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NASA's Atomic Fridge Will Make the ISS the Coldest Known Place in the Universe (vice.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Later this year, a small part of the International Space Station will become 10 billion times colder than the average temperature of the vacuum of space thanks to the Cold Atom Lab (CAL). Once it's on the space station, this atomic fridge will be the coldest known place in the universe and will allow physicists to 'see' into the quantum realm in a way that would never be possible on Earth.
In a normal room, "atoms are bouncing off one another in all directions at a few hundred meters per second," Rob Thompson, a NASA scientist working on CAL explained in a statement. CAL, however, can reach temperatures that are just one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero -- the point at which matter loses all its thermal energy -- which means that this chaotic atomic motion comes to a near standstill.
CAL uses magnetic fields and lasers traps to capture the gaseous atoms and cool them to nearly absolute zero. Since all the atoms have the same energy levels at that point, these effectively motionless atoms condense into a state of quantum matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate. This state of matter means that the atoms have the properties of one continuous wave rather discrete particles.
In a normal room, "atoms are bouncing off one another in all directions at a few hundred meters per second," Rob Thompson, a NASA scientist working on CAL explained in a statement. CAL, however, can reach temperatures that are just one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero -- the point at which matter loses all its thermal energy -- which means that this chaotic atomic motion comes to a near standstill.
CAL uses magnetic fields and lasers traps to capture the gaseous atoms and cool them to nearly absolute zero. Since all the atoms have the same energy levels at that point, these effectively motionless atoms condense into a state of quantum matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate. This state of matter means that the atoms have the properties of one continuous wave rather discrete particles.
Although Bose-Einstein condensates have been made in labs on Earth, gravity causes the particles to sink to the bottom of the device. Yet in the microgravity of low earth orbit, the Bose-Einstein condensate can hold its wave form for much longer—up to ten seconds—which allows researchers to better understand its properties.
love is just extroverted narcissism
True. "Close to absolute zero" refers to the rotten tomatoes score.
They will make it a bit colder, 10 billion times.
Funny thought... What would happen to a can of beer if I put it inside that "fridge" (assuming of course that the refrigerator was large enough for this)?
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
FTA: One ten-billionth of one degree. I'm assuming Kelvin.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Saying "X times lower", "X times smaller" and "X times colder" is common in English, and everyone knows what it means. "Times" means multiplication. You can multiply by 10 to make X ten times bigger. You can multiply by 1/10 to make X ten times smaller. If you make X ten times bigger, and then make it ten times smaller, you end up right back where you started, which is what you would logically expect. Stop nitpicking.
The point is, unlike lengths or weights, multiplying temperatures makes no goddam sense.
FTA: One ten-billionth of one degree. I'm assuming Kelvin.
You're assuming the "average temperature of space" is 1K? I believe in interstellar space it's closer to 3K and near earth it's much higher. So maybe a closer estimate is 8x10^-9K. Of course I could be wrong.. please correct me.
Why the hell they couldn't just type the number instead of wearing out everyone's 0 key?
this atomic fridge will be the coldest known place in the universe
They are clearly all single. Otherwise they would know the coldest place known to man is a woman who's mad at you.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
please correct me
I'm not assuming anything about the average temperature of space. FTA:
CAL, however, can reach temperatures that are just one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero...
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Right. The proper venue for such language is government, where sometimes you need to redefine things on the fly.
How much of the universe do we really know? I understand how unrealistic it is that there are naturally occuring coldspots like this but this is phrased like we've explored the universe.
What are you on about? X times smaller means "divided by X" in pretty much every context I've ever encountered. Is it linguistically logical? No. But very little about language is. Is it unambiguous anyway? Yes.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Think of all the times you thought you were being smart. You're living a lie.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Well, no I suppose that's not *quite* true. "X times smaller" is the inverse of "X times larger", and there is some slight ambiguity there. 3x larger almost always means 3x as large as the reference size, but the words technically indicate 1+3, or 4x larger than it began. That hardly ever comes up though, unless there's a pedant around trying to stir up trouble. And as the scale increases the relative difference diminishes. It doesn't really make much functional difference if 10,000,000,000x colder is interpreted as 1/10,000,000,000th the temperature, or 1/10,000,000,001th - the difference is almost certainly within the margin of error.
Basically, I think whole usage grew out of a common expression such as "3x as much", which is completely unambiguous. It was then generalized to add direction and context, and shortened at the expense of literal accuracy. 3x the length = 3x longer, the opposite of which would be 3x shorter = 1/3 the length, and get you back to the original length.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Why not? You have an absolute reference point for length - 0m, against which all scaling takes place so that it makes sense, right?
