>The next "revolution"
(actually, evolution) will probably be in parallel >processing.
>It's already starting, what with multi-CPU chips, multi-socket
boards and all.
Yeah, I know. I use them. The TACC
machines here in Austin have up to 1024 cpus in parallel locally. Plus,
with infiniband, they are networked to other supercompus elsewhere.
>(Actually, it's been going on for many years.)
>Eventually, each PC will have thousands or millions of CPUs,
all working in >parallel.
Millions? Hardly. You'd never be able to cool such a setup, even if it
is decentralised by infiniband, or whatever. Power
consumption vs dissipation would be too prohibitive. I don't
think we can go further than a few tens of thousands.
Actually, the issue here is computational power vs computational
demand. Even with all the power of parallel cpus, there will always be
folks who'd want to simulate a sizable fraction of the Earth's
atmosphere, or try to copy living systems into computer memory, or want
to figure out if tossing a coin is really a 50-50 probability of
heads-or-tails, or try to simulate phase transitions of 10^20 atoms, or
diagonalize 200-billion X 200-billion matrices. Eventually, no matter
how many cpus you add in parallel, you will fall short of the demand.
The only way to have virtually unlimited computational power is to use
the quantum properties of matter itself to process information.
Yeah, but that is the wrong kind of business model. It's reactionary, and typical of monoliths like Intel. Quantum Computing is not a nebulous theory, but a rapidly maturing field with thousands of research teams all across the academia. There are a few conceptual problems, like the Wigner Paradox problem or the classical coupling problem, but in the long run this represents the best possibility in the evolution of computing hardware. Wasting needless resources in cramming things into other dimensions (height) or closer together will only delay the inevitable, and when it comes, there will be no fallback, as there will have been no funding for QComp research, since they wasted it all in trying to fight back the laws of nature.
None of this is relevant in the long run. Eventually, chip manufacturers will hit the blank wall of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. As you try to cram more transistors into smaller spaces (even in 3-D), you localize the electron wavefunctions (not to mention that cuttoff is achieved only if the electrons are in conduction bands, which will cease to exist if the transistors are too small). This means that they delocalise in Momentum space, and their Shannon entropy goes up, causing them to heat up drastically and eventually melt. Solid State Technology has taken us far enough, trying to stack chips will only prolong the inevitable. Researchers should focus on a fundamentally new method of computation, like using entangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilenger states or Bell states for computational purposes.
1. If computers can fly voyager, two men with even more
(presumably) advanced computers can fly smuggling ships
2. heh
3. heh (String theorists will disagree, of course)
4. One can say that those sounds heard in the movies are not generated
in space, but inside ships when they collide or when them turbolaser
thingies strike them. The gunshots are also sounds transmitted thru
hull metal when the guns fire or whatever, and remember that space
isn't 100% vacuum.
5. Reminds me of a story of some guy who pointed out that bad guys in
hollywood westerns would win if they just shot the horses. The director
replies, 'but then we wouldn't have a movie'.
6. Maybe it's more of a Stephen Baxter style "Vacuum Diagram" type
prophecy than anything bootstrapped from Hinduism/Buddhism/Judaism.
7. You forgot to mention the biggest damn problem. Why is there gravity
in space? everybody in those ships stand upright & walk, and
those ships don't have centrifuges or anything??????
Might want to read Stephen Baxter instead. He's a bit of a
racist, but a good scifi writer who doesn't deviate too far from the
laws of physics or common sense.
Orbit= A Complete circuit????
Read Glodstein my friend (a REAL Physics book). It defines terms like parabolic and hyperbolic "orbits" , and they don't involve any closed circuits.
An orbit is a any solution to the classical Coulombic potential.
Pi=3.1415926535897932384626433832795
That's as far as I can remember. I got it up to 200 once...
