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NOVA; Absolute Zero: The Race For Absolute Zero

12/06/2007

HV (home video) Master 16x9 FHA

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Series

NOVA

Program

Absolute Zero: The Race For Absolute Zero

Program Number

3505

Series Description

Premiered March 1974 NOVA is a general-interest documentary series that addresses a single science issue each week. Billed as "science adventures for curious grown-ups" when it first aired in March, 1974, NOVA continues to offer an informative and entertaining approach to a challenging subject. 1996 marked NOVA's 23rd season, which makes it the longest-running science program on national television. It is also one of television's most acclaimed series, having won every major television award, most of them many times over. Series release date: 3/3/1974

Program Description

Part Two, "The Race For Absolute Zero," picks up the story in the late 19th century, when researchers plunged cold science to new lows as they succeeded in reaching the forbidding realm at which oxygen and then nitrogen liquefy. The master of this technology was Scottish chemist James Dewar, who pursued the holy grail of the field—liquefying hydrogen at minus 253 C, just 20 degrees above absolute zero. When he succeeded, he faced the unexpected and even more daunting challenge of liquefying the newly discovered gas helium at a mere 5 degrees above absolute zero. However, he had a talented competitor—Danish physicist Heike Onnes—and the ensuing race to the bottom of the temperature scale was as zealous as the contemporaneous race to the Earth's poles.

The end of the 20th century produced another low-temperature contest. No one had ever seen an exotic form of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate, which only forms at temperatures vanishingly close to absolute zero. But new techniques developed in the 1990s by Daniel Kleppner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set the stage for a race to create this truly bizarre substance—and with it win the latest heat in the quest for cold.

Duration

00:56:46

Asset Type

Broadcast program

Media Type

Video

Genres

Documentary

Topics

Science

Citation

Chicago: “NOVA; Absolute Zero: The Race For Absolute Zero,” 12/06/2007, GBH Archives, accessed October 14, 2024, http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_D8B2513DF58D4FA39F7A38FE6A35D3AF.

MLA: “NOVA; Absolute Zero: The Race For Absolute Zero.” 12/06/2007. GBH Archives. Web. October 14, 2024. <http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_D8B2513DF58D4FA39F7A38FE6A35D3AF>.

APA: NOVA; Absolute Zero: The Race For Absolute Zero. Boston, MA: GBH Archives. Retrieved from http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_D8B2513DF58D4FA39F7A38FE6A35D3AF