Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold
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Chapter 2
Barbara Shapiro's Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England, 1983, puts the Bacon-Boyle era, and its science, into perspective. The Works of Francis Bacon, in seven volumes, with notes by his disciples, was published between 1857 and 1859. Robert Boyle's New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold, 1665, is still a treat to read. Among the biographies of Bacon, Catherine Drinker Bowen's Francis Bacon, The Temper of a Man, 1963, slightly updated in 1993, is the most insightful, though it pays less attention to the scientific side than to the political. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaeffer's Leviathan and the Air Pump, 1985, analyzes the acerbic exchanges of Hobbes and Boyle; those authors' view of Boyle is countered in the best recent biography of Boyle, Mary-Rose Sargent's The Diffident Naturalist, 1995. The definitive study The Royal Society: Concept and Creation is by Margery Purver, with an introduction by Hugh Trevor-Roper, 1967.
Chapter 3
W. E. Knowles Middleton's books A History of the Thermometer and Its Use in Meteorology, 1966, and The Experimenters, A Study of the Accademia del Cimento, 1971, are exhaustive and thoughtful; a supplement is Maurice Daumas's Scientific Instruments of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 1972. Other references include Harold Acton's The Last Medici, 1932, and Christopher Hibbert's Rise and Fall of the House of Medici, 1974. Fahrenheit's 1729 letter to Boerhaave is put into context by the rest of the series, annotated by Pieter van der Star, in Fahrenheit's Letters to Leibniz and Boerhaave, 1983. Detective work on Fahrenheit's scale can be found in various articles in Isis and in Nature. The topic of "Antecedents of Thermodynamics in the Work of Guillaume Amontons" is analyzed by G. R. Talbot and A. J. Pacey in Centaurus, 1971, and by Robert Fox in The Culture of Science in France, 1700–1900, 1992, which also recounts the history of the Académie des Sciences. Robert Hooke's work is the subject of a lecture by E. N. da C. Andrade before the Royal Society, printed in its Proceedings, 1950. Anders Celsius, a biography by N. V. E. Nordenmark, was issued in 1936.
Chapter 4
Richard O. Cummings's The American Ice Harvests, 1949, and Oscar Edward Anderson, Jr.'s Refrigeration in America, 1963, are invaluable, as are Xavier de Planhol's L'Eau de Neige, 1995; Roger Thevenot's A History of Refrigeration Throughout the World, 1987; and W. R. Woolrich's The Men Who Created Cold, 1967. Early refrigeration machines are detailed in Edward W. Bryn's The Progress of Invention, 1900, and in Robert Maclay's chapter, "The Ice Industry," in Chauncey Depew's One Hundred Years of American Commerce, 1895. Henry G. Pearson's seminal paper "Frederic Tudor, Ice King," which quotes liberally from Tudor's diaries, is in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1933. Several articles about Gorrie and Twining are in the pages of Ice and Refrigeration and The Florida Historical Quarterly. Faraday's experiments are detailed in John Meung Thomas's Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution, 1991.
Chapters 5–6
Michel Serres sets the historical scene in "Paris 1800" in his A History of Scientific Thought, 1995. Robert Fox, in The Caloric Theory of Gases, 1971, traces the history of that wonderfully misleading concept. Sadi Carnot's Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu, 1824, is still in print. Hippolyte Carnot's memoir of his brother, along with Sadi's beautifully handwritten post-1824 notes, 1878, make fascinating reading. Good secondary sources are Sadi Carnot, Physicien et les Carnots Dans L'Histoire by A. Friedberg, 1978; Carnot et la Machine a Vapeur by Jean-Pierre Maury, 1986; and two articles by Robert Fox on Carnot, Clément, and work on steam engines, reprinted in his 1992 book The Culture of Science in France, 1700–1900. Robert Mayer and the Conservation of Energy, by Kenneth L. Caneva, 1993, tells more than anyone might want to know about the enigmatic doctor. Scientific Papers of James Prescott Joule, 1887, are now more available, thanks to a recent reprinting. James Joule, A Biography, by Donald'S. L. Cardwell, 1989, and Cardwell's earlier From Watt to Clausius, 1972, are essential reading about the history of thermodynamics, as is Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise's Energy and Empire, 1989, the best biography of Lord Kelvin. Two other studies are Harold I. Sharlin's Lord Kelvin, The Dynamic Victorian, 1979, and David B. Wilson's Kelvin and Stokes, 1987. For those undaunted by mathematics, there is C. A. Truesdell Ill's The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics, 1822–1854,1980, and, for unrivaled clarity, various articles and book chapters on the same subject by Crosbie Smith. Daniel D. Pollock's article "Thermo electricity" in the Encyclopedia of Physical Science and Technology 1987, evaluates Thomson's contributions to the subject, and Joule-Thomson cooling is historically traced in Graham Walker's Miniature Refrigerators for Cryogenic Sensors and Cold Electronics, 1989. Bernice T. Eiduson's study Scientists: Their Psychological World, 1962, offers insightful observations.