Re:Boiling Point, Stupid!
on
How Ice Melts
·
· Score: 0
Latent heat, that's why. Oh, and yes, we don't understand how liquids boil either. At least, we can't explain these basic phase transitions usign models of spontaneous symmetry breaking like Landau did for more exotic phase transitions
>>>>>>As you approach the
speed of light, your mass increases m = m0/sqrt(1 - v^2/c^2)
<<<<<<<<<
AAARGHH!!! There is no such thing as relativistic mass! It's a
pedagogical fiction invented by Bergmann, Einstein's graduate student (I wish I could go back in time to whack him in the head, but I like his textbook). Einstein never mentioned any
$E=mc^2$ or whatever. The correct statement is that the application of
constant force does not imply constant acceleration in relativity.
(sorry, my latex2html isn't working for some reason)
\begin{eqnarray*}
{
F^{\mu}&=& \frac{dp^{\mu}}{d\tau} \\
F^{\mu}&=& \frac{d}{d\tau}\left[m
\frac{dx^{\mu}}{d\tau}\right] \\
F^{\mu}&=& m\gamma^2 \frac{d^2x^{\mu}}{d\tau^2} \\
\gamma^2 \frac{d^2x^{\mu}}{d\tau^2}&=& Constant\\
}
\end{eqnarray}
So if F is constant and $\gamma$ tends to $\infty$, then
$\frac{d^2x^{\mu}}{d\tau^2}$ has to go to $0$ to compensate.
See? not so hard to understand when you lay out the math, and
no need for al lthat relativistic mass increase crap. The only mass is
rest mass, that's it!
Keep life simple, that's what I say
Oh, and to answer to the long post before about alternate views of STR wrt time moving, you don't need relativity to prove the Second law of thermodynamics. All you need to show is that, in a microcanonical ensemble, entropy is a nondecreasing function of volume. This is always true in ergodic systems that are isolated, relativity or not.
OK, the poms are more to blame for the last two, but they had already
become a puppet regime of the Americans by then and Chamberlain could
not have signed the Munich pact without the discreet endorsement of
your government.
Bear in mind that British appeasement of Germeny ended when
the Labour party came to power, the same people you hate as "commies".
>>>While
the US did engender the Mujahadeen rebels in Afghanistan, it did not
engender Al-Quada
Use spellchecker, it's Al
Qaeda or Al-Qa'ida (using the standard phenomes
characteristic to the Semitic family of languages).
Know your enemy before trying to defeat them.
And yes, Americans did engender Al-Qaeda. They existed back then too,
and were it not for stinger missiles supplied by your country to their
leaders, the Russians would have crushed Afghanistan like a bug. Were
it not for that western-sympathising idiot Gorbachev and his
obsession with weakenening Soviet power with all that Perestroika
nonsense,
Iran would be a puppet government under Soviet control, Afghanistan
would be broken, there'd be no 9/11 today, and all nuclear technology
would be in the hands of countries run by stable SANE people, intead of
mad mullahs who will paint moons and stars on warheads and USE THEM!!!
zealot: a fervent and even militant proponent of an ideology
Etymology: Late Latin zelotes, from Greek zElOtEs, from zElos
I agree that the good Comrade general is not the best of
leaders, and a bit blinded by his own zeal. The same is true
for a
country that catalysed the rise of an Aryanist Third Reich and
engendered the Al-Qaeda Mujahiddeen just because they didn't like "them
commies who'll conquer us with their errr... cigars".
Ok! Ok! I'm not some high priest Jihadi of the great temple of Linus Torvalds trying to redeem you from the heresy of BSD and into the righteous path of our Lord the Penguin. I was merely pointing out a possible solution to the question posed by the original poster, that's all.
Try this for a good (non-GUI) iptables frontend: http://www.shorewall.net/
Works well, is very flexible, easier to config than iptables directly
& has stock configs for multiple interface setups.
Run it with Mandrake mnf or ipcop & ur good to go.
That's a good point. However, the claims made above are either cases
of priests screaming for the 4 horsemen of the christian
apocalypse, or the political rantings of Rabochy Put. They are made
with malicious intent in order to advance a political agenda. What I
said was a simple statement of fact concluded from social observations
and based on the dynamics of human interaction. They're not made with
any malicious intent.
