Heat, Energy, Motion and Absolute Zero

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Isn't the reason that absolute zero is unattainable is because heat is motion and everything is always in motion, and that it is impossible to "immobilize" anything? We spin this scientifically to say that it would require an infinite amount of work to reach absolute zero. Okay. But in layman's terms it's because motion is a fundamental component of the universe and as such is impossible to remove? Is that basically correct?

 

[bilby]

Isn't the reason that absolute zero is unattainable is because heat is motion and everything is always in motion, and that it is impossible to "immobilize" anything? We spin this scientifically to say that it would require an infinite amount of work to reach absolute zero. Okay. But in layman's terms it's because motion is a fundamental component of the universe and as such is impossible to remove? Is that basically correct?

An immobile particle would have a known position and momentum.

Heisenberg demonstrated that this isn't a possible situation.

A particle with zero momentum could be literally anywhere. It would be very unlikely to be in your refrigeration apparatus.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Isn't the reason that absolute zero is unattainable is because heat is motion and everything is always in motion, and that it is impossible to "immobilize" anything? We spin this scientifically to say that it would require an infinite amount of work to reach absolute zero. Okay. But in layman's terms it's because motion is a fundamental component of the universe and as such is impossible to remove? Is that basically correct?

Absolute zero is impossible because of virtual particles. John Wheeler's quantum foam.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Absolute zero is impossible because of virtual particles. John Wheeler's quantum foam.

Okay. Thank-you. Not going to respond by jumping back on my hobby horse because I think that agrees with the OP.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

And how do you extract that last bit of energy? No matter what your cooling system the energy must flow somehow, if there's energy flow you don't have 0K, if there's no flow how do you remove the last bit?

 

[bilby]

But is it not written: "Everything is going to be 0K"?

 

[steve_bank]

Coldest temperature ever recorded in a lab
The exact temperature scientists measured was 38 trillionths of a degree above -273 degrees Celsius — the closest that has ever been measured to absolute zero in a lab.Oct 20, 2021

I have not looked at the test set up. I'd look at the experimental error analysis.

Even in a vaccumm there is radiative energy trasnfer. I don;t see how you can completly isolate what you are cooling.

 

[Jarhyn]

Absolute zero is impossible because of virtual particles. John Wheeler's quantum foam.

Okay. Thank-you. Not going to respond by jumping back on my hobby horse because I think that agrees with the OP.

Well, that's the thing. Zero energy and zero moment mean it's everywhere because it's nowhere. It means you made it not exist, by putting everything in it into other stuff, or perfectly canceling stuff against stuff and making it go "whoopsie" out of the universe.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

At the quantum foam level, the false vacuum energy - field level, one can measure the energy state and the time the field spends in the state but not both. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Heisenberg hypothesized this indicated an unstable energy field. Which was demonstrated to be actual, and could express itself as producing short lived virtual particle pairs. Which it does. A leap of intuition on Heisenberg's part that proved true and fruitful.

"Now I’m going to discuss how we would look for a new law. In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it (audience laughter), no, don’t laugh, that’s the truth."
- Richard Feynman

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

If you cool stuff low enough, you make with the Einstein-Bose condensate and that stuff makes with the quantum behavior instead of the macroscopic expected behavior.

Reminds me of the Tacoma Narrows bridge, where effects exist that are not perceived, until the conditions are changed enough that their influence becomes the controlling one.

 

[lpetrich]

Absolute zero is impossible because of virtual particles. John Wheeler's quantum foam.

Quantum fluctuations?

That's correct about zero motion, but absolute zero refers to the minimum possible temperature, and that means the minimum of random motion, even if that minimum is nonzero.

 

[lpetrich]

I will now explain some thermodynamics. Temperature is related to entropy, the amount of randomness in a system, quantified as the logarithm of the ratio of the number of microstates, fully-detailed states to the number of corresponding macroscopic states. That is, how much detail one loses when going from a fully-detailed microscopic description to a macroscopic description.