Chapters 7–12
The clearest and most cogent book to deal with the entire subject of gas liquefaction and superconductivity is the second edition of Kurt Mendelssohn's The Quest for Absolute Zero, 1977. Other essential texts for this period are Per F. Dahl's Superconductivity: Its Historical Roots and Development, 1992; Gianfranco Vidali's Superconductivity: The Next Revolution? 1993; and Ralph G. Scurlock's History and Origins of Cryogenics, 1993. A supplement is Jean Matricou's La Guerre du Froid, 1994.
Cailletet's communications to the Académie des Sciences are salted through several volumes of its Comptes Rendus and its Annales de Chimie. Maurice P. Crosland's Science Under Control: The French Academy of Sciences, 1795–1914, 1992, is the definitive study of that institution during its most distinguished and influential period. Additional insight is provided by Crosland's Studies in the Culture of Science in France and Britain Since the Enlightenment, 1995. Gwendy Caroe, who spent her youth living in the Royal Institution, has written the best short book on it, The Royal Institution, An Informal History, 1985.
The Collected Papers of Sir James Dewar, in two volumes, 1927, was edited by his wife and several colleagues and includes such matter as newspaper reportage of his speeches where no other written material exists. Important supplements are articles by Agnes M. Clerke and by Henry E. Armstrong in the Proceedings of the Royal Institution, 1901 and 1909, which analyze the low-temperature research. Armstrong's longer memoir, James Dewar, 1924, is the most significant source of biographical information. Morris Travers's two books, The Discovery of the Rare Gases, 1936, and A Life of Sir William Ramsay, 1956, discuss the Ramsay-Dewar controversies. Tadeusz Estreicher's chapter "The Siamese Twins of Polish Science," referring to Olszewski and von Wrôblewski, is in Great Men and Women of Poland, edited by Stephen P. Mizwa, 1942.
Carl Linde's autobiography Aus Meinem Leber und Meinem Arbeit, 1979, is explicated in Mikael Hard's Machines Are Frozen Spirit, 1994. Robert J. Soulen wrote about Dewar's flask in Physics Today, 1996. Some of the Dewar-Onnes correspondence is printed in an English edition of the selected papers of the Communications from the Physical Laboratory at Leiden, entitled Through Measurement to Knowledge, edited by Kostos Gavroglu and Yorgos Goudaroulis, 1991. More of it exists in manuscript at the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden. Anne C. Helden's pamphlet "The Coldest Spot on Earth," 1989, is a reliable guide to Onnes's procedures. Additional light is shed on Kamerlingh Onnes's contributions by Rudolf de Bruyn Ouboter in various recent articles, and in a chapter of the Gavroglu book. Leo Dana's memoir of his year with Onnes is in Cryogenic Science and Technology, edited by R. J. Donnelly and A. W. Francis, 1985. Another good source of biographical information is a memorial lecture by Ernest Cohen in Journal of the Chemical Society, 1927. The discovery of superfluidity is well covered in an article by Donnelly in Physics Today, July 1955.
The work and lives of Pyotr Kapitsa and Lev Landau are best traced, in English, by a translation of Anna Livanova's 1980 memoir Landau, A Great Physicist and Teacher, and by such books as Kapitza: Life and Discoveries, 1984, by F. B. Kedrov, and Kapitza, Rutherford, and the Kremlin, 1985, by Lawrence Badash.
Chapter 13
In Frozen Foods: Biography of an Industry, 1963, E. W. Williams tackles the subject with an insider's knowledge, as d
oes a lecture by Clarence Francis of General Foods, "A History of Food and Its Preservation," 1937, which details the work of Clarence Birdseye. Gail Cooper's Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900–1960,1998, deals properly with a neglected subject. The growth of the cryogenics industry and of the commercial use of liquefied gases is traced in David Wilson's Super-cold, 1979. In Biophysics and Biochemistry at Low Temperatures, 1986, the topic is examined by Felix Franks. The "Woodstock of Physics" era and high-critical-temperature superconductivity are the subjects of a handful of books, the best of them being Bruce Schecter's The Path of No Resistance, 1989, and Robert M. Hazen's Breakthrough, 1988. Articles about superconductivity in the decade after the 1987 breakthrough are found in issues of Scientific American, Science, Physics Today, and other journals, as well as in the science sections of the New York Times. The nexus of low-temperature physics, particle physics, and astronomy is detailed in Near Zero: New Frontiers of Physics, edited by J. D. Fairbank, et al., 1988, and especially in William Fairbanks's chapter, "Some Thoughts on Future Frontiers of Physics." Information on commercial work in superconductivity and liquefied gases comes from Web sites of the United States Department of Energy and the various industrial companies involved in these endeavors, and information on recent advances in various fields utilizing low-temperature research is taken from the Web sites of MIT and other universities and from newspaper reports. Contemporary work on cooling techniques for electronic equipment is gleaned from Win Aung's edited compilation for the National Science Foundation, Cooling Techniques for Computers, 1991; Thermal Measurements in Electronics Cooling, edited by Kaveh Azar, 1997; and the proceedings of the American Institute of Physics, Thirteenth International Conference on Thermoelectrics, 1995.