And that is not always the fate of all societies. A few
cultures have endured for a long time, despite the vissicitudes of
history. This is primarily due to checks and balances placed on their
societies that prevent the dominance of a particular ideology. This has
not happened with the United States. One ideology has started to
dominate in their culture, creating a dogmatic society that can only
result in their decline and fall. There is nothing that can be done to
prevent this fall, but the effects and repercussions of that
destruction can be minimized.
Actually, in that respect, the United States is a lot more like the
erstwhile Roman Empire than the Third Reich.
Like the Roman Empire, the United States was founded on principles of
basic freedom by political visionaries. Like the Roman Empire, the
state was slowly lost to tyrants and murderers who used propaganda to
energize the masses with ideas of racial and religious superiority and
the concept of 'glory' or some abstract idea of creating a utopian
society. Like with the Roman Empire, this never actually happened. Like
the Romans, the United States started to decay with the growing power
of Christians in the State, while simultaneously engaging in acts of
excess and decadence as well as brutality towards those who chose not
to subscribe to their idealogy. If we carry the comparison to it's
logical conclusion, then, like the Roman Empre, this country is
inevitably destined to collapse in civil war and anarchy and invasions
from foreigners. In this respect, the Islamic zealots are a lot like
the Goths, Vandals, and Huns who periodically ransacked Rome during her
dying years. Like preying vultures and carrion crows, they sense the
eventual destruction of this country and are trying to get in on the
feast.
It's very sad that so many innocent people have to die before
this happens, but American Society has lost whatever virility and worth
it once had, and we should just let them pass into history and allow
their civilization a dignified death.
History never repeats itself, but historical situations often recur. I can only hope that wheatever comes after isn't worse.
There are infinitely many phases of matter. I don't blame you for this
misunderstanding. My chemistry teacher thought the same thing.
The thing is that a 'state' or phase of matter in itself doesn't mean anything. Phases are defined by the means of phase transitions.
A Phase Transition is perceived as a qualitative change in the
collective behaviour of a many-particle system. The phase transitions
we do understand are the ones that can be explained by the Landau
theory of spontaneous symmetry breaking of an order parameter. This
interpretation is sufficiently generic to include many material states
that can be called 'phases', like metals & insulators,
superconductors & insulators & metals, smectic
& nematic phases of liquid crystals and some really wierd ones.
Oh, and superfluidity & BEC are connected, they are
not 2 DISTINCT phases as such. Fermionic superfluidity is actually the result of Bosinic Cooper Pairs of Fermions.
Also,wrt to the posts that say that this is a high temp system,
High temperature doesn't mean high as in Fermi-temperature high. It's
still low enough for the comments above to be qualitatively valid. I
mean, 50 nanokelvin is still like a billion times colder than the
vacuum of intergalactic space, and the 'superfluid' is still a Quantum
Phase, that which has been achieved through a spontaneous symmetry
breaking of the many-particle ground state, which could never be
treated as a pure quantum state if the temp was THAT high. This is
fundamental.
fr
Temperature is not a scale of energy, it's a scale of
information. It's a parameter that determines the statistical
equilibruim of a system.
Temperature is related to energy, but that fact is a derivable one, not
one to be used in it's definition.
I'm not trying to be overtly pedantic. Just thought it bears
mentioning, that's all.
