Educating Carlton: Part 2

Thinking outside the box

In part 1 I talked a bit about Boss-Einstein Matter. Producing it required temperatures on the scale of 1/1000th of a degree absolute, maybe even colder. In the box thinking says that to make something cold use something colder. If I want cold tea I start with tea at 78F and add ice at 20F and wind up with tea pretty close to 32F. In the northern latitudes this is easy. Put out water in winter, get ice. Making things colder than anything we have presents a problem for in-the-box minds. How do I get ice at the equator? Here we begin with those outside thinkers. Someone observed the cooling nature of evaporation. Water evaporating cooled some amount. Ammonia evaporating cooled more. An enclosed evaporating system was produced that could make ice at the equator. Be careful about leaks. But then we wanted something colder, and colder, and colder. We can produce a really cold artificial heat sink to draw heat off of our matter, but still can’t get to the necessary temperatures with evaporation. (notable: this has become inside the box thinking, but that’s only because it has become common.) To get even colder let’s break away and talk about sound. Let’s say we want it to be quiet. In-the-box thinking says we stop the sources of noise. If you’re driving in the car and need to talk on the phone, park the car. Thankfully, there are those outside thinkers. To make things quiet add sound. Not intuitively obvious. Noise cancelling technology adds in a sound that nullifies ambient noise. A brilliant application of wave theory. When an unwanted sound wave is producing a pressure on your eardrum have a speaker produce a sound wave that applies a negative pressure of the same magnitude. The net is zero pressure on the eardrum and virtual quiet, even though it’s really quite loud. To get colder than we can through evaporation we do the same thing. Except with lasers. And it’s cumulative. So I’d better break away again. We’ve all seen boxing. Boxers train. They use heavy bags. Heavy bags swing. So let’s say there’s a heavy bag swinging and you want to stop it. There’s a pendulum thing going on here, and you have a flexible rod. There’s only so much force you can apply with it, because it flexes. As the bag swings up toward you and gets almost to the top of its arc hit it with the rod. You just imparted a little bit of energy on the bag that acted to lessen it’s overall amount of energy. The bag’s backswing will now be a little less than it would have been, so will the next fore swing. Again, as it nears the top of it’s swing hit it. Keep doing this. The bag will come to a stop. Same bag, same initial energy. Without you hitting it with your little rod it will come to a stop – due to air resistance and friction in its chain – in, let’s say 100 swings. With you hitting it, at appropriate times so that the energy you add works against the system energy and has the effect of lessening it, the bag stops in 70 swings. So adding energy to a system, in the correct way, can cancel some of the system energy. Back to our lasers and cold. Temperature is a measure of the random motion in a system. In our really cold system that is atomic oscillations. Those oscillations are at a fixed frequency. Think cesium oscillations for an atomic clock. Using lasers tuned to the correct frequency we get photons striking the atoms at just the right time to dampen the oscillations. By dampening the oscillations we lessen the amount of random motion in the system. Temperature is driven down below the temperature of anything we have by adding energy to the system. We have achieved what is impossible to the in-the-box mind. Get out of the box. It is errant thinking to say “we can’t” based on “we haven’t.” Instead go with the truth: “we haven’t, yet” because “we haven’t, yet.”