Science Niblets

Have you ever wondered why heavy steel ships float and don't sink? Plain steel would sink in water immediately, as would a wrecked steel ship like the Titanic or the more recently sunken Costa Concordia in Italy. But an intact ship floats.

Absolut Zero

When the atoms or molecules wouldn't have any motion at all, the temperature couldn't drop any further and it therefore couldn't become any colder. Here, we have the absolute minimum temperature, which is -459.67 °F (-273.15 °C). The scientific unit, kelvin, now becomes very handy, because the lowest possible temperature ever is exactly 0 K. This temperature is called the absolute zero.

But it gets a little bit more complicated, because the temperature 0 kelvin can never be reached. This is true both theoretically as well as in reality, because there are always some motions of the atoms or molecules. Atoms and molecule never completely stand still, as would be the case at 0 kelvin. You can approach 0 K, and there are always new records on how close you can get to 0 kelvin, but the temperature will always be above 0 K. Currently, the record for the lowest reached temperature is 500 picokelvin (0.0000000005 kelvin), which scientists reached in a low temperature laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003.

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The lowest temperature ever recorded on the earth was -128.6°F (-89.2°C) at the Vostok Station on the Antarctic on July 21, 1983. The lowest temperature in the universe is roughly -453.8 °F (-269.9°C), which occurs far away from any heat emitter like the sun. But this article is not only about the lowest temperatures ever occurring. No, I'm also writing about the lowest temperature possible at all.

It's all over the news: scientists from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, may have found particles which travel faster than light. (See the New York Times Article Tiny Neutrinos May Have Broken Cosmic Speed Limit.) Why is this a big deal?