Also, the truth of the matter is that, since only long wavelength terms
matter in the immediate neighborhood of a phase transition (the ones
that we understand, anyway), the study of low energy systems carries
special importance over others, so that is one of the many reasons why
we cool things. In addition, we want to see collective behavior which
can be explained to a good degree by mappings into single-particle
problems (which, when you think about it carefully, are the only
problems that we REALLY can solve ab initio). This turns out to be very
interesting in systems where strong correlations and quantum
fluctuations dominate over thermal ones. With regards to this "new
state of matter" and similar works done by the Ketterle Group and
others, the primary advantage of these types of systems is their
"tunability", both in terms of their effective dimensionality
(controlled by lenticular magnetic traps that keep the energy gaps
above the chemical potential in totally trapped directions), and in
terms of the interactions, which, in this low temperature limit, can be
approximated by the long wavelength terms in the Born expansion of the
Lippmann Schwinger equation, ultimately leading to the possibility of
changing the nature of the interaction itself by tuning a homogenous
magnetic field close to a Feshbac resonance (the parent article
explains this better), or by using optical systems to control the
relative magnitude of tunneling terms over the "on-site" interactions.
We've NEVER been able to do that so well in any solid-state system
before.
That's why such systems are so vital to out understanding of condensed
matter physics, because we can do many things to it with relative
ease.
Heh, reminds me of a joke...
A poultry farmer was puzzled by the fact that his chickens were dying for no apparent reason, so he called in a Biologist, a Chemist, and a Physicist to try to figure out what's going on. The Biologist took samples of blood and other bodily fluids from the chickens, made slides, studied them under a microscope, but found nothing awry. The Chemist did various qualitative and quantitative chemical analyses on the samples to look for any problems, but found none. Finally, all eyes were on the Physicist who, after spending a few minutes in deep thought, suddenly got very excited and started to scribble notes on a page. After a few more minutes, he shouted out "YES! I've solved it! I know what's happening, but it only works for spherical chickens in a vacuum at absolute zero."
Slashdot Mirror
OK, great! I'm so happy.
>The next "revolution" (actually, evolution) will probably be in parallel >processing.
>It's already starting, what with multi-CPU chips, multi-socket boards and all.
Yeah, I know. I use them. The TACC machines here in Austin have up to 1024 cpus in parallel locally. Plus, with infiniband, they are networked to other supercompus elsewhere.
>(Actually, it's been going on for many years.)
>Eventually, each PC will have thousands or millions of CPUs, all working in >parallel.
Millions? Hardly. You'd never be able to cool such a setup, even if it is decentralised by infiniband, or whatever. Power consumption vs dissipation would be too prohibitive. I don't think we can go further than a few tens of thousands.
Actually, the issue here is computational power vs computational demand. Even with all the power of parallel cpus, there will always be folks who'd want to simulate a sizable fraction of the Earth's atmosphere, or try to copy living systems into computer memory, or want to figure out if tossing a coin is really a 50-50 probability of heads-or-tails, or try to simulate phase transitions of 10^20 atoms, or diagonalize 200-billion X 200-billion matrices. Eventually, no matter how many cpus you add in parallel, you will fall short of the demand. The only way to have virtually unlimited computational power is to use the quantum properties of matter itself to process information.
Yeah, but that is the wrong kind of business model. It's reactionary, and typical of monoliths like Intel. Quantum Computing is not a nebulous theory, but a rapidly maturing field with thousands of research teams all across the academia. There are a few conceptual problems, like the Wigner Paradox problem or the classical coupling problem, but in the long run this represents the best possibility in the evolution of computing hardware. Wasting needless resources in cramming things into other dimensions (height) or closer together will only delay the inevitable, and when it comes, there will be no fallback, as there will have been no funding for QComp research, since they wasted it all in trying to fight back the laws of nature.
Page 1398 Section 5 Para 1. Aren't they making my point?
HUH?!?!?!!?
Are you from Bizzaro World?
None of this is relevant in the long run. Eventually, chip manufacturers will hit the blank wall of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. As you try to cram more transistors into smaller spaces (even in 3-D), you localize the electron wavefunctions (not to mention that cuttoff is achieved only if the electrons are in conduction bands, which will cease to exist if the transistors are too small). This means that they delocalise in Momentum space, and their Shannon entropy goes up, causing them to heat up drastically and eventually melt. Solid State Technology has taken us far enough, trying to stack chips will only prolong the inevitable. Researchers should focus on a fundamentally new method of computation, like using entangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilenger states or Bell states for computational purposes.
