Baby, it's cold inside

""We're going to study matter at temperatures far colder than are found naturally," says Rob Thompson of JPL. He's the Project Scientist for NASA's Cold Atom Lab, an atomic 'refrigerator' slated for launch to the ISS in 2016. "We aim to push effective temperatures down to 100 pico-Kelvin."

100 pico-Kelvin is just one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero, where all the thermal activity of atoms theoretically stops. At such low temperatures, ordinary concepts of solid, liquid and gas are no longer relevant. Atoms interacting just above the threshold of zero energy create new forms of matter that are essentially ... quantum.

Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics that describes the bizarre rules of light and matter on atomic scales. In that realm, matter can be in two places at once; objects behave as both particles and waves; and nothing is certain: the quantum world runs on probability.

It is into this strange realm that researchers using the Cold Atom Lab will plunge."

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I sometimes envision our social relationships, as a species, in the same manner.

The turmoil of the sun's surface versus the relative seeming peace of the moon. The moon a dead thing, essentially, of course.

As similar to the huge cultural differences amongst the various cultures in the world, versus two people, of any culture, strangers, sitting on a park bench, or on a plane, or a Greyhound. Mostly we ignore the opportunity to learn of another, preferring instead our fortified castle. Sometimes though, through what quirk I know not, we talk.

-XRay