The second law of thermodynamics, entropy always increasing, is a result of macrostates with lots of microstates being much more probable than macrostates with only a small number of microstates.  Second law of thermodynamics The  First law of thermodynamics is simply conservation of energy.

Change of entropy S, DS, is related to change of energy content, DQ, by

DQ = T * DS

where T is the temperature.

The  Third law of thermodynamics says that a physical system has constant entropy when the temperature is at  Absolute zero -- constant independent of how its physical state might be changed, like applying a magnetic field.

A consequence is that it is impossible to reach absolute zero in a finite number of operations, and after some searching, I found:

A general derivation and quantification of the third law of thermodynamics | Nature Communications

The most accepted version of the third law of thermodynamics, the unattainability principle, states that any process cannot reach absolute zero temperature in a finite number of steps and within a finite time. Here, we provide a derivation of the principle that applies to arbitrary cooling processes, even those exploiting the laws of quantum mechanics or involving an infinite-dimensional reservoir. We quantify the resources needed to cool a system to any temperature, and translate these resources into the minimal time or number of steps, by considering the notion of a thermal machine that obeys similar restrictions to universal computers. We generally find that the obtainable temperature can scale as an inverse power of the cooling time. Our results also clarify the connection between two versions of the third law (the unattainability principle and the heat theorem), and place ultimate bounds on the speed at which information can be erased.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Absolute zero is impossible because of virtual particles. John Wheeler's quantum foam.

Quantum fluctuations?

That's correct about zero motion, but absolute zero refers to the minimum possible temperature, and that means the minimum of random motion, even if that minimum is nonzero.

Don't argue with me. Argue with the physicists.

 

[bilby]

I believe it was Isaac Asimov who summarised the three Laws of Thermodynamics as:

1) You can't win
2) You can't break even
3) You can't get out of the game

 

[lpetrich]

That's  Ginsberg's theorem - "Ginsberg's theorem is a parody of the laws of thermodynamics in terms of a person playing a game. The quote was first attributed to the poet Allen Ginsberg in a 1975 issue of the Coevolution Quarterly."

• 0. There is a game. (consequence of  Zeroth law of thermodynamics )
• 1. You can't win. (consequence of  First law of thermodynamics)
• 2. You can't break even. (consequence of  Second law of thermodynamics)
• 3. You can't even get out of the game. (consequence of  Third law of thermodynamics)

The Big Apple: “You can’t win. You can’t break even. You can’t quit the game” (Ginsberg’s Theorem) - laws 1, 2, 3 go back to the 1950's in Astounding Science Fiction now Analog Science Fiction.

A zeroth law? It states that if A is in thermal equilibrium with B and B with C, then A is in thermal equilibrium with C. That's transitivity, one of the three properties of an equivalence relation. The other two seem to be tacitly assumed much of the time. For relation ~ the axioms are

1. Reflexivity: A ~ A
2. Symmetry: A ~ B implies B ~ A
3. Transitivity: A ~ B and B ~ C implies A ~ C

It's easy to check on familiar relations. Numerical equality satisfies all three, inequality only the second one, less than or equal (or greater than or equal) the first and third ones, and less than (or greater than) only the third one.

Freeman's Commentary on Ginsberg's Theorem:

• Capitalism: you can win
• Socialism: you can break even
• Mysticism: you can quit the game

 

[Jarhyn]

That's  Ginsberg's theorem - "Ginsberg's theorem is a parody of the laws of thermodynamics in terms of a person playing a game. The quote was first attributed to the poet Allen Ginsberg in a 1975 issue of the Coevolution Quarterly."

• 0. There is a game. (consequence of  Zeroth law of thermodynamics )
• 1. You can't win. (consequence of  First law of thermodynamics)
• 2. You can't break even. (consequence of  Second law of thermodynamics)
• 3. You can't even get out of the game. (consequence of  Third law of thermodynamics)

The Big Apple: “You can’t win. You can’t break even. You can’t quit the game” (Ginsberg’s Theorem) - laws 1, 2, 3 go back to the 1950's in Astounding Science Fiction now Analog Science Fiction.