1. If computers can fly voyager, two men with even more (presumably) advanced computers can fly smuggling ships
2. heh
3. heh (String theorists will disagree, of course)
4. One can say that those sounds heard in the movies are not generated in space, but inside ships when they collide or when them turbolaser thingies strike them. The gunshots are also sounds transmitted thru hull metal when the guns fire or whatever, and remember that space isn't 100% vacuum.
5. Reminds me of a story of some guy who pointed out that bad guys in hollywood westerns would win if they just shot the horses. The director replies, 'but then we wouldn't have a movie'.
6. Maybe it's more of a Stephen Baxter style "Vacuum Diagram" type prophecy than anything bootstrapped from Hinduism/Buddhism/Judaism.
7. You forgot to mention the biggest damn problem. Why is there gravity in space? everybody in those ships stand upright & walk, and those ships don't have centrifuges or anything??????
Might want to read Stephen Baxter instead. He's a bit of a racist, but a good scifi writer who doesn't deviate too far from the laws of physics or common sense.
Best & most flexible way (I do this):
Get an ipaq or a Dell Axim or a sharp zaurus PDA with a cf expansion slot (if needed)
Install Familiar Linux or Openzaurus
Get a Holux GM-270 GPS Card (or anotherone here or here)
Install gpsdrive & enjoy
This way, no worrying about firmware incompatibilities, & if u buy an old ipaq h3600 from ebay your TCO can be less than $200
Hey isn't this better?
That way I can search multiple engines (incl google) w/out having an annoying extension slowing the browser down
I replied to tomhudson's reply-post on orbits, sorry for the misunderstanding.
Orbit= A Complete circuit???? Read Glodstein my friend (a REAL Physics book). It defines terms like parabolic and hyperbolic "orbits" , and they don't involve any closed circuits. An orbit is a any solution to the classical Coulombic potential.
Pi=3.1415926535897932384626433832795 That's as far as I can remember. I got it up to 200 once...
Latent heat, that's why. Oh, and yes, we don't understand how liquids boil either. At least, we can't explain these basic phase transitions usign models of spontaneous symmetry breaking like Landau did for more exotic phase transitions
>>>>>>As you approach the speed of light, your mass increases m = m0/sqrt(1 - v^2/c^2) <<<<<<<<<
AAARGHH!!! There is no such thing as relativistic mass! It's a pedagogical fiction invented by Bergmann, Einstein's graduate student (I wish I could go back in time to whack him in the head, but I like his textbook). Einstein never mentioned any $E=mc^2$ or whatever. The correct statement is that the application of constant force does not imply constant acceleration in relativity.
(sorry, my latex2html isn't working for some reason)
\begin{eqnarray*}
{
F^{\mu}&=& \frac{dp^{\mu}}{d\tau} \\
F^{\mu}&=& \frac{d}{d\tau}\left[m \frac{dx^{\mu}}{d\tau}\right] \\
F^{\mu}&=& m\gamma^2 \frac{d^2x^{\mu}}{d\tau^2} \\
\gamma^2 \frac{d^2x^{\mu}}{d\tau^2}&=& Constant\\
}
\end{eqnarray}
So if F is constant and $\gamma$ tends to $\infty$, then $\frac{d^2x^{\mu}}{d\tau^2}$ has to go to $0$ to compensate.
See? not so hard to understand when you lay out the math, and no need for al lthat relativistic mass increase crap. The only mass is rest mass, that's it!
Keep life simple, that's what I say
Oh, and to answer to the long post before about alternate views of STR wrt time moving, you don't need relativity to prove the Second law of thermodynamics. All you need to show is that, in a microcanonical ensemble, entropy is a nondecreasing function of volume. This is always true in ergodic systems that are isolated, relativity or not.
