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(Illustration from Encyclopedia Londinensis, 1810-