Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum Bose-Einstein Condensate

How much energy would it take to get the required quipment and energy source to whatever location in order to be able to engage in such a cooling venture?

Deep space does not grow lasers and containment vessels.

It is an idea for a century well into the future ... not this one.

Yes, DA, it won't happen tomorrow; but I intended the question to be hypothetical and to serve soley as a basis for discussing a key point: the temperature gradient.

I'll simplify the question, and reverse it, to avoid confusion:

Would it still require 4.1855 joules (1 calorie) to raise the temperature of 1g of water (ice) from, say, 1.7K to 2.7K, or is the physics different at close to absolute zero?

I don't think the physics is different but the amount of effort required gets larger in that it only takes the passing gamma ray photon, potentially, to make a mess of things.

One thing lost will be the shielding of the Van Allen belts and the atmosphere.

But I truly don't know how significant that would be.

Good points everyone! I hope we can keep this thread going in some form. For now, lets just say we want to create a BECS. ("BECSingularity, and by that I guess I mean a gentle way to create a region of infinite curvature of space-time). Again, I'm just going out there, so please feel free to add correction/input of any kind. So, do do this we need a VERY cold place with say a very strong magnetosphere. Hmm...I can think of one possible place, Jupiter, its got this HUGE magnetosphere and its pretty cold in places... Another place I suppose would be in the Oort belt, but hey, that's really far away. I'm not sure, but if we can haul some junk out somewhere cold and shielded, I think we could start some really cool experiments. Maybe instead of worrying so much about hauling mass, we can use some Newman machines to make what we need, when the nanomachines get there. In any case, first one to create BEC of critical mass should definitely get a cookie, and a Nobel prize to boot!
Later,
Amnion

Amnion, on the face of it, the topic is stepping well into the realms of science fiction. We can safely say that, as far as practicalities are concerned, we're talking about, if not the impossible, then the extremely improbable. (Anyway, I think nanobot von Neumann machines would be more useful )

Nevertheless, it is interesting to consider where in the solar system one might find temperatures close to 2.7K without going too far from the sun. Obviously, lower temperatures would be easier to find at greater distances from the sun; but lets look at some options:

Amnion: "...I can think of one possible place, Jupiter, its got this HUGE magnetosphere and its pretty cold in places..."

No, not Jupiter; it radiates too much heat.

The other gas giants and their moons may also be radiating too much heat.

Amnion: "I'm not sure, but if we can haul some junk out somewhere cold and shielded"

"Shielded" could mean in a penumbra, right? Maybe somewhere relatively nearby like an asteroid in the asteroid belt - especially one that's not rotating. At least it would be unlikely to radiate much heat, and would be far from other heat sources (except for the sun).

If not, you might consider the Kuiper belt. More accessible than the Oort Cloud - just down the road by comparison - and it must be pretty chilly.

@redewenur - Correct, we are getting into the realm of "Science Fiction". However, in my mind science fiction is a way for us to describe possibilities. From what I've observed, the more popular and long lived a science fiction idea (think meme, natural selection of the truth) the higher probability of the idea becoming "reality". The difficult part is knowing the time frame in which they will come to pass. The prediction of future events seem to obey Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in that if we know more certainly What is going to happen, the When gets harder to pinpoint, and conversely, knowing that "something" important is going to happen at a certain time limits our ability to determine the nature of that event . If you view the theory of zero point energy generators, its been passed around quite a bit. Because of the greater frequency of such a concept in the human consciousness on this planet, I believe that we are coming closer (on a logarithmic scale) to the realization of what was formerly science fiction.
To talk about ZPG's, I'm sure that when the time is right, we will find the right dark, cold place to build our apparatus.
-A

Thats very interesting. So are you implying that this new form of matter can never exist, nor has existed anywhere in our universe?

That it's only a temporary result of our human experiments in a low temp laboratory in trying to achieve the hyper-theoretical absolute zero?
No more super heavy (black hole type) of dense atom clusters, and other semi-science fiction ideas?
Shame, ....if true I'm really dissapointed.

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"You will never find a real Human being - even in a mirror." .....Mike Kremer.
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It does seem that the coldest place in the universe is in a lab on this planet.

But I'm not sure that is necessarily the only condition under which a Bose Einstein condensate can be created.

It is just the only one of which are currently aware.

Time will tell.