Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum Flatness Problem: To call a spade a spade.

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What they are saying is correct at some level what they are not doing is talking about the quantum side of things.

At a Quantum level you have stuff spinning binding the matter together that is the energy that gets released by a nuclear explosion if you want some scale of how much energy we are talking about.

Like anything that spins there are vibrations in that spinning and add in our friendly sub atomic particles that are spinning doing there QM thing they have quite a bit of vibration because there position is not well defined.

That QM vibration is part of the larger molecule vibration you are talking about which is the classical measurable statistic you call temperature.

So they are correct laser cooling slows the macro molecule vibration but it has also the ability to slow the QM vibration within the atom which is very different to classical cooling which has no such ability.

I am sure if you think about this it makes perfect sense and in some ways you probably knew all this you just hadn't put it all together.

You are correct the macro molecule vibration is a large part of the statistic of temperature but there is a much larger energy involved in binding atom together you are ignoring and generally we only see that energy in a nuclear blast.