Newswise — After seven years of working with $2.5 million in grants, long-time University of Oregon physicist Russell J. Donnelly is taking middle-schoolers and the general public around the world on an educational journey by way of the television screen.
The journey could start with the question: What's colder than zero degrees Kelvin, or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius, or minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit? Well, absolutely nothing. The adventure is being done on public television thanks to the Canadian-born Donnelly, 77, who joined the UO faculty in 1966. The documentary "Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold," is loosely based on the book by Tom Shachtman. "Absolute Zero" debuted this summer on the British Broadcasting Corp. network, which helped fund the project.
----------------From the introduction to Absolute Zero -- For centuries: cold remained a perplexing mystery. Nobody had any idea what it was, much less how to harness its effects. Yet in the last hundred years cold has transformed the way we live and work. Imagine homes or supermarkets without fridges and frozen foods; or skyscrapers without air conditioning; or hospitals without liquid oxygen. We take for granted the technology of cold. Yet it has enabled us to explore outer space and the inner depths of our brain.----------------
What is so special about absolute zero? It's so cold that atoms stop moving and heat is neither absorbed nor emitted. Scientists have gotten to within tiny fractions of a degree away from their quest. The coldest place in nature is in deep space, where it is a balmy 3 degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero.
The documentary features several leading international scientists who don't bog down the viewer with incomprehensible jargon during its two one-hour segments. "Absolute Zero" debuted in summer 2007 in the United Kingdom and subsequently in France.
The documentary is a fast-moving, entertaining ride into the worlds of low temperature physics, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, the history of air conditioning, the dawn of ice cubes as a marketable product, extremely hot temperatures, lasers, permanent gases, temperature-measuring devices and scales, and lots of theories.
Part One, "The Conquest of Cold," chronicles the trail of discovery, beginning with Cornelius Drebbel attempting to turn summer to winter by cooling the Great Hall of Westminster Abbey in 1620. It covers much of the early scientific work, including the development of thermometers by Daniel Fahrenheit and Anders Celsius.
Part Two, "The Race for Absolute Zero," features an extended yet unbelievably easy-to-grasp history and explanation of the Bose-Einstein condensate and delves into superconductivity and superfluidity. It also re-creates a lecture by Scottish scientist James Dewar describing how he turned oxygen gas into liquid, which, at the time, had been deemed impossible. And all of this is easy fodder for an eighth-grader? Yes, believe it or not. Absolutely.
The documentary's presentation of science may be enough to make author and filmmaker Michael Crichton take notice. Speaking in 1999 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Crichton addressed the complaints of scientists about how the media misunderstand their work. He argued that it is really scientists who misunderstand the media.
Crichton said that "movies are a special kind of storytelling, with their own requirements and rules." He mentioned four, but two are important here. One, he said, "movie characters must be compelled to act," and two, "movies must move." Well, Mr. Crichton, "Absolute Zero," the documentary, succeeds.
"My idea was to build the story around the races in the sciences to achieve certain goals," Donnelly said. "The audience I am aiming for is middle school children."
"Absolute Zero" has scientists in costume of various times and places, film footage of days gone by (such as cutting ice cubes from Walden Pond for use in refrigeration around the world), and scientists describing the significance of discoveries. In one seemingly tranquil scene, a British scientist's discussion of particles comes visually alive with airborne images appearing and dancing between his hands, and then compressing as his hands come together.
The book was written by Shachtman with a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Donnelly was asked to review Shachtman's manuscript as a technical adviser. The book, Donnelly said, so simply presented the information that he knew this was the time to fulfill a desire that had burned for a long time. "The book does not contain a single equation, or a single graph, but it conveys in words the sweep of the evolution of our subject in a compelling and intellectually accurate way," Donnelly said. "It is a story with details I had never heard of, even though I'm a professional in the field with a deep interest in the history of science."
Long before Shachtman's book, Donnelly had served as a NASA adviser. One day an upper-level NASA manager asked his group to tell him what "my grandmother should know about low-temperature physics." Donnelly compiled a list of some 18 Nobel Prize winners whose work was on the topic, "and it was clear there would be more."
"When I looked into the giant industries made possible by the use of cold to liquefy gases, I realized there was an important story to try to convey to the public," he said.
Shachtman's book, published by Houghton Miffin in 1999, helped Donnelly pursue funding for a project to show that low temperature physics could be explained to youngsters. He wants them to know how "civilization has been profoundly affected by the mastery of cold."
The National Science Foundation gave $1.75 million, with the requirement that Donnelly develop an educational outreach campaign. He did in the form of downloadable "Absolute Zero" resource guides called the "Community Education Outreach Guide" and the "Science Educator's Guide," both designed to help teaching efforts in middle schools. Other funding sources were the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ($550,000) and the BBC ($200,000).
"Absolute Zero" is a collaboration of the University of Oregon's Cryogenic Helium Turbulence Laboratory, Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St. Paul) Public Television, Meridian Productions of Washington, D.C., and Windfall Films in London. The co-principal investigators on the project are Donnelly, UO graduate and Meridian Productions President Meredith Burch, and Richard Hudson of Twin Cities Public Television. The documentary was co-produced by Twin Cities Public Television and Meridian/Windfall.
Background Links: http://www.absolutezerocampaign.org/get_involved/community_education.htm
http://www.absolutezerocampaign.org/ask_experts/science_prof_outreach.htm
http://www.absolutezerocampaign.org/index.htm
Russ Donnelly Web page: http://www.uoregon.edu/~rjd/index.htm
The underwriters: http://www.absolutezerocampaign.org/underwriters/index.htm
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