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NOVA Absolute Zero Video Questions
1)What substance did Cornelius Drebbel use to lower the temperature of ice when he produced artificial cold for King James?______
2)If he had written down how he performed his great stunt, Drebbel would have gone down in history as the inventor of ______.
3)What fictional character does Simon Schaffer (the “frigorific guy”) remind you of?______
4)What scientist carefully weighed barrels of water, then froze them and weighed them again to demonstrate that cold is not a substance?______
5)The first temperature scale to be widely adopted was devised by ______, a gifted instrument maker who made thermometers for scientists and physicians across Europe.
6)Fahrenheit was able to make his thermometer quite small because he used ______instead of alcohol or air.
7)Anders Celsius’s original temperature scale had the boiling point of water as ______and the freezing point of water as ______.
8)In one stroke, Guillaume Amontons had realized that although temperatures might go on rising forever, they could only fall as far as this absolute point, now known to be ______degrees centigrade. For him, this was a theoretical limit, not a goal to attempt to reach.
9)What researcher carried out experiments to support the erroneous idea that heat was a substance, a weightless fluid that he called “caloric”? ______
10)Count Rumford’s experiments with cannon boring showed that heat must be a form of ______, and heat is not a substance because you could generate indefinitely large amounts of heat simply by turning the cannon.
11)During the French Revolution, ______was beheaded in the guillotine. His wife married Count Rumford, his biggest rival. She was very cold-hearted! (Get it?)
12)______performed experiments in which chlorine and ammonia were used to cool the surrounding air.
13)William Thomson, who would later become Lord ______, was impressed by Sadi Carnot’s ideas on thermodynamics.
14)______’s work mattered because it was the first time that anyone had convincingly measured the exchange rate between movement and heat. He proved the existence of something that converts between heat and motion—that something was going to be called "energy"—and it's for that reason that the basic unit of energy in the new international system of units is named after him, the ______.
15)______vastly improved people’s lives by keeping produce and groceries cool allowing people to go to the store once a week instead of every day.
16)Who froze a rubber ball by immersing it in liquid oxygen? ______
17)It was not until 1873 that a Dutch theoretical physicist, ______, finally explained why these gases were not liquefying. By estimating the size of molecules and the forces between them, he showed that to liquefy these gases using pressure, they each had to be cooled below a critical temperature. At last, he had shown the way to liquefy the so-called “permanent gases” was to cool them.
18)James Dewar felt that ______was the last of the “permanent gases” to be liquefiedin the vicinity of – 250°C. He was wrong.
19)In 1908, Kamerlingh Onnes came closer than anyone else in history to absolute zero. He succeeded in producing liquefied ______at a temperature of – 268°C. This monumental achievement eventually won Onnes the Nobel Prize – and really ticked off James Dewar! Dewar went “frigorically” crazy and started playing with soap bubbles.
20)Onnes then began investigations on how materials conduct electricity at very low temperatures. This phenomenon is called ______.
21)At 2 degrees above absolute zero, liquid helium turns into a ______.
22)______cooling was a new tool that had the potential to reduce the temperature of a gas to within a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero.
23)June 5th, 1995 turned out to be a big day in the history of physics. The UC-Boulder group seemed to have made what Einstein had theorized 70 years before, a Bose-Einstein ______.
24)Within weeks of the Boulder group's success, Wolfgang Ketterle produced an even larger condensate from ten million ______atoms slowed down to a virtual standstill, causing their wave functions to overlap, to produce an entirely new state of matter. It was something that could be seen with the naked eye.
25)For the pioneers who had realized Einstein's dream and created condensates, it was the end of an extraordinary decade of physics. Now there was a new challenge: to work out what to do with them. At Harvard, a Danish scientist, Lene Hau, had the idea of using a condensate to slow down ______.
26)One day, ultra-cold atoms will probably be used to store and even process information. Even now, cold atoms are being turned into prototype quantum ______.
27)It's been a remarkable journey for scientists, into unknown territories far beyond the narrow confines of earth. On the Kelvin temperature scale, which begins at absolute zero, the temperature of the Sun is around ______Kelvin. At 1,000 Kelvin, metals melt. At 300, we reach what we think of as room temperature. Air liquefies at 100 Kelvin, hydrogen at 20, helium at four Kelvin. The deepest outer space is ______degrees above absolute zero.
28)Getting to absolute zero is tough. Nobody's actually been there at absolute 0.000000 (with an infinite number of zeros). That last little tiny bit of heat becomes harder and harder to get out. And, in particular, the timescales for getting it out get longer and longer and longer, the smaller and smaller the amounts of energy involved. So eventually, if you're talking about extracting an amount of energy that's sufficiently small, it would indeed take the age of the ______to do it. Also, you'd need an apparatus the size of the ______to do it, but that's another story.
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Nova Absolute Zero Video Questions