired by science fiction, an engine that moves the ship through space by means of squeezing the energy out of the ions of a rare gas, xenon—a gas obtained through air-separation processes, and maintained on board the spacecraft as an ultracold liquid.

If the present direction and volume of research are any guide, a large proportion of tomorrow's technological advances, and of tomorrow's discoveries about the composition of matter and the nature of the universe, will be made in the vicinity of absolute zero and will be based on our mastery and manipulation of the cold.

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

I wish to thank the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for a generous grant enabling me to complete this book. The Writers Room in New York City afforded me shelter through this project, as it has through others; my colleagues and the staff there have been a source of unflagging support and encouragement. Much of the research was conducted at the main branch of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and in the recently opened Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL) at 34th Street; the library also provided me with facilities in its Wertheim Room. Other American libraries consulted include those at Columbia and New York universities, the Library of Congress, the Scoville Library in Salisbury, Connecticut, and the Alfred H. Lane Library at The Writers Room.

In London, I worked extensively in the unrivaled historical collections of the British Library and of the Science and Technology Library connected to the Victoria and Albert Museum; in the Netherlands, my research centered on the collections of the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden and of the free library of Amsterdam. Visits to the Royal Institution in London, arranged by Dr. Frank James, and to the Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory at Leiden, arranged by director Dr. Jos de Jongh and emeritus director Dr. Rudolf de Bruyn Ouboter, were especially helpful in gleaning details about the settings in which James Dewar and Heike Kamerlingh Onnes worked.

I owe debts of gratitude to Coleman Hough for basic research and insights, to editor Laura van Dam for her enthusiasm and her ability to ask the best questions, to Steve Fraser for getting me going on the book, and to my wife, Harriet Shelare, and sons, Noah and Daniel, for putting up with my obsession with an esoteric topic. Rudolf de Bruyn Ouboter, Russell Donnelly, and other physicists read portions of the manuscript and made helpful suggestions. The errors that may remain are, of course, mine alone.

The sections that follow report the major published and unpublished sources for the material in the book, with a few comments on them. The list is cumulative; that is, sources used in earlier chapters are also used in later ones, but I have omitted second references to them to make it easier to read. Though the listing does not constitute a complete bibliography, I hope it will provide ample fodder for readers who want to find out more about the people, events, history, and science of the cold.

Chapter 1

Any science-history research begins with the multivolume
Dictionary of Scientific Biography,
in whose pages the work of most (though not all) of the people discussed in this book are profiled. Gerrit Tierie's brief
Cornelius Drebbel (1572–1633),
1932, collects all the comments made by Drebbel's contemporaries and quotes liberally from his works. Thomas Tymme's A
Dialogue Philosophicall
..., 1612, provides the best description of Drebbel's fabled perpetual-motion machine. Two thoughtful articles are L. E. Harris's "Cornelius Drebbel: A Neglected Genius of Seventeenth Century Technology,"
Newcomen Society,
1958; and Rosalie L. Colie's "Cornelius Drebbel and Salomon de Caus: Two Jacobean Models for Salomon's House,"
Huntington Library Quarterly,
1954–1955. Fascinating references for the period are Lynn Thorndike's monumental
History of Magic and Experimental Science,
1923; William Eamon's study of books of secrets,
Science and the Secrets of Nature,
1994; and Elizabeth David's
Harvest of the Cold Months,
1994. The last traces the work of della Porta and other alchemists and engineers mentioned in the chapter. Material about James I is provided in Robert Ashton's compilation
James I by His Contemporaries,
1969, and in biogra
phies, the most useful being Antonia Fraser's
King James VI of Scotland and I of England,
1974. Westminster Abbey is interestingly traced in Edward Carpenter's
A House of Kings,
1966.

Chapter 2

Barbara Shapiro's
Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England,
1983, puts the Bacon-Boyle era, and its science, into perspective.
The Works of Francis Bacon,
in seven volumes, with notes by his disciples, was published between 1857 and 1859. Robert Boyle's
New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold,
1665, is still a treat to read. Among the biographies of Bacon, Catherine Drinker Bowen's
Francis Bacon, The Temper of a Man,
1963, slightly updated in 1993, is the most insightful, though it pays less attention to the scientific side than to the political. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaeffer's
Leviathan and the Air Pump,
1985, analyzes the acerbic exchanges of Hobbes and Boyle; those authors' view of Boyle is countered in the best recent biography of Boyle, Mary-Rose Sargent's
The Diffident Naturalist,
1995. The definitive study
The Royal Society: Concept and Creation
is by Margery Purver, with an introduction by Hugh Trevor-Roper, 1967.

