Slashdot Mirror
Quantum Gas Goes Below Absolute Zero
First time accepted submitter mromanuk writes in with a story about scientists at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich who have created an atomic gas that goes below absolute zero. "It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time. Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery."
Lasers have had negative temperature for decades!
wikipedia has quite a good explanation of negative temperature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature
From TFA:
Another peculiarity of the sub-absolute-zero gas is that it mimics 'dark energy', the mysterious force that pushes the Universe to expand at an ever-faster rate against the inward pull of gravity. Schneider notes that the attractive atoms in the gas produced by the team also want to collapse inwards, but do not because the negative absolute temperature stabilises them. “It’s interesting that this weird feature pops up in the Universe and also in the lab,” he says. “This may be something that cosmologists should look at more closely.”
Sadly, our universe runs on a quite old hardware, which allowed the scientists to overflow the temperature variable. Why the Great Programmer didn't use unsigned longs ist beyond me, rookie mistake, really!
Heat is just atoms moving around, after all, so negative temperatures are easy:
just make the atoms move backwards.
sudo ergo sum
HAH! When I was a freshman in college a long long time ago, I lost points in a computer science assignment because I did not perform error checking to ensure the user enter temperatures were above absolute 0. Prof didn't believe me when I told her that wasn't a hard limit, so there!
I'm sorry, but to me that is just absolute bollocks. So if you have more particles with a higher energy, you have a lower temperature? If I flip my thermometer upside-down, I'm also measuring a decrease in temperature when I heat it up. That makes sense too.
So is this story misleading to say that absolute zero was achieved. Wikipedia The Celsius and Fahrenheit scales are defined so that absolute zero is 273.15 C or 459.67 F. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero
But in the news story it says SUB and SUB means below, yet there is no mention of the temperature whatsoever in the article and going beyond absolute zero is not possible even out in space! You can get close, but not to absolute zero otherwise you would have created the ultimate weapon!
Enough said.
All cows eat grass!
Maybe because the Great Programmer wanted us to be able to use buffer overruns to invoke the debugger and thus do magic?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1733076&cid=33042664
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1733076&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=33043184
"I've thought about writing a sci-fi novel based around three interacting groups (taking off on Arthur C. Clark's ideas of any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic):
* Those who have expanded human consciousness in a transhumanist technical nanotech/biotech direction and can do magical-looking things like with nanotech (like when nanites rebuilt the Red Dwarf).
* Those who have found this debugger link or just a bug and can affect reality in magical seeming ways (so, like Harry Potter or Earthsea, where words an incantations and symbolic movements and symbolic devices like wands are combined to create patterns that invoke complex programs written in arcane symbols, such as from "lumos" causing light to all sorts of complex spells invoked in complex ways -- maybe with a high degree of secrecy involved in who makes these things and who is told about them).
* Those who have just expanded humanity in a brute-force sort of way throughout the solar system and beyond through self-replicating space habitats duplicating themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore, and maybe also have recently learned to tap zero-point energy and so create energy and matter in empty space (so, they can duplicate things out of thin vacuum as it were).
I have no idea where that would go. But those are the major sorts of "magic" things I can imagine in our future, and all are hard-sci-fi "plausible". Would the mystery of consciousness be an underlying theme?"
Or perhaps there are deeper aesthetic issues involved that we have only just begun to be aware of? :-) :-) So, I'll go you one further -- are people going to fight over what color-temperature their local Dyson sphere should be tuned to? :-) Or even the color-temperature of the universe? Would you like a naturally balmy 2.725 K background temperature in the universe, or is that excessively wasteful and just an unasthetic looking color, and 2.724 K would be better? :-) Or maybe a slightly warmer 2.726 K would be worth it for making a peppier cosmos?"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963016&cid=34980884
"Still, ultimately, you may be right as far as there always being some issue to be in conflict about, and how on a cosmic scale, groups may well disagree fundamentally about things like enclosing stars. I'm also reminded of the Red Dwarf theme of David Lister's cat's descendants fighting over what color hats they should be wearing.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You mean -- The serpent offered Eve a Perl script to parse /etc/passwd, and Adam's punishment was crypt (3) ...?
Negative temperatures, vomiting robots, and "you're a snotty person" taxes on electric cars. 2013 is starting off just swell!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
. Yet we can only detect photons due to electron promotions, so we could never detect the half photons, so we build models as though the photon (the thing we observe) can't exist in partial forms
I wonder if you are the same AC that posts this every other topic on quantum mechanics, or if multiple people think that is how things work. It has been repeatedly pointed out that this is incorrect, there are ways to detect photons that are non-destructive and ways other than using electron transitions. There are non-discrete ways of detecting photons in common use.
