Finding Ourselves in the Extremes of the Universe | Ron Colone

As I flipped through the various press releases that came my way, one caught my eye describing research at Rice University in Houston and Kyoto University in Japan, where scientists have now made the coldest particles in the universe – so cold, that we don’t. not even tools to measure them.

But if we did, they would register down to a billionth of a degree of absolute zero, which is the theoretical and presumably unattainable temperature at which all motion ceases.

Their reason for creating these ultra-cold particles is that extreme temperatures, both hot and cold — just like extreme speeds and extreme sizes “change the physics” — you can start seeing things you couldn’t otherwise see. And by doing so, you can “open a portal to an uncharted realm of quantum magnetism.” (It’s these kinds of dramatic statements that made me major in physics.)

My interest ended with the article, as with my studies, “The Dramatic and The Theoretical”, but my curiosity about extremes was still aroused. I wondered if this is the coldest particle, what is the hottest?

A quick search revealed that the hottest event occurring naturally in the Universe is a supernova, an event that marks the final stage in a star’s life. It ends dramatically with a colossal explosion that will see temperatures soar to 100 billion degrees Celsius – 6,000 times hotter than the sun’s temperature.

But even that pales in comparison to the super-hot temperatures created by scientists at the CERN lab in Switzerland, which directs super-high-energy collisions between lead or gold ions. They generate temperatures of about 5.5 trillion degrees, or 360,000 times the temperature of the Sun, to better understand what the universe looked like in the first microsecond after the Big Bang!

(You may be wondering, if it’s that hot, why isn’t it burning the place down? The answer has to do with the size and mass of the subatomic particles. They’re so tiny that the amount of energy dissipated is also small, less uniform than what radiates from our power lines.)

Just as there is a theoretical absolute on the cold side of things, there is also an absolute hot; It is called the Planck temperature and is 100 million million million million million degrees.

At that temperature, gravity and electricity and magnetism and the weak and strong forces merge into a single unified field or force – that which Einstein was chasing but could never catch.

As for other extremes, there’s the loudest thing in the universe, coming from deep within the Perseus galaxy cluster, where an amount of energy roughly equivalent to 100 million exploding stars erupts from a black hole, filling the surrounding super-hot, super-giant gas cloud. The cloud is then distributed as sound waves that reverberate through thousands of galaxies.

The actual “sound” of these waves is a B flat, 57 octaves below middle C, meaning the frequency is so low and so slow – and the spacing between the crests of the waves is so extended – that it takes about 10 million years for that to happen a single wave passes.

The quietest thing, or theoretically the quietest place, is in a perfect vacuum. But since there is no such thing, no place in the universe completely free of cosmic rays or particles left over from the Big Bang, intergalactic space is the closest we can get to in nature.

The quietest place on earth is at Orfield Laboratory in Minnesota. The echo chamber they created there is so quiet that the noise inside is actually minus 9.4 decibels. The longest anyone could stay indoors was 45 minutes.

The lab’s founder said, “The quieter the room, the more you hear. You hear your heart beating and your lungs and stomach gurgle. You become the sound.”

… so we study the extremes to discover ourselves in between.