Chapter 3

W. E. Knowles Middleton's books
A History of the Thermometer and Its Use in Meteorology,
1966, and
The Experimenters, A Study of the Accademia del Cimento,
1971, are exhaustive and thoughtful; a supplement is Maurice Daumas's
Scientific Instruments of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,
1972. Other references include Harold Acton's
The Last Medici,
1932, and Christopher Hibbert's
Rise and Fall of the House of Medici,
1974. Fahrenheit's 1729 letter to Boerhaave is put into context by the rest of the series, annotated by Pieter van der Star, in
Fahrenheit's Letters to Leibniz and Boerhaave,
1983. Detective work on Fahrenheit's scale can be found in various articles in
Isis
and in
Nature.
The topic of "Antecedents of Thermodynamics in the Work of Guillaume Amontons" is analyzed by G. R. Talbot and A. J. Pacey in
Centaurus,
1971, and by Robert Fox in
The Culture of Science in France, 1700–1900,
1992, which also recounts the history of the Académie des Sciences. Robert Hooke's work is the subject of a lecture by E. N. da C. Andrade before the Royal Society, printed in its
Proceedings,
1950.
Anders Celsius,
a biography by N. V. E. Nordenmark, was issued in 1936.

Chapter 4

Richard O. Cummings's
The American Ice Harvests,
1949, and Oscar Edward Anderson, Jr.'s
Refrigeration in America,
1963, are invaluable, as are Xavier de Planhol's
L'Eau de Neige,
1995; Roger Thevenot's
A History of Refrigeration Throughout the World,
1987; and W. R. Woolrich's
The Men Who Created Cold,
1967. Early refrigeration machines are detailed in Edward W. Bryn's
The Progress of Invention,
1900, and in Robert Maclay's chapter, "The Ice Industry," in Chauncey Depew's
One Hundred Years of American Commerce,
1895. Henry G. Pearson's seminal paper "Frederic Tudor, Ice King," which quotes liberally from Tudor's diaries, is in the
Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society,
1933. Several articles about Gorrie and Twining are in the pages of
Ice and Refrigeration
and
The Florida Historical Quarterly.
Faraday's experiments are detailed in John Meung Thomas's
Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution,
1991.

Chapters 5–6

Michel Serres sets the historical scene in "Paris 1800" in his
A History of Scientific Thought,
1995. Robert Fox, in
The Caloric Theory of Gases,
1971, traces the history of that wonderfully misleading concept. Sadi Carnot's
Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu,
1824, is still in print. Hippolyte Carnot's memoir of his brother, along with Sadi's beautifully handwritten post-1824 notes, 1878, make fascinating reading. Good secondary sources are
Sadi Carnot, Physicien et les Carnots Dans L'Histoire
by A. Friedberg, 1978;
Carnot et la Machine a Vapeur
by Jean-Pierre Maury, 1986; and two articles by Robert Fox on Carnot, Clément, and work on steam engines, reprinted in his 1992 book
The Culture of Science in France, 1700–1900. Robert Mayer and the Conservation of Energy,
by Kenneth L. Caneva, 1993, tells more than anyone might want to know about the enigmatic doctor.
Scientific Papers of James Prescott Joule,
1887, are now more available, thanks to a recent reprinting.
James Joule, A Biography,
by Donald'S. L. Cardwell, 1989, and Cardwell's earlier
From Watt to Clausius,
1972, are essential reading about the history of thermodynamics, as is Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise's
Energy and Empire,
1989, the best biography of Lord Kelvin. Two other studies are Harold I. Sharlin's
Lord Kelvin, The Dynamic Victorian,
1979, and David B. Wilson's
Kelvin and Stokes,
1987. For those undaunted by mathematics, there is C. A. Truesdell Ill's
The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics, 1822–1854,
1980, and, for unrivaled clarity, various articles and book chapters on the same subject by Crosbie Smith. Daniel D. Pollock's article "Thermo
electricity" in the
Encyclopedia of Physical Science and Technology
1987, evaluates Thomson's contributions to the subject, and Joule-Thomson cooling is historically traced in Graham Walker's
Miniature Refrigerators for Cryogenic Sensors and Cold Electronics,
1989. Bernice T. Eiduson's study
Scientists: Their Psychological World,
1962, offers insightful observations.

Chapters 7–12

The clearest and most cogent book to deal with the entire subject of gas liquefaction and superconductivity is the second edition of Kurt Mendelssohn's
The Quest for Absolute Zero,
1977. Other essential texts for this period are Per F. Dahl's
Superconductivity: Its Historical Roots and Development,
1992; Gianfranco Vidali's
Superconductivity: The Next Revolution?
1993; and Ralph G. Scurlock's
History and Origins of Cryogenics,
1993. A supplement is Jean Matricou's
La Guerre du Froid,
1994.