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Index
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* The freezing point of water did become an acknowledged fixed point in the minds of scientists and instrument makers for many years, until it was determined in the nineteenth century that the melting point of ice, which is slightly different, was a more precise reference location.
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* Another hundred years would elapse before French physicist and chemist Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac would definitively refine this notion into the law that at constant pressure, all gases have the same coefficient of expansion.
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* Evans inspired two other attempts at refrigeration. He corresponded with the English inventor Richard Trevithick, who in 1828 also proposed a refrigerating machine based on Evans's work, a machine that was never built; and he exchanged letters with Jacob Perkins, an American expatriate in London, who patented an Evans-type device in 1834 and for a while made ice from a barge that floated on the Thames. Unable to generate much enthusiasm for his product, Perkins failed commercially; as events would later show, the venture was about thirty years ahead of its time.
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*Gorrie also recommended draining the swamps to remove the local cause of malaria, even before the principal transmitter of the disease, the swamp-born mosquito, had been identified as its carrier.
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* Carnot's rejection of caloric in his post-1824 notes was one reason why the Académie des Sciences was eager to publish them in 1878, even though it had ignored Carnot during his lifetime. The second reason was that the notes showed clearly that a Frenchman had preceded all the German and English scientists in coming to understandings of both the first and second laws of thermodynamics.
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*The explanation for this eluded the generation of Seebeck and Peltier and was approached later by Kelvin. See chapter 6, [>].
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*By "imponderable," Mayer meant weightless.
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* The figure for absolute zero was eventually refined to—273.15°C.
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* Also made forcefully by Helmholtz in 1847.
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* Their initial idea was to test a hypothesis put forth by Mayer, with which both Joule and Thomson disagreed. By this time, Mayer had gained some respect as a theorist, and, after having spent the previous five years doing nothing more mentally strenuous than cultivating his garden in Heilbronn, he had recovered his sanity; he also had won a new champion in Great Britain, John Tyndall of the Royal Institute, who began to tout the insights of Mayer and to belittle the contributions of Joule. Tyndall disliked Joule for having caught and exposed an important error in one of Tyndall's papers, which embarrassed the flamboyant Tyndall. Eventually, this contretemps would provoke a battle over who had been the first to announce the conservation of energy, a battle in which Thomson came galloping to the defense of Joule, to the latter's great satisfaction.
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*It would develop no heat because nothing would resist its passage—resistance is what produces heat in electrically conductive wires, in, for example, the coils of a conventional electric toaster when they are activated. And if there was no heat, no energy would be dissipated.
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* True to his word, Lennox returned to the Royal Institution after Dewar's death in 1923.
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*Liquid helium had to be transferred from the vessel in which it had been collected at the end of the liquefaction process, by means of a specially constructed siphon—cooled and isolated from the environment—and held in another vessel, one large enough to also contain measuring apparatus for whatever experiment was being conducted and a stirrer to ensure uniformity of temperature in the liquid helium.
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*The theory also had portions that made reference to the vibration of molecular particles; more about this aspect later in the chapter.
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* In the same issue of Nature as Kapitsa's first letter about the flow of helium II was a similar and equally revelatory letter on the same subject by John Allen and his Cambridge graduate student Donald Misener.
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*The Fermi surface is not a real surface but a geometric description of the behavior of conducting electrons in a solid. A "surface" of constant energy, it separates energy states filled with certain kinds of electrons from those that are unfilled. At absolute zero, those particles with a certain spin would fill all the available energy levels up to the Fermi surface, but none above that. The absence of these particles is a characteristic of a substance in the superconducting state; in contrast, a substance in a normal conducting state has plenty of electrons of several kinds, which are the basis of normal resistivity.
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*A similar notion occurred independently and simultaneously to physicist Herbert Frölich while on a sabbatical year at Purdue University. Frölich's theory also predicted the isotope effect before it was discovered.
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*Perhaps the most important of these was the 1995 discovery of the "top quark." Decades earlier theorists had predicted six different kinds of quarks. Five "flavors" had been found and identified in the 1970s: the pairs up and down, strangeness and charm, and the single one called bottom. Thus the last to be discovered was the other half of the third pair, called the top quark.
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