X-Message-Number: 14060
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 00:59:40 -0400
From: "Stephen W. Bridge" <>
Subject: New book on the "conquest of Cold"

To CryoNet
From Steve Bridge
July 11, 2000

*Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold* by Tom Shachtman, Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1999.

I want to heartily endorse this book as an informative, readable, and
highly entertaining history of research into very cold temperatures.  The
author begins his history in 1620 with flamboyant Dutch magician Cornelis
Drebbel and his attempt to cool the Great Hall of Westminster Abbey on a
hot summer day.  Roger Bacon and Robert Boyle were the first scientists to
make a serious inquiry of the phenomenon of "cold," and Boyle's 1665 book
*New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold* was the first detailed
study ever published.  (Shachtman explains in detail why it was considered
improper and even frightening to study cold prior to the early 1600's.]

From there, the author explores the work and lives of such researchers as
Daniel Fahrenheit, Anders Celsius, Michael Faraday, Sadi Carnot,
Jean-Charles-Athanase Peltier, Lord Kelvin, Louis-Paul Caillet, James
Dewar, H.K Onnes, and many other scientists, at least in regards to their
work on low temperatures.  Especially useful to me was the constant
reminder of how these experiments and the understanding generated by them
affected nearly every aspect of both science and daily life in the 20th
century.  Of course there are obvious benefits such as frozen food and air
conditioning; but also the laws of thermodynamics, superconductivity, and
many principles of physics and electricity were discovered or confirmed
during the attempts to produce lower and lower temperatures.

I particularly enjoyed the way Shachtman brought these scientists to life,
with all of their rivalries and even dirty tricks, trying to steal the
limelight from each other.  For example, James Dewar regularly left out all
mention of his chief rivals whenever he wrote a history of cryogenic
research for periodicals or presentations.

The one regret I have is that Shachtman did not provide the same level of
detail and personal touch to his history of the quest for Absolute Zero in
the past 30 years -- but I suppose most of those people are still alive and
able to be directly offended.  (Never insult a person with the ability to
drop your temperature to 2 billionths of a degree Kelvin!)

The book is easily read with a good general science background -- there are
no equations, and the explanations of how the physics works are clear and
creative.  I was going to donate my copy to Alcor's library; but it was so
interesting and useful, I'll have to keep it myself.

Steve Bridge

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