Absolute Zero
damninteresting.com
damninteresting.com
ABSOLUTE ZERO IS 0K
Much, much better. 0K?
In any case the thrust of the article appears to be the race to be the first to produce liquid helium; that could easily have been incorporated if the HN editor wanted to make the title better.
Personally I'd favour an editorial subtitle for cases where the HN editors deem the title to be less useful.
"As [sic] unspecified assistant with quick reflexes reversed the helium valve, but he turned it either the wrong way or too far, because instead of halting the flow of helium, he caused it all to be vented into the laboratory. Dewar's notes do not indicate whether a high-pitched apology was offered."
(Although some proofreading would have been useful.)
http://www.damninteresting.com/nineteen-seventy-three/
Summary: A guy tries to build a networked central economic planning computer system.... in 1973.
"A chunk of helium ice would behave as a single, solid, oversized, and stupefyingly slippery atom, which may be capable of passing ghost-like through certain materials. But that's another matter altogether."
Onnes hastened to make observations with the small container of -271°C fluid before it all evaporated away. He found it had a lower surface tension than any previously observed liquid, and just 1/8th the density of water. The modest amount of the stuff he had been able to collect behaved very curiously in general, flowing with strange characteristics and evading easy observation as if enveloped in an SEP field.
http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Somebody_Else's_Problem_fi...
Kamerlingh Onnes' laboratory was built in the space that was created in 1806 when over 15,000 kg of gunpowder stored in a ship exploded, killing 151 people and destroying over 200 houses (http://www.pieterskerk.com/en/explore/19e-eeuw/1807/
That must have made the Leiden city council more cautious when hearing about potential explosions in this laboratory.
It's a bit of a definitional thing; once you get that cold measuring how fast atomes move is less useful than looking at enthalpy and entropy and the way atoms give or receive energy.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero
> It is commonly thought of as the lowest temperature possible, but it is not the lowest enthalpy state possible
And it's not really a negative temperature anyway, it's more of a notational thing, not an actual negative temperature.
(If there is a mathematician nearby and begins to cry, just say that you must change the topology and use $\bar{\R}^{*}$.)
It's funny that I have zero difficulty understanding you when you say you, "push to Github and try something new" - but I'm trying to grok what you mean when you say, "long production cycles that got to me" and "shelved a whole book of research notes with no so much as a mention" - What was happening when you were working in Chemistry?
It would be something akin to building AWS from Arduinos, step-by-step, say.
The molecules I was making took up to a week to build. All-day and overnight reactions made me impatient. I'd spend a day researching the procedure, then a day setting up and getting the reaction started. I'd come in the next morning and might have sludge or nothing or what I wanted. Then I'd wait a few days to have access to the equipment I needed for analysis and, most of the time, would have to start over. One week of work and nothing to show.
After a year of this, my research advisor kind of shrugged his shoulders and said "well, this isn't really going anywhere" and switched me over to help a grad student that was there. The lab notebook went on the shelf and they're probably still sitting there collection dust. No publications, no discoveries, no record of me even being there except the credits on my transcript.
I got the sense that this was just par for the course and, working in the industry for a couple of years, that looked to be the case. Work as hard as you can, paying attention to every tiny detail, and if you get nowhere ... oh well, move on.
Some people seemed perfectly fine with this cycle. Me? It drove me insane ... and out of chemistry!
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with...
For those not familiar with the show, the format is simple. A topic is picked for each week and it consists of the host, Melvyn Bragg, and three experts on that topic. The experts are then left to discuss the topic for 45 minutes with the host only interjecting to ask questions and steer the conversation. It's very much the pinnacle of listening to smart people talk about things that they're interested in.
Recent episodes have covered topics as diverse as The Talmud, Photosynthesis, States of Matter, Spartacus and Early Chinese History.
A list of episiodes can be found here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl/episodes/player - and there's links on the site to download all the episodes since 2011.
"A chunk of helium ice would behave as a single, solid, oversized, and stupefyingly slippery atom, which may be capable of passing ghost-like through certain materials. But that's another matter altogether."
Is this actually doable/observable?
Oh phlogiston.
(Source: The internet)