"What happen to the matter inside the 0 K temperature system?". A question was asked in physics class during my high school years. Then the teacher explained since 0 K indicates absolute zero condition means the system will lose all its energy, and all the atoms will cease moving one another. The system will be perfectly static since it has no energy to move even in the atomic level.
Is it true? At that moment that explanation sounded true enough to be accepted. And the most interesting fact is while on earth the temperature is nice and cozy, but the average temperature of the universe is 2.73 K, just almost 3 more degree to absolute zero.
Ok, so what is the answer for that question? The answer is Bose-Einstein condensation. Recent news from NUS startled me since they claimed to have succeeded in doing the experiment. It means creating one of the coldest material in the universe!
The most interesting fact about Bose-Einstein condensation is at the low(est) temperature, the particles will start to behave strangely. The atoms will display wavelike property. And as the temperature goes down, the wave will grow longer and eventually overlap one another. And then the atoms will undergo an identity crisis means can be everywhere at once in one big quantum system(hmm strange..)? But anyway it is nothing like my high school teacher explanation.
It is amazing to trace backwards and see how far physics can go. Once Newton thought about gravity and the basic motion of objects, and then Einstein came up with relativity and the world's most famous equation E=mc^2.
Newton's equation will be enough to send men to the moon, but it is Einstein relativity theory that enables us to find out interesting fact that the current record holder of time travel is the Russian astronaut Sergei Krikalev, who spent more than eight hundred days whipping around the earth on board both the Mir Space Station and the International Space Station. So far he has aged about one-fifiteth a second less than us people of the earth.
At around the same time Einstein published his most famous work, Max Planck published a paper at 1900 while he was struggling to explain the spectrum of the radiation emitted by hot objects. The paper was a root to more exotic framework: quantum theory.
Max Planck was led to the idea that energy is not emitted in a continuous stream, but rather in discrete bundles of a particular size. In the next few decades (until now) quantum theory blossomed into a new system of mechanics that would replace Newton's mechanic especially for the atomic and sub-atomic world.
In a quantum system, the system can be in many states at once, but when we observe it, than the system collapses and we obtain a single and specific result. The most famous experiment is double slit experiment. That when we fire electrons through double slit, it display wavelike result. But when we observe the electron one by one closely while it passes the slit, it will behave like a normal particle.
So strange! But yet it's so true. Science enables us to see outward and observe enormous things such as black holes, stars, and supernovas. Yet in the same time it enables us to see inward and observe minuscule matters. Still so much wonders left in this boring world.
