Boffins trap ultra-cold plasma-in-a-bottle, a move that may unlock secrets of exotic stars Physicists have trapped a sliver of the world’s coldest plasma in a magnetic "bottle" for the first time, taking the first tentative steps towards building increasingly realistic simulations of the interiors of stars. Plasma, otherwise known as the fourth state of matter, is normally formed in extremely hot environments, where …
>> the emitted frequencies allow the team to figure out where they are and how fast they’re going
Nope. They can figure out where the ions were, and how fast they are going, or how fast they were going and where they are. Never where they are and how fast they are going, with any degree of certainty.
/mine's the one with a copy of the 1927 edition of Quantum Mechanics for dummies in the pocket.
I'm not saying that he's not invited, but I would have assumed that since the experiment is being conducted at less than 2 Kelvin that the velocities of the atoms are quite low. This doesn't exclude the Uncertainty Principle, but it will minimise that effect such that useful science can be performed.
It's not as binary as a simple reading of your remark might seem to be implying.
The more accurately you know about position, the less about momentum, and vice versa; but the thing that is bounded is the *product* of the position uncertainty and momentum uncertainty; but fortunately bounded by a number generally regarded as small, i.e. Planck's constant.
"They can figure out where the ions were, and how fast they are going, or how fast they were going and where they are. Never where they are and how fast they are going, with any degree of certainty."
Quite a high degree of certainty actually. The uncertainty principle imposes a limit on how accurately you can know the combination of certain paired parameters, but just because it's impossible to eliminate the error bars entirely, that doesn't mean you don't know anything at all. Most of the time, the uncertainty principle isn't relevant at all, since there will usually be much larger sources of error present in most experiments.
In this specific case, they're using the fluoresence to take measurements at 50 um resolution on timescales of ~1 us. That's many, many orders of magnitude away from a scale where anyone would even bother to remember that uncertainty principles exist.
Surely anyone with small children is aware that it is often impossible to know either where they are or how fast they are travelling with any degree of accuracy, unless they are asleep in bed?
People are like sub-atomic particles:
They behave differently when they know they are being watched.
I assume you realize that heat is motion, and motion is motion and all energy is motion and mass is motion.... yeh, OK, you don't accept the last one, but the others, presumably you're ok with.
So the spin of the earth is also heat, motion of our planet around the sun is also heat, that absolute zero you're chasing is only relative to your containment bottle.
If you got to absolute zero, it would only be zero with respect to the motion of the containment bottle. The bottle would still be moving on a planet that is moving, in solar system that is moving and so technically it would not be 'absolute' universe zero, just some local zero.
Zero is that other magic constant that isn't. Like the speed of light in a vacuum that is always c relative to the observer measuring it, as if the observer was stationary, i.e. the observer is at the magic zero and the speed of light is at c. But you are moving, so zero isn't universe zero, and thus c isn't some magic universe wide constant.
Maybe I can do better here:
An atom is moving, is it heat or is some form of motion? From the perspective of the atom there is no difference, it is an atom moving.
Hence heat is motion, motion is heat, and whether we call it motion or heat depends on how coherent the motion is. If lots of atoms bang into each other as a result of the motion, we call it heat, if they all move roughly the same way, we call it some form of motion.
Hence I assert that absolute zero you're targeting is just a local absolute zero, because your container is moving, and that motion is just coherent heat.
"The bottle would still be moving on a planet that is moving, in solar system that is moving and so technically it would not be 'absolute' universe zero, just some local zero."
is that why it's colder at the South and North Poles, where the motion is less (than at the equator).
No, of course not, but if what you're saying is true it should be possible to measure the effect on the Kelvin scale at the equator, and at the poles, and probably at 6 months difference too (earth going round sun adds or subtracts from orbit around the galaxy centre)
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