You also have an absolute reference point for temperature - absolute zero, the temperature at which there is no more thermal energy to remove, even in theory, against which temperature scaling makes just as much sense. It['s only in the completely arbitrary Celsius and Fahrenheit scales that it appears nonsensical - but those don't get used in scientific calculations for exactly that reason (outside of chemistry and thermal flow, which are mostly interested in temperature deltas and critical event temperatures, neither of which care where zero is)
You can't even compute heat-engine efficiency using C or F them without getting completely bogus results, because they're completely bogus scales - as though we arbitrarily said the "zero point" on a ruler was actually 213.7meters from the beginning, so that a sheet of paper was approximately -213.7 meters thick - which would similarly make scaling lengths pretty much nonsensical.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's literally ambiguous, but consistent in practice.
"10x as high" is completely unambiguous. 10x higher is used to mean the same thing, but *is* technically ambiguous the words literally mean 10x+1 = 11x, but that's almost never how it's used (the exception generally being with percentages for some reason, probably because they're usually used for fractional changes).
"10x lower" is the inverse function. Make something 10xhigher, then 10x lower, and you get back to the original state. intuitively obvious, and common language usage almost always follows intuition rather than reason.
It also helps if you consider such things from an absolute reference point, as negative numbers are nonsensical in everyday usage: I have 6 apples, if you have 2x fewer, how many would you have? You can't have -6 of anything, so clearly you have 3. There is no ambiguity. Similarly lengths absolute, nothing can be less than 0m long, so "5x as short" is unambiguously 1/5th.
It gets a little more complex when dealing with arbitrary reference points, but you're still talking about measures from a particular zero point - the height of the hill is measured from "ground level", and no hill can be less than 0m tall, or it's not a hill.
Temperature is particularly bad because it's not immediately obvious that there's a natural zero point for temperatures, and most people are accustomed to *F or C, which are completely arbitrary junk scales akin to setting the zero point on a ruler 247.3 meters away from the beginning, and declaring anything shorter than that to have a negative length. But that's why we have K and R - absolute scales whose zero point is the well-defined theoretical coldest that anything could possibly be, at which point it would contain zero thermal energy, and thus could not get any colder. But most people aren't used to thinking of temperature as a measure of the absolute amount of one kind of energy in a thing, largely because all the changes we're accustomed to amount to adding or removing a few cups of water from a bathtub that already contains many gallons.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yep. And the coldness of space is something like a couple degrees Kelvin, which measures from absolute zero, the theoretically coldest temperature achievable, at which all heat has been removed from the system. And the only thermal reference point from which you can meaningfully determine thermal ratios, such as needed for thermodynamic efficiency calculations, or saying Thing A is X times hotter or colder than Thing B.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Assuming it were possible to drop the temperature to absolute zero, would an atom in this state be able to be observed, including its constituent parts? Could it be moved in one piece like a piece of matter?
Or would the fact it is at absolute zero cause it to fall to pieces (no pun intended)? How would quantum mechanics come into play in this scenario?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Fortunately, good tech writers and most engineers avoid that terminology.
What if this triggers some run-away process or black hole that destroys our planet?
Slim chance, I agree, but not zero.
Table-ized A.I.
Same as for "hotness" or any other colloquial term for equilibrium latent heat energy, a.k.a "temperature" - Kelvin (Celsius is arbitrary bullshit unsuitable for measuring anything other than temperature deltas, in which case the delta is the same as if measured in K)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yep, it might confuse engineers and pedants, though everyone else would understand it perfectly. The exact opposite of what good technical writing is supposed to accomplish, right?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
What are you on about? X times smaller means "divided by X" in pretty much every context I've ever encountered.
My point is exactly how that is bullshit.
X is Y times as big as Z.
X is Y times as small as Z.
X is Y times Z.
X = YZ
X is Y times bigger than Z.
X = Z + YZ
X is Y times smaller than Z.
X = Z - YZ
X is one Yth as big as Z.
X is one Yth as small as Z.
X is one Yth Z.
X = Z/Y
X is one Yth bigger than Z.
X = Z + Z/Y
X is one Yth smaller than Z.
X = Z - Z/Y
Some things to note:
Terms like "big" and "small" aren't very useful, so you can say things are "as small as" or "as big as" each other and mean the same comparison. These terms can weakly imply information in certain instances, such as a filter that filters particles as small as X. Otherwise, "as big as" or "as small as" are effectively "the same size as".
Terms like "smaller" and "bigger" do have a true direction, as with "more" and "less" or "fewer".
When something is compared to something else in a fractional, percentage, or other referential sense, the scale is implied as being that of the thing to which the comparison is being made. For example, "10 is 50% less than 20" has the implication that the "50%" refers to 50% of 20.
This is simple math and simple English, and I'm sick of "journalists" getting it wrong.
There's also the common bullshit where "X times better" in marketing means "X times as good" or "X-1 times better".
Take "ten times lower" that a hilltop. Is that 1/10th the altitude of the hilltop, or is that 9 times the hilltop altitude below ground which makes 10 times after adding the hilltop, or does it mean ten times the hilltop altitude below ground?
You could make the exact same objection to "ten times higher". You need to have a common reference point going up or down.
TFH is unambiguous because the reference point is obviously zero Kelvin.
Yep, it might confuse engineers and pedants
It would confuse neither. An engineer would not say it that way, but would know what it means. Pendants also understand, but object anyway, because that what pedants do.
