Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold [Hardcover]

Tom Shachtman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1999

In a sweeping yet marvelously concise history, Tom Shachtman ushers us into a world in which scientists tease apart the all-important secrets of cold. Readers take an extraordinary trip, starting in the 1600s with an alchemist's air conditioning of Westminster Abbey and scientists' creation of thermometers. Later, while entrepreneurs sold Walden Pond ice to tropical countries -- packed in "high-tech" sawdust -- researchers pursued absolute zero and interpreted their work as romantically as did adventurers to remote regions. Today, playing with ultracold temperatures is one of the hottest frontiers in physics, with scientists creating useful particles Einstein only dreamed of. Tom Shachtman shares a great scientific adventure story and its characters' rich lives in a book that has won a grant from the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Absolute Zero is for everyone who loves history and science history stories, who's eager to explore Nobel Prize-winning physics today, or who has ever sighed with pleasure on encountering air conditioning.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Ancient minds imagined the benefits of technological advances that wouldn't be realized for hundreds of years: "heavier-than-air-flight, ultrarapid ground transportation, the prolongation of life through better medicines, even the construction of skyscrapers and the use of robots." But as Tom Shachtman points out in his Alfred P. Sloan-funded science history Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold, no one could conceive of how or why humans would make use of intense cold. "Cold was a mystery without an obvious source, a chill associated with death, inexplicable, too fearsome too investigate."

But as we now know, the mastery of cold has yielded innumerable advances, from the ubiquitous presence of refrigeration and air-conditioning to phenomenal leaps in superconductivity and subatomic research--in 1999 alone, Shachtman cites, a Harvard team used laser cooling to create an environment 50-billionths of a degree above zero, slowing the speed of light to just 38 miles per hour! Absolute Zero guides us skillfully through the fitful, nascent growth of this misunderstood, bastard branch of science, from the early accomplishments of Boyle, Joule, William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), and other lesser-knowns like Anders Celsius and Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit to the 20th century, the integration of ultracold research with quantum theory, and the most recent accomplishments in the field. Shachtman's approachable voice proves equally facile with both the science of cold and the mundane history of its technical and commercial uses, including the global ice trade and the work of one of cold's greatest commercial pioneers, a chemist named Clarence Birdseye. --Paul Hughes

From Publishers Weekly

This uneven narrative history of scientific and commercial cooling seeks to elucidate the very nature of cold. The concept that cold was simply the absence of heat was itself a long time coming. The 17th-century English natural philosopher Robert Boyle first disproved conventional beliefs that water and wind produced cold. Temperature could only be measured using rudimentary methods, as the thermometer took years to evolve into the mercury-filled glass unit we know today. (Documentary filmmaker Shachtman gives proper kudos to Gabriel Fahrenheit and Anders Celsius.) Shachtman then turns to the evolution of the natural ice business in the 19th century, which allowed frozen food to be carried hundreds of miles and enabled individuals to preserve fresh food at home. While the natural ice industry expanded, laboratory experiments attempted to determine the best way to travel to the "land of Frigor." Nineteenth-century European scientists believed that some combination of temperature and pressure could liquefy all the components of air, but the apparatus for condensing these gases proved increasingly complex and dangerous. First oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and, finally, the difficult-to-obtain element helium were liquefied in a series of contests, each race resulting in a few drops of precious fluid. Shachtman's book comes alive in his highly technical descriptions of the unique and wondrous properties of materials at only a few degrees above absolute zero. After describing the heyday of these experiments in the 1950s, Shachtman backtracks, racing through the technological advances in commercial cooling in the 20th century. At times concise, at other times meandering, this history holds the reader's interest by its intrinsically fascinating subject matter. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; None edition (December 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395938880
• ISBN-13: 978-0395938881
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,080,907 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Suffers from lack of diagrams and technical errors, January 8, 2000

By 

Jonathan A. Titus - See all my reviews

This review is from: Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold (Hardcover)

No figures? No diagrams? How can you tell an interesting story about the physics of low temperature without showing even simple line diagrams of some of the revolutionary apparatus used to reach such low temperatures? You'll find no photos of the main researchers, either, so you end up with names instead of personalities.

Characters pop in and out with confusing frequency, and I never got the feeling that some of them completely connect to the web of the story. Pioneer Carl Linde drops out on page 110 to reappear on page 153.

Technical errors, such as calling solid carbon dioxide "carbonic acid" (it's dry ice), and describing helium II, a low-temperature liquid, and then talking about helium-3, an isotope of helium, will confuse many readers. Esaki diodes haven't been called that in years--they're tunnel diodes. The errors don't detract from the main story, but technical people will find they get annoying.

