An Absolutely Chilling Start to 2013

The title of this article refers not to the temperature in my neck of the woods: Montreal, Canada.  The mild weather here (6 degrees Celsius) makes one question whether the season is winter.  Neither does the title refer to the average temperature on planet Earth, which continues to rise steadily.  This article is about exciting new research being conducted at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, where Ulrich Schneider and others have brought the temperature of some Potassium atoms to sub-zero... Kelvin.

Like me, you were probably taught in some introductory science course that the minimum temperature for matter of any kind was zero Kelvin, a temperature called 'absolute zero' (corresponds to -273.15 degrees Celsius - slightly colder than a bad day in Winnipeg).  The Kelvin scale is based on this minimum measurement.

We often find in science that certain boundaries may be crossed.  What Schneider and his colleagues have done is helped coax a gas to sub-absolute-zero temperatures, if only for a short while.  As many 20th and 21st century science discoveries, this phenomenon centers around quantum physics, which correctly asserts that things are not quite as they seem.  Unlike Newtonian physics, which incorrectly assumes that the state of matter has one absolute value, quantum physics views matter in the way of probability functions.  Without getting too deep into that now, let us agree for the moment that quantum physics is bizarre and not intuitive 100% of the time.