Also, if you are basing your bashing of quantum mechanics on the idea of negative temperature, then you have really no idea what you are talking about. Negative temperature is a classical concept and does not require quantum systems to implement or demonstrate. There are examples of quantum systems that produce it much as there are examples of quantum systems reproducing just about any aspect of classical mechanics.
I thought if they have replicable results showing a lower temperature that they where suppose to update the Kelvin scales adjustment so that the lowest temperature is zero.
Except, if I understand the concept correctly.... there isn't one.
Kelvin temperature is a reflection of average thermal energy per unit volume. Most matter still behaves a certain (normal) way and while there are a few high-energy particles, a majority of the particles in it possess an "average" amount of energy. For some materials, evidently, the particles' energy properties are inverse in this respect and have more than an average number of high energy particles. The lowest temperature that you could bring such a material to would, I believe, be a function of exactly what percentage of particles are, in fact, "high-energy", and would need to be defined on a per-material basis. Also, if I understand this correctly, this would mean that materials which have an above-average amount of low-energy particles should reach "absolute zero" at temperatures higher than 0K. Again, how much above would depend on the percentage of particles that are not of average energy. Either way, I'd expect the deviation from 0K, regardless of the concentration of non-average energy particles, to be on the order of very tiny fractions of a degree K.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You explanation is informative. Not only is your definition of temperature new to me, I find the consequences unfortunate. They should have a different term for this state rather than "negative temperature". Sure it's interesting physics, but the headline seems a bit sensational due to the definition of temperature needed to make it possible.
I don't think it means what you think it means
You must gather your party before venturing forth.
Proving/Disproving God isn't a Scientific Mission. Understanding how the Universe works is.
If we ever figure it all out we can go.
Well that is how the Universe Works and that is it.
or we can go.
Wow so that is how God did it.
You are confusing the Idea of a God with Religious interpretations of God. Science has more or less disproven that the Stories in the Bible are often not Factual or at least exaggerations. But it doesn't disprove God.
God and Science do not Mix. The God idea exists outside of Science as God is defined as a SuperNatural entity or more plainly God exists out of the rules of Observable Nature, Science is the study of Observing Nature.
This come with a two edge sword.
1. Any Science that states that God did it, is faulty because God is unobservable thus you cannot equate it as an observed fact. At best if there is a God Influence it would probably be considered a seemingly Random Element that will need further study.
2. The counter to this, is Science can't disprove God, because he is out of Observable Ability. Thus any work to Disprove God will be trying to apply God as a factor to disprove it.
Keep God out of Science, Also Keep Atheism out of Science as well.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
These researchers had to give it 110% to achieve this less than nothing.
These physicists should hang their heads in shame.
Pin heads have heads? Maybe I just can't see their heads because of all the obtuse and acute angles in the way.
What if 'God' is simply the sum total of everything. Are we not created in his image? We, as 'individual' humans are composed of hundreds of different systems, with different purposes, all somehow working together as a functioning whole.
God, put simply, is the set of all sets. Absolutely no problem in science studying that.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
They should team up with the researcher from last year,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2115974/Einstein-right-CERN-says-particles-DIDNT-travel-faster-light--quite-right-years-experiment.html
Yes, if you make your own definition, it is possible to disprove said definition.
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It is the unknowning masses who created the stupid definition that gets railed against by ignorant science fanbois.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Bleah your post has several glaring deficiencies:
1) your definition of God as "unobservable" is only one of the many different (and quite often incompatible) definitions of God.
Science can (and did) rule out many definitions of God (where God should have been observed but wasn't) so for these Gods, science is atheistic.
2) if you start from a definition of God as unobservable, then what you know about this God was necessarily reached only but a pure construction of human minds, an hypothesis in other word.
So you should name your God as "an hypothetical and unobservable God".
Except it isn't my definition. It's the definition at the top of every spiritual/religious path.
[citation needed]. This sounds very dependent on which religions you're talking about and/or subjective.
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Seriously though, even read a wiki on hindu cosmology. The point is regardless which path you take to the top, once there you can see all the paths that lead up.
Of course, it isn't spelled out so simply. You don't teach a child integrals before addition.
Even the corrupted definition of the attribution of omnipresence of the christian god is from the teaching that god is everything. Unfortunately, paul corrupted the church in it's formation, laying the groundwork for doublespeak that would chain the masses in ignorance. One can only wonder at the manipulation needed to still include Jesus saying we are god/part of god in the bible and yet convince the masses that only Jesus is God.
