Topic: Scientists Create Synthetic Leftist Heart In Lab

[trapeze]

Just kidding about the leftist heart thing. But they did cool a cubic meter of copper down to almost absolute zero, to a point that qualifies as the coldest thing ever in the history of the planet.

Supposedly the point of doing this is to use the freezing process to detect neutrinos in an effort to learn about anti-matter or something.

I have always found the whole "absolute zero" topic to be very interesting because, like the speed of light, it is one of those things that we aren't supposed to be able to do. That is, it is unachievable according to everything that we currently understand about matter and physics. Also, as a young person I remember reading a science fiction book wherein somehow some scientists are able to freeze an object to absolute zero and when they do it opens a portal to other dimensions and then drama happened. Total BS, of course, but it captured my imagination when I was perhaps eleven years old.

A chunk of copper became the coldest cubic meter (35.3 cubic feet) on Earth when researchers chilled it to 6 millikelvins, or six-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero (0 Kelvin).

This is the closest a substance of this mass and volume has ever come to absolute zero. Researchers put the 880-lb. (400 kilograms) copper cube inside a container called a cryostat that is specially designed to keep items extremely cold. This is the first cryostat built that is capable of keeping substances so close to absolute zero.

"The main difficulty of this project was the technological challenge of the cryostat," Carlo Bucci, a researcher at the Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy who helped build the cryostat, told Live Science. "We spent 10 years designing, realizing and testing the system." [The 8 Coldest Places on Earth]

Building the extreme temperature cryostat is just the first step in a new experiment in which the cryostat will act as a particle detector. The setup for the experiment is called Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) and is being built at the INFN Gran Sasso underground lab. Bucci and a team of researchers hope the CUORE detector will reveal more about the subatomic particles called neutrinos and why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe.

LINK

The comments that follow the article immediately pick up on the fact that there is a huge discrepancy between the volume of the copper and its weight...can't get away with sloppy science reporting unless it involves the climate, you know.

[Libertas]

Yes, many are chasing after The God Particle, because once they have the power of creation there need not be any God.  OK, like Trap and the Leftist Heart quip, I only half joke...some Scientists may feel that way but not all, some actually are in it for the science and not the religion...something their counterparts in the Junk Sciences (Climate Hoaxers) do not ascribe to.

And yes, their calculations on the volume and weight of a cubic meter of copper isn't even close...seriously, scientists should know that, and since this looks to be a scientific site that wants to be taken scientifically serious, they should at least have a science editor review the submission...perhaps they did and they are a moron too, but any cursory check on the internets would reveal the error, so, come on man?!

 

[Glock32]

Yeah absolute zero is one of those interesting physical constants.  Due to the relationship between matter and energy, achieving actual absolute zero (the total of absence of energy) would imply the total absence of matter as well wouldn't it?

I remember asking a chemistry professor about absolute zero, and if there was a counterpart on the other end, i.e. a maximum temperature. He said that number would be limited only by the total mass of the universe, i.e. if you converted all matter to energy. The actual temperature is some unfathomably massive number.

[Libertas]

Yeah, that entire mass of the universe compressed into one little pinhead just before The Big Bang...which they say will happen again once the universe stops its expansion and collapses into that pinhead again.  It's all good in theory, all we know is at this point in time is that the expansion continues...otherwise General Relativity calculations would be off and last I heard they were still solid, so...not any time soon.  So to measure it you just have to figure out a way around the speed, mass and energy issues and travel backward (or forward) in time and measure that temp in a way so that you can escape back to safety.  So in other words, not gonna happen!