Exactly. Here it's described with cats:
segmeowtationfault.com/13
Certainly "big" and "small" are useful terms - they're just *qualitative* rather than *quantitative* - they perform much the same role as a negative sign for addition - indicating the (one dimensional) vector direction in which quantities are interpreted.
The caveat of course being that we're talking proportion(multiplication) here rather than addition, so the inverse is division rather than subtraction. And likewise, the degenerate(identity) value is 1 rather than 0.
When you say "as big as" or "as small as" you're in the degenerate case, and obviously it makes no difference which direction you don't make a change in.
As big as = 1x as big as = positive change = multiply by 1 = 1
As small as = 1x as small as = negative change = divide by 1 = 1
As soon as you use a non-degenerate scale factor, everything falls into place
3x as big as = positive change = multiply by 3
3x as small as = negative change = divide by 3
The only point of ambiguity is the use of "bigger" and "smaller" rather than "as big/small as", but people are lazy, so there's no surprise that such linguistic shortcuts get used, even when they compromise clarity (heck, sometimes I think *especially* when they compromise clarity)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
A vacuum has no temperature since temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the particles. In deep space we consider the temperature to be the equilibrium temperature an object will eventually reach, which is the temperature of the cosmic background temperature.
Anyway, one ten billionth of a degree over absolute zero is not 10 billions times colder than the average temperature of the vacuum of space. We really need journalists to have at least passed grade 9 science before writing about science.
Aaaaaaaaa kiiiiiiiir aaaaaaaaaaaa !!!!!
The parent thinks that the article should have said 99.99999999% colder. Maybe "10 billion times as cold" would be acceptable too. Parent makes fun of the consequences of "10 billion times colder".
Cold does not exist per se; it is the absence of heat. What does 10 billion times the absence of something even mean? The sentence should have read that space is 10 billion times as hot as the fridge or that the fridge is one ten-billionths as hot as space. Oh, and remember than when talking temperatures, always convert to kelvin before doing the math (273 C is about twice as hot as 0 C).
X is Y times bigger than Z.
X = Z + YZ
X is Y times smaller than Z.
X = Z - YZ
No-one uses that notation. "X is Y times bigger than Z" is synonymous, to any normal human, with "X is Y times as big as Z."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
His issue is not with "X times as low as" but with "X times lower than." He thinks these are different. I don't think anyone else would assume they were.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It doesn't matter what the units are as long as there is an absolute zero on the scale. Luckily, in this case, there is. It's even called "absolute zero"! What are the chances?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
How many beers can this atomic fridge store?
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
But that's already tested: I've made hundreds of bad/trolly posts before, without ending Earth.
Each post is an independant test of the theory your posts may produce a black hole. Since the chance is as small as the orbital experiment producing a black hole, the fact you have posted hundreds of times provides no evidence.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Pedants also object to objections.
"will become 10 billion times colder than the average temperature of the vacuum of space"
That is a meaningless statement. Temperature doesn't work that way mathematically.
If a scientist or engineer says something like that then shame on them.
If a journalist says something like that then "oh, hum" because they make stupid statements on a pretty frequent basis... *sigh*
Someone pointed out to me that from the perspective of a human in space, it is neither hot nor cold. Rather it is a really good layer of insulation.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Go back to 9th grade.
10 billion times colder...
is an utterly ridiculous, nonsensical phrase. Room temperature is measured ultimately in Kelvin, and is so many degrees above theoretical absolute zero.
Even "the vacuum of space", which is not a complete vacuum, is also not at absolute zero, and is a positive temperature. It isn't "cold".
"Cold" is a human-centric term. Something that is far below the freezing of water, for example, most people consider to be pretty damned cold.
But "cold" can only be measured as compared to normal human ambient or body temperature.
So how do you measure "cold"? You don't. There is no way to measure cold. Any more than there is a way to measure "dark". Better close that door, Eugene, or all the dark will leak out.
If the author meant "One ten billionth of the warmth of empty space," that might actually make sense.
Don't forget, folks, we're having a special next week: 75% off the 60% higher price we charged this week. The prices will be so much "less"!
You're assuming the "average temperature of space" is 1K?
No one said anything about the average temperature of space. The coldest place known in the universe (outside of a lab) is the Boomerang Nebula, and it does indeed have a measured temperature of 1 K.
Seems the whole world is getting more and more tolerant of sloppy expression.
"One million times colder" is absolute semantic drivel. If it's logically valid, then what on earth does "one time(s) colder" mean?
It's on the same level as "this beer tastes five times lousier". Anyone who uses it ought to be totally ashamed at their lack of expression skills and take up speaking Inuktitut or something.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Building and maintaining a system like this is very hard! Astronauts are often good scientists, but these laser cryogenic system require some deep specialization to keep running day to day. The impressive part of this to me is that in a few decades we went from 4-5 people in the world being able to build such systems and get them to work (once a month, maybe) to being able to strap a system to a rocket and have someone from a completely different field operate it in an environment where spare parts are at a premium.