>>Except the US did not catalyze the rise of the Nazis (while, thanks to Pat Buchanan-types, the US sure sat back and watched them grow!)
s emitism/ford1.html a ust/IBM.html 7 995.asp d _and_Nazism
You might want to read some REAL history, intead of the redneck propaganda they tout in your public schools:
http://history.hanover.edu/hhr/99/hhr99_2.html
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holoc
http://aolsvc.bookreporter.aol.com/reviews/060960
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#Henry_For
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=23193426
http://www.answers.com/topic/appeasement
OK, the poms are more to blame for the last two, but they had already become a puppet regime of the Americans by then and Chamberlain could not have signed the Munich pact without the discreet endorsement of your government.
Bear in mind that British appeasement of Germeny ended when the Labour party came to power, the same people you hate as "commies".
>>>While the US did engender the Mujahadeen rebels in Afghanistan, it did not engender Al-Quada
Use spellchecker, it's Al Qaeda or Al-Qa'ida (using the standard phenomes characteristic to the Semitic family of languages).
Know your enemy before trying to defeat them.
And yes, Americans did engender Al-Qaeda. They existed back then too, and were it not for stinger missiles supplied by your country to their leaders, the Russians would have crushed Afghanistan like a bug. Were it not for that western-sympathising idiot Gorbachev and his obsession with weakenening Soviet power with all that Perestroika nonsense, Iran would be a puppet government under Soviet control, Afghanistan would be broken, there'd be no 9/11 today, and all nuclear technology would be in the hands of countries run by stable SANE people, intead of mad mullahs who will paint moons and stars on warheads and USE THEM!!!
zealot: a fervent and even militant proponent of an ideology
Etymology: Late Latin zelotes, from Greek zElOtEs, from zElos
I agree that the good Comrade general is not the best of leaders, and a bit blinded by his own zeal. The same is true for a country that catalysed the rise of an Aryanist Third Reich and engendered the Al-Qaeda Mujahiddeen just because they didn't like "them commies who'll conquer us with their errr... cigars".
CaymanIslandCarpedie: Don't bother trying to reason with zealots. You can only hope that they don't breed children.
Ok! Ok! I'm not some high priest Jihadi of the great temple of Linus Torvalds trying to redeem you from the heresy of BSD and into the righteous path of our Lord the Penguin. I was merely pointing out a possible solution to the question posed by the original poster, that's all.
Try this for a good (non-GUI) iptables frontend:
http://www.shorewall.net/
Works well, is very flexible, easier to config than iptables directly & has stock configs for multiple interface setups.
Run it with Mandrake mnf or ipcop & ur good to go.
That's a good point. However, the claims made above are either cases of priests screaming for the 4 horsemen of the christian apocalypse, or the political rantings of Rabochy Put. They are made with malicious intent in order to advance a political agenda. What I said was a simple statement of fact concluded from social observations and based on the dynamics of human interaction. They're not made with any malicious intent.
And that is not always the fate of all societies. A few cultures have endured for a long time, despite the vissicitudes of history. This is primarily due to checks and balances placed on their societies that prevent the dominance of a particular ideology. This has not happened with the United States. One ideology has started to dominate in their culture, creating a dogmatic society that can only result in their decline and fall. There is nothing that can be done to prevent this fall, but the effects and repercussions of that destruction can be minimized.
Actually, in that respect, the United States is a lot more like the erstwhile Roman Empire than the Third Reich.
Like the Roman Empire, the United States was founded on principles of basic freedom by political visionaries. Like the Roman Empire, the state was slowly lost to tyrants and murderers who used propaganda to energize the masses with ideas of racial and religious superiority and the concept of 'glory' or some abstract idea of creating a utopian society. Like with the Roman Empire, this never actually happened. Like the Romans, the United States started to decay with the growing power of Christians in the State, while simultaneously engaging in acts of excess and decadence as well as brutality towards those who chose not to subscribe to their idealogy. If we carry the comparison to it's logical conclusion, then, like the Roman Empre, this country is inevitably destined to collapse in civil war and anarchy and invasions from foreigners. In this respect, the Islamic zealots are a lot like the Goths, Vandals, and Huns who periodically ransacked Rome during her dying years. Like preying vultures and carrion crows, they sense the eventual destruction of this country and are trying to get in on the feast.