I think everybody should read the bible at least once. It is an eye-opener to just how much ignorance there is on both sides as to what the true foundations of christianity are.
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It is impossible to prove the non-existence of an omnipotent God through observation and experiments.
Of course... but the point is that at the temperature at which ordinary matter has no energy, it's not actually the case for matter that certain matter which consists mostly of very high energy particles would also have no energy.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You are referring to pantheism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism and no, not all religions adopt this belief, Catholocism amongst them. You are engaging in a "no true Scotsman" argument where your critics are wrong because they don't accept your "one true definition". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman
Account -> Discussions -> Disable Sigs
You need to look more closely at the other AC you are replying to (not me though... I'm assuming he is stating what seems to obviously most relevant).
The statement about the speed of light was not saying that the limit of the speed of light is the same as the limit of absolute zero. It was saying the apparent, but actually non-existent incongruity many people see when discussing phase velocities faster than c is on par with the same failure of understandings that can pop up with negative temperatures.
In the case of the phase velocity going faster than c, many people forget that the speed of light limit is for physical, massive particles and doesn't apply to things that are more or less just geometric points (e.g. the example of building a giant pair of scissors from the Earth to the moon and closing them in a second, which is possible with no matter going faster than the speed of light, but the geometric point where the two blades intersect will move faster than light). Additionally, some people don't quite know what is meant by phase velocity and don't realize it is not capable of transmitting information, hence it doesn't allow FTL.
Similar, with negative temperature, people try to apply what they remember about temperature when most people have had no exposure to the implications of more formal definitions. In both cases, there are problems because people are trying to apply watered-down versions of principles. In both cases, when you cut out the details, you will find cases that break or violate the simplified picture. Both are cases ripe for either learning a lot more about the actual specifics and details of how such things work, or for one to make an ass of oneself by assuming they knew the complete picture. Which path someone goes down is up to them with such things.
And on the moral aspects of simulation: http://users.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/rants/simulation_errors.html
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/LegalRightsOfRobots.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6200005.stm
http://www.aspcr.com/newcss_rights.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Also on this theme: "The World Was Probably Already Destroyed" ... Will the destruction happen again in the simulation? Probably not since the conditions that caused it were of stochastic nature. However, even if the destruction takes place in the simulation, the computer will restart it and the world will be created again in an endless fashion. ..."
http://www.digitalcosmology.com/Blog/2012/12/06/t/
"Some people wonder if our planet will be destroyed on December 21, 2012. I have friends asking me every day whether I think the world will end in a few weeks. But it is possible that our planet was already destroyed and before that occured its scientists managed to send a capsule in space with a supercomputer running its simulation.
I have for a time made a little niche creating a little ripple with my sig on the irory of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity, as well as related writings. That is a little ripple that may only be meaningful as a "trimtab" when surveillance AIs newly emerging into sentience decades from now process it from all the other stuff being archived these days. :-) Perhaps even after the human race is physically long gone from our follies as above? :-( Recent example:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/12/06/0055206/army-tests-autonomous-black-hawk-helicopter
Would I like to do more such as with various other projects I've tried that have not gone very far in reality (educational simulations, self-replicating space habitats, design libraries, social-semantic desktops, etc.). Sure, but at least I can do something even if it is small. Our path out of any technological singularity may have a lot to do with our path going into one. Every little effort may make a difference. So, as I see it, with every email I send and slashdot post I make, I'm potentially programming the values of computers that won't exist for decades. :-) Well, or statistically as above, I guess I'm most likely perhaps programming an infinite chain of future simulated versions of the same computers that are already simulating me? What an admittedly odd way to spend so much time... :-)
Although, that is not that different from the plant growth algorithm my wife and I developed in our PlantStudio software, which grows structures through successive iterations on a numerical seed. And it is in keeping with someone else's point on the interrelation between the universe coming into being and our own personal growth. And of course everyone is doing that kind of programming too with every Slashdot post or twitter or text message; I'm just more aware of the possibility perhaps. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tab#Trim_tab_as_a_metaphor
So, in that sense, are we creating our own future "God" at some moral and physical temperature? Which is a different argument from saying we are "God" or that we see "God" in our own image. And even different from this ultra-short sci-fi story (only as big as the previous paragraph):
""Is there a God?" sci-fi short story âoeAnswerâ by Fredric Brown"
http://obront.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/is-there-a-god-sci-fi-short-story/
I wish I could remember the author or title of a journal article my (sadly late, just found out recently) advisor at Princeton, George A. Miller, had laying around about 1984, which talked about mind as an infinite tower of effectively simulations. I'm sure that theme may also pop up in some religions, especially Eastern ones. Perhaps it indeed is simulated turtles all the way down? :-)
Anyway, at least we can try to see an upsid
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Unfortunately, paul corrupted the church in it's formation, laying the groundwork for doublespeak that would chain the masses in ignorance.
