Summary
In a programme first broadcast in 2013, Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss absolute zero, the lowest conceivable temperature. In the early eighteenth century the French physicist Guillaume Amontons suggested that temperature had a lower limit. The subject of low temperature became a fertile field of research in the nineteenth century, and today we know that this limit - known as absolute zero - is approximately minus 273 degrees Celsius. It is impossible to produce a temperature exactly equal to absolute zero, but today scientists have come to within a billionth of a degree. At such low temperatures physicists have discovered a number of strange new phenomena including superfluids, liquids capable of climbing a vertical surface.
With:
Simon Schaffer Professor of the History of Science at the University of Cambridge
Stephen Blundell Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford
Nicola Wilkin Lecturer in Theoretical Physics at the University of Birmingham
Producer: Thomas Morris
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
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| 0:36.0 | Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. |
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| 0:45.9 | the program. Hello the coldest natural temperature ever known on earth was recorded |
| 0:51.9 | 30 years ago at a Soviet research base in the Antarctic. |
| 0:55.6 | At a quarter to three in the morning, the thermometer registered minus 89.2 degrees |
| 1:00.7 | Celsius. Beyond our atmosphere, atmospheric can be dramatically colder even than this. |
| 1:05.6 | Astronomers believe that intersteller space is a temperature of around minus 270 degrees. |
| 1:11.2 | But the coldest temperatures yet known, colder even than space, have been created |
| 1:16.3 | artificially in the laboratory. Scientists have been creeping ever |
| 1:19.8 | closest to the lowest possible temperature known as absolute zero. The idea that temperature had a lower limit was first suggested in the 17th century. |
| 1:28.0 | The race for ever colder temperatures began 200 years later and has resulted in some of the strangest, most important |
| 1:35.2 | and useful discoveries of modern science. |
| 1:37.8 | But although physicists can get within a billions of a degree of absolute zero, they'll never quite get there. Why not? And why does |
| 1:45.3 | temperature have a minimum? With me to discuss absolute zero are Simon Schaffer, |
| 1:49.9 | professor of the history of science at the University of Cambridge, Stephen Blundell, Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, |
| 1:56.5 | and Nicola Wilkin, Lecture in Theoretical Physics at the University of Birmingham-Samshaffer. |
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