An interesting story, but told in the form of "light" science. Was the author rushing to meet a deadline? Check it out of your library.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Explains the personalities, not the science, June 5, 2001

By 

Douglas M. Murphy "murfgolf" (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold (Paperback)

For a book with this much detail about such a complex topic not to have a single illustration, diagram, or equation cannot be an oversight. I'm not sure if the author really wants to give you the illusion that he is allowing you to understand the relevant physics or not. He delves endlessly into the upbringing of the various scientists, and fails miseraby at making lay people understand what it is they dicovered. Many times he mentions scienfic findings in a context that makes one wonder if the equation or experiment turned out to be a cornerstone of later discovery or a red herring. I therefore conjecture that this book was meant to be primarily a history of competition and petty bickering among academics, and the title refers to how much you will learn about the physical forces responsible for low temperatures. The comparisons to "Longitude", (an excellent book), are apt in that both books focus on the egos and disputes involved, but "Longitude" traces the fight over the lifespan of one man, who ultimately triumphs despite long odds. If that book had been carried through with the same tone until it became a breathless account of how Bullova can outsell Rolex in 1992, I would also have given it 2 stars.

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A history book, July 11, 2000

By 

Duwayne Anderson (Saint Helens, Oregon) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold (Hardcover)

One of the promotional statements on the book's jacket describes it as being similar to David Sobel's book "Longitude." I agree. There are some distinct similarities, and I think that if you liked "Longitude," you will probably enjoy "Absolute Zero" every bit as much.

Though this is a good book it's not quite what I was looking for. The book is strictly a history book, while I was looking for something that would have emphasized the scientific aspects more than Shachtman does. For example, the book describes the work by scientists to get as close as possible to absolute zero, but it never gives an adequate definition of what absolute zero really is. While it would have taken some mathematics and a little physics, a better description of the physics would have added considerably to this book. [For a good discussion of the physics - still at an introductory level - I suggest "Temperatures Very Low and Very High," by Mark W. Zemansky. This book, published by Dover, has only 127 pages. So the price is right, and it makes a nice companion volume (read it first) to Shachtman's book.]

Another thing that bothered me about this book is that it has no figures or illustrations. That's a big problem for a book that is constantly trying to describe this or that configuration of scientific equipment. There are at least a dozen places in the text where I found myself reading it and then reading it over again, trying to understand some convoluted description of apparatus when a simple diagram would have taken care of the problem.

A third problem I have with this book is the author's occasional lapse in describing scientific principles. For example, he describes quantum-mechanical tunneling as a process "in which the particles do not overcome the energy of the atoms in their way but instead find a route between the atoms in the wall." [p. 227] This is a very misleading description of quantum-mechanical tunneling. In another place he describes the speeds of particles in a particle accelerator: "physicists had relied for investigation of these latter particles on linear accelerators that raised the particles' speed to several thousand miles per hour and let them smash into obstacles, or each other, and disintegrate into interesting pieces." [p. 231] This statement has the particles in an accelerator traveling about the same speed as an SR-71 jet. In reality, particle accelerators move atomic particles at nearly the speed of light, or virtually 186,000 miles per second.

So my greatest objection to the book is that it was written by an historian and not a scientist.

But don't infer from my comments that I think this is a bad book. I really did like it, and found it engaging and difficult to put down. One of the best aspects of this book is the way it illustrates the conflict and competition between scientists. Sometimes there is a tendency to have an antiseptic view of science, in which noble individuals, in white coats, struggle against ignorance for the betterment of society. Not so. In reality there were intense rivalries and bitter feuds, and these are laid out bare in the human struggle that Shachtman describes in his story of the conquest of cold.

The book not only describes the historical progress among scientists, but also describes the influence that the technology of generating cold temperatures had on more practical aspects of society. There is some very interesting historical information about the natural-ice industry that existed prior to development of modern-day refrigeration, and how the ice was cut up at the end of the winter and put into storage, and then shipped to regions around the world.

There are also stories about how the invention of modern refrigeration facilitated settling in the southern portions of the United States. Mostly, though, the stories focus on the scientists who spent their lives and sometimes livelihoods trying to get closer and closer to absolute zero.

The book is pretty up to date, and includes historical developments around the invention of high-temperature super conductors (high temperature, in this case, being over 77 K, which is the temperature at which nitrogen liquefies). There is also some history around the verification of the Bose-Einstein condensate at 170 billions of a degree K.

Overall I think this is a fine book. It was certainly captivating, well written, and enjoyable.