The Catholics kind of consider Paul the founder of the entire freakin' church...can you even say that the founder "corrupted" it if it didn't exist prior?
One can only wonder at the manipulation needed to still include Jesus saying we are god/part of god in the bible and yet convince the masses that only Jesus is God.
I would be very interested in seeing verses that you quote in support of this. The Bible as far as I've ever seen emphasizes the ability of the reader to have a relationship with God, but it's at best as a confidant, and usually as an authority to be obeyed. God and/or Jesus (Trinity, y'know), angels, and man are rather clearly delimited as separate classes of beings.
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English translations have jesus calling himself continuosly the son of man and saying we are all son of man(adam), we are all brothers and sisters etc... The trinity lie was in part based on using this as a messianistic title to seperate Jesus from other humans. However, in the language of the time he was basically just saying "listen, i'm just an ordinary joe like you, just another human". Perhaps a more accurate translation (this one I have no objective proof for but others hold it as well) would be what is possible when man attains perfection. Perfection in this case is entrance into the kingdom of heaven, which Jesus kept wisely mentionning is 'in you'. Or translated as a part of you.
The church controlled by controlling access to the bibles and simply providing interpretations. Later on, sure you had your bible, but it had sanitized translations.
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I always enjoy it when somebody whips out the "oh, it was distorted all along, the translation is a conspiracy, but I HAVE THE *TRUE* MEANING!"
This whole ~nirvana thing you're pushing seems to be rather at odds with the recurring "I am the Way...only through me" messages, but after all, you know better.
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As for having the true meaning, dude it's a translation, this is what the translation experts say. Hey, it's your call, you want to believe the translation experts or you want to believe the catholic church?
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I should add that even without the help and research of translation experts it is fairly simple to grasp what Jesus is saying if you don't view it through the interpretation of the church or society. I had the good fortune of avoiding both by starting to read it around 6.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Jesus said, "It is I who am the light which is above them all. It is I who am the all. From me did the all come forth, and unto me did the all extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there." -- Gospel of Thomas 77
Jesus said, "If they say to you, 'Where did you come from?', say to them, 'We came from the light, the place where the light came into being on its own accord and established itself and became manifest through their image.' If they say to you, 'Is it you?', say, 'We are its children, we are the elect of the living father.' If they ask you, 'What is the sign of your father in you?', say to them, 'It is movement and rest.'" -- Gospel of Thomas 50
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
As you extract energy from a substance, it is supposed to be the case that temperature drops linearly with amount of energy removed. This is because the substance's heat capacity, which determines the rate at which temperature rises or falls in a substance as energy is added or removed, is defined such that when the amount of material being examined is constant, heat capacity is constant. It's defined that way, as an extensive property of matter. From my understanding of the article, I can only conclude that it has apparently been noted, however, that for some materials, you can keep extracting energy from it when absolute zero should have already been reached based on that constant. It's further my understanding that the exact "temperature" at which this could be achieved evidently is a function of what percentage of high energy particles there are in the substance, and so it's not just a matter of recalibrating the thermometer. The implication means that either temperatures below absolute zero exist, which is what the article was proposing, or else heat capacity itself, which has traditionally only ever been a function of the amount of material to be examined, is also a function of the current temperature (which is an intensive property of matter) of the material itself, which would completely change the procedure for how it is calculated. The reverse effect could also be an implication of the latter, meaning that "absolute zero" could be reached sooner than predicted by a constant heat capacity in some substances, which might have some interesting consequences when examining the properties of those substances at very low temperatures.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I had heard about the Isis thing, yeah. It's an interesting theory.
Catholicism vs. Protestantism was at one point basically "believe what we tell you because we won't let you read the actual Bible" versus "we're sick of this, we're going to read it ourselves and draw our own conclusions." So in the fight between tradition maintained by powerful bishops, popes, etc. and "Scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone," I come out on the side of reading the actual book. As you might have guessed, I have been a Lutheran.
Of course, then there's the problem of whether to include certain books that may contradict the rest......
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If heat capacity can change with temperature, even when the amount of material is constant, then why is it considered an extensive property at all? From what I remember in school, extensive properties are those that must are supposed to be directly proportional to the amount of material in the system being studied. If heat capacity were a function of temperature as well, then it would be considered neither extensive nor intensive.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Some definitions of "God" differ quite markedly from yours, and are explicitly interventionist. Bear this in mind.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?