The Disappearing Spoon: Chapter 16: Chemistry Way, Way Below Zero Summary & Analysis

There is still much more left to discover about the periodic table, but this increasingly involves conducting research at extreme temperatures. In 1911, Robert Falcon Scott and his group of “pale Englishmen” journeyed on what they hoped would be the first human expedition to reach the South Pole. However, when a dwindled group of five of them did manage to reach the pole, they were upset to find a Norwegian flag already there, along with a letter explaining that the Norwegians had beaten them to it by a month. The journey back was horrendous: the weather was especially bad and the men’s kerosene supply leaked onto their food, meaning they couldn’t cook the little food they had left or melt ice into drinking water. 

One of the team died from illness, while another went insane and walked off, never to be seen again. The remaining three are thought to have died of exposure in late March of 1912. Although no one knows the exact fate of the last three men, it is believed that the tin kerosene canisters they were carrying may have undergone an alpha-beta shift due to the cold, a process that can give a white rust-like appearance but is different from chemical rust. When tin experiences an alpha-beta shift, it weakens or disintegrates and can even make a kind of screaming sound. It’s possible that this is the reason why the kerosene leaked, dooming the mission. Scott and his men were thus arguably “victims at least in part of the periodic table.”

Elements do strange things when they get very cold and shift between the three states of matter (solid, liquid, and gas). In a solid state, atoms line up in crystal formations that can change shape. At very low temperatures, when elements that would usually be in gas form become solid, very strange behavior can result. Noble gases, for example, which usually would resist forming compounds, will react with other elements if they are cold enough. Yet there are still two—helium and neon—which scientists believe have never formed a compound, no matter how ultra-freezing their surroundings. 

For a long time, scientists believed that superconductors worked at low temperatures because the electrons—which flow across atoms without resistance in a superconductor—had more room to move. Yet in 1957, scientists realized that the qualities of electrons themselves change at these low temperatures. They connect closely to one another, helping them move extremely fast with no resistance. When elements are cooled even further, the atoms start to “overlap and swallow each other up.” This is called coherence.

As Albert Einstein famously demonstrated, light acts like both a wave and particles called photons. Light may travel faster than anything else in a vacuum, but other elements have the capacity to slow it down or change its direction. Lasers also manipulate light by artificially limiting where electrons can go when they jump between shells of the atom. The most powerful lasers that exist today can momentarily produce more power than the entire U.S. When they were first introduced in the 1950s, many scientists were deeply skeptical that they would work. However, this skepticism was founded in forgetting the particle/wave “duality of light.”

Contrary to what many people think, Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has almost nothing to do with affecting something simply by looking at it. The principle states that if a particle’s precise position is known then it’s impossible to precisely know its momentum—and vice versa. This imprecision has nothing to do with bad measurement or observation—it is actually a principle of the physical world. It is always basically impossible to know the location of any single photon inside a beam of light, which is why it is possible to precisely channel the energy inside a beam and make it into a laser. Furthermore, quantum physics indicates that on most fundamental and mysterious level, all matter behaves much more like a wave than one might assume.

In the 1920s, Satyendra Nath Bose, an Indian physicist, made a mistake while doing quantum mechanics equations in a lecture. Scientific journals refused to publish Bose’s findings, however, leaving Bose to resort to sending them to Einstein himself. Impressed, Einstein helped get Bose’s research published by placing it at the center a German-language paper he himself then wrote. In this paper, Einstein noticed that in theory, if atoms were cold enough they could condense into a new state of matter. However, at the time, it was technologically impossible to actually make atoms this cold.

The ability to do this came later, via the invention of lasers. Ultimately, Bose and Einstein’s theory was proven correct, although the Bose Einstein Condensate only managed to hold together for ten seconds before it combusted. At the same time, laser technology continues to advance. Soon scientists might be able to build “matter lasers” thousands of times more powerful than light lasers and “supersolid” ice cubes could pass through each other as solids.