Temperatures below absolute zero?
Posted: December 28th, 2020, 6:28 am
I woke up this morning to a 'popular science' programme on the radio (which had been on all night, doh!) discussing whether it was possible to have temperatures lower than absolute zero, 0 Kelvin.
Now obviously to me at least, and to the presenter team discussing it, the answer is 'no', as 0 Kelvin is when all the atoms have stopped moving. But their guest imminent scientist Cambridge Professor Wilkins said otherwise, sort of. He seemed to be describing an experiment with potassium which showed that as 0 Kelvin is approached, a sort of inversion can occur and the near stationary atoms 'flip' from a very cold state to a very hot state, thereby passing to the other side of 0 Kelvin but not passing through 0 Kelvin.
They went on to completely fail to explain properly other than than to say it is something to do with approaching 0 Kelvin requiring an infinite number of steps to actually get there. And as infinity is polarity conscious, i.e. infinity can be positive or negative, the potassium somehow skipped to being very hot thereby achieving a temperature on the far side of absolute zero, followed by much laughter and joking about it.
Now this makes no sense to me beyond seeing that quantum mechanics is involved here and nothing makes much sense where QM in involved. Do we have any physicists here that can perhaps translate what happened in that experiment into layman's language please?
The episode is here, FF to the last five or six minutes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3cszv6t
Edit to make a proper sentence out of a jumble.
Now obviously to me at least, and to the presenter team discussing it, the answer is 'no', as 0 Kelvin is when all the atoms have stopped moving. But their guest imminent scientist Cambridge Professor Wilkins said otherwise, sort of. He seemed to be describing an experiment with potassium which showed that as 0 Kelvin is approached, a sort of inversion can occur and the near stationary atoms 'flip' from a very cold state to a very hot state, thereby passing to the other side of 0 Kelvin but not passing through 0 Kelvin.
They went on to completely fail to explain properly other than than to say it is something to do with approaching 0 Kelvin requiring an infinite number of steps to actually get there. And as infinity is polarity conscious, i.e. infinity can be positive or negative, the potassium somehow skipped to being very hot thereby achieving a temperature on the far side of absolute zero, followed by much laughter and joking about it.
Now this makes no sense to me beyond seeing that quantum mechanics is involved here and nothing makes much sense where QM in involved. Do we have any physicists here that can perhaps translate what happened in that experiment into layman's language please?
The episode is here, FF to the last five or six minutes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3cszv6t
Edit to make a proper sentence out of a jumble.