It's very sad that so many innocent people have to die before this happens, but American Society has lost whatever virility and worth it once had, and we should just let them pass into history and allow their civilization a dignified death.
History never repeats itself, but historical situations often recur. I can only hope that wheatever comes after isn't worse.
Thanks, but unlike my Vedic ancestors, I don't give a rat's ass about karma.
There are infinitely many phases of matter. I don't blame you for this misunderstanding. My chemistry teacher thought the same thing.
The thing is that a 'state' or phase of matter in itself doesn't mean anything. Phases are defined by the means of phase transitions. A Phase Transition is perceived as a qualitative change in the collective behaviour of a many-particle system. The phase transitions we do understand are the ones that can be explained by the Landau theory of spontaneous symmetry breaking of an order parameter. This interpretation is sufficiently generic to include many material states that can be called 'phases', like metals & insulators, superconductors & insulators & metals, smectic & nematic phases of liquid crystals and some really wierd ones.
Oh, and superfluidity & BEC are connected, they are not 2 DISTINCT phases as such. Fermionic superfluidity is actually the result of Bosinic Cooper Pairs of Fermions.
Also,wrt to the posts that say that this is a high temp system, High temperature doesn't mean high as in Fermi-temperature high. It's still low enough for the comments above to be qualitatively valid. I mean, 50 nanokelvin is still like a billion times colder than the vacuum of intergalactic space, and the 'superfluid' is still a Quantum Phase, that which has been achieved through a spontaneous symmetry breaking of the many-particle ground state, which could never be treated as a pure quantum state if the temp was THAT high. This is fundamental.
fr Temperature is not a scale of energy, it's a scale of information. It's a parameter that determines the statistical equilibruim of a system. Temperature is related to energy, but that fact is a derivable one, not one to be used in it's definition.
I'm not trying to be overtly pedantic. Just thought it bears mentioning, that's all.
Also, the truth of the matter is that, since only long wavelength terms matter in the immediate neighborhood of a phase transition (the ones that we understand, anyway), the study of low energy systems carries special importance over others, so that is one of the many reasons why we cool things. In addition, we want to see collective behavior which can be explained to a good degree by mappings into single-particle problems (which, when you think about it carefully, are the only problems that we REALLY can solve ab initio). This turns out to be very interesting in systems where strong correlations and quantum fluctuations dominate over thermal ones. With regards to this "new state of matter" and similar works done by the Ketterle Group and others, the primary advantage of these types of systems is their "tunability", both in terms of their effective dimensionality (controlled by lenticular magnetic traps that keep the energy gaps above the chemical potential in totally trapped directions), and in terms of the interactions, which, in this low temperature limit, can be approximated by the long wavelength terms in the Born expansion of the Lippmann Schwinger equation, ultimately leading to the possibility of changing the nature of the interaction itself by tuning a homogenous magnetic field close to a Feshbac resonance (the parent article explains this better), or by using optical systems to control the relative magnitude of tunneling terms over the "on-site" interactions. We've NEVER been able to do that so well in any solid-state system before.
That's why such systems are so vital to out understanding of condensed matter physics, because we can do many things to it with relative ease.
Heh, reminds me of a joke... A poultry farmer was puzzled by the fact that his chickens were dying for no apparent reason, so he called in a Biologist, a Chemist, and a Physicist to try to figure out what's going on. The Biologist took samples of blood and other bodily fluids from the chickens, made slides, studied them under a microscope, but found nothing awry. The Chemist did various qualitative and quantitative chemical analyses on the samples to look for any problems, but found none. Finally, all eyes were on the Physicist who, after spending a few minutes in deep thought, suddenly got very excited and started to scribble notes on a page. After a few more minutes, he shouted out "YES! I've solved it! I know what's happening, but it only works for spherical chickens in a vacuum at absolute zero."