Absolute Zero: And the Conquest of Cold

by Tom Shachtman

Book Overview

In this engrossing scientific chronicle, a perennial paperback favorite, Tom Shachtman combines science, history, and adventure in the story of our four-centuries-long quest to master the secrets of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395938880
• ISBN13: 9780395938881
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.9" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Very Well Written Understandable Yet Technical Book

This is a very interesting book. The technology discussed is complex, but the complexity never gets in the way or leaves the reader wondering what the author is talking about. I highly recommend this book especially for those interested in the history of industrial revolution, or in the sequence of discoveries leading to the discovery of super conductors.

Wonderful

If you are interested in science, scientists and its history; If all you remember from your science classes are the names of scientists like Boyle, Van der waals and Joule; if you are ready to be taken on a fantastic ride into the realms of the cold and the story of its conquest.... This is the book for you. I really enjoyed it very much. Not only did I get a better perspective of physics and chemistry but I was surprised at the amount of work that had gone into the construction of the common refrigerator or the air conditioner, to which we never pay any attention. And the personal touch the author added really helped me feel like I was with the scientists when each discovery was being made. Now, I feel like I know Dewar and Joule well enough to call them by their first names!

THIS WAS GOOD.

I LIKED THIS BOOK. IT WAS GOOD. YOU SHOULD READ IT TOO.

A history book

One of the promotional statements on the book's jacket describes it as being similar to David Sobel's book "Longitude." I agree. There are some distinct similarities, and I think that if you liked "Longitude," you will probably enjoy "Absolute Zero" every bit as much.Though this is a good book it's not quite what I was looking for. The book is strictly a history book, while I was looking for something that would have emphasized the scientific aspects more than Shachtman does. For example, the book describes the work by scientists to get as close as possible to absolute zero, but it never gives an adequate definition of what absolute zero really is. While it would have taken some mathematics and a little physics, a better description of the physics would have added considerably to this book. [For a good discussion of the physics - still at an introductory level - I suggest "Temperatures Very Low and Very High," by Mark W. Zemansky. This book, published by Dover, has only 127 pages. So the price is right, and it makes a nice companion volume (read it first) to Shachtman's book.]Another thing that bothered me about this book is that it has no figures or illustrations. That's a big problem for a book that is constantly trying to describe this or that configuration of scientific equipment. There are at least a dozen places in the text where I found myself reading it and then reading it over again, trying to understand some convoluted description of apparatus when a simple diagram would have taken care of the problem.A third problem I have with this book is the author's occasional lapse in describing scientific principles. For example, he describes quantum-mechanical tunneling as a process "in which the particles do not overcome the energy of the atoms in their way but instead find a route between the atoms in the wall." [p. 227] This is a very misleading description of quantum-mechanical tunneling. In another place he describes the speeds of particles in a particle accelerator: "physicists had relied for investigation of these latter particles on linear accelerators that raised the particles' speed to several thousand miles per hour and let them smash into obstacles, or each other, and disintegrate into interesting pieces." [p. 231] This statement has the particles in an accelerator traveling about the same speed as an SR-71 jet. In reality, particle accelerators move atomic particles at nearly the speed of light, or virtually 186,000 miles per second.So my greatest objection to the book is that it was written by an historian and not a scientist. But don't infer from my comments that I think this is a bad book. I really did like it, and found it engaging and difficult to put down. One of the best aspects of this book is the way it illustrates the conflict and competition between scientists. Sometimes there is a tendency to have an antiseptic view of science, in which noble individuals, in white c

A FREEZING Good Yarn !

I got this book as a gift and thought...oh well. BUT I really enjoyed it very much. I loved the writing style, and the chronological summary of the quest for absolute zero. I worked for a time with low temperature physicists in applied research unrelated to cold, and WISH I had read this book before that happened...there are many questions I would have asked. I really liked the conciseness of the book as well as the 'human' perspectives of each of the giants in the field. This was a very FUN read.