A zeroth law? It states that if A is in thermal equilibrium with B and B with C, then A is in thermal equilibrium with C. That's transitivity, one of the three properties of an equivalence relation. The other two seem to be tacitly assumed much of the time. For relation ~ the axioms are

1. Reflexivity: A ~ A
2. Symmetry: A ~ B implies B ~ A
3. Transitivity: A ~ B and B ~ C implies A ~ C

It's easy to check on familiar relations. Numerical equality satisfies all three, inequality only the second one, less than or equal (or greater than or equal) the first and third ones, and less than (or greater than) only the third one.

Freeman's Commentary on Ginsberg's Theorem:

• Capitalism: you can win
• Socialism: you can break even
• Mysticism: you can quit the game

I prefer Tarn's law: you can only 'lose'. 'Losing' is actually Fun. Fun means you are winning, therefore 'losing' isn't actually  losing per SE.

Therefore it isn't about energy, or holding onto it, which you can't. Instead it's about what you do with it before it's gone.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Absolute zero is impossible because of virtual particles. John Wheeler's quantum foam.

Quantum fluctuations?

That's correct about zero motion, but absolute zero refers to the minimum possible temperature, and that means the minimum of random motion, even if that minimum is nonzero.

So even at absolute zero there is motion, and therefore everything is always in motion all the time. There is no such thing as "zero motion" and all "energy" is actually motion by different labels.

Is that scientifically sound?

 

[steve_bank]

There's a blast from the past, Alan Ginsberg. I remember Howl.

Temperature is a state of energy.

If you look at thermodynamics as a game then what LOT says is you can't win, meaning you can't get something for nohing.

I cal it the 'no free linch' rule.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Absolute zero is impossible because of virtual particles. John Wheeler's quantum foam.

Quantum fluctuations?

That's correct about zero motion, but absolute zero refers to the minimum possible temperature, and that means the minimum of random motion, even if that minimum is nonzero.

So even at absolute zero there is motion, and therefore everything is always in motion all the time. There is no such thing as "zero motion" and all "energy" is actually motion by different labels.

Is that scientifically sound?

Yes. This Universe contains a sea of an unstable energy field that pervades everything. Wheeler's Quantum Foam. A sea of virtual particles. There is no way to experimentally in the lab to create a region free from the Quantum Foam and virtual particles. So absolute zero is impossible. The average energy of a cubic meter of space from this Quantum Foam is very small. But never zero.

 

[lpetrich]

Let's now try to derive entropy from first principles. It's a units constant times the missing information for going from a macroscopic state to a microscopic state, how many bits are needed to specify a microstate given what macrostate it has.

For states s with probabilities P_s, the formula is

\( \displaystyle{ S(\{P\}) = - K \sum_s P_s \log P_s } \)

Let's say that we didn't know that formula, but we know that it must satisfy certain things. An obvious one is symmetry - one can rearrange the values in it and get the same results: S(P1,P2) = S(P2,P1) etc.

Another one is composition:

\( S(P_1, P_2, \dots P_m P'_1, P_m P'_2, \dots P_m P'_n) = S(P_1, \dots, P_m) + P_m S(P'_1, \dots, P'_n) \)

Probability P_i = N_i / N with P'_i = N_i / N' where P_m = N'/N. Using R = N*S, with R having the form

\( R(N_1, \dots, N_{max}; \sum_i N_i) \)

we find, with N' = N_m,

\( R(N_1, ...., N_{m+n}; N) = R(N_1, \dots, N_m; N) + R(N_{m+1}, \dots, N_{m+n}; N_m) \)

Here is a solution to this equation is, with R(x) some single-arg function. I don't recall how to prove that this is necessarily a solution, however.

\( \displaystyle{ R(N_1, ...., N_{m+n}; N) = \sum_{i=1}^{m+n} R(N_i) - R(N) } \)

So we must find R(N).