Has the ring of a Harry Potter novel’s title, doesn’t it? Well, it’s about physics. The history of the physics of cold, particularly its extremes. It’s a TV show on PBS’ Nova (based on the Tom Shachtman book of the same title), to appear this week, and it looks rather good! You can see the PBS website for it here. The good news is that this program has been a while in the making, with lots of physicists involved behind the scenes to get it right, so I’ve got my fingers crossed that it will not just be entertainment for the moment, but actually a rather good information resource (as well as being entertaining – the two are not mutually exclusive). It first airs on January 8th and 15th (there are two hours, one on each day). There are preview videos to look at on the website (sorry, can’t find any embedding wrappers) too. The program description is here, from which I quote:
The two-part special follows the quest for cold from the unlikely father of air-conditioning, the court magician of King James I of England in the 17th century, to today’s scientists pioneering superfast computing in the quantum chill near absolute zero—the ultimate extreme of cold at minus 273.15 C (minus 460 F).
Continuing…
Along the way, viewers learn about the invention of thermometers, the origin of the ice business in 19th-century New England, Clarence Birdseye’s fishing trip that led to the invention of frozen food, and a couple of cold-inspired scientific races towards absolute zero that ended in Nobel Prizes.
NOVA brings the history of this frosty subject to life with historical recreations of great moments in low-temperature research and interviews with noted historians and scientists, including Simon Schaffer of the University of Cambridge, and Nobel laureates Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman of the University of Colorado at Boulder and Wolfgang Ketterle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The program is based on the definitive book on cold: Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold by Tom Shachtman.
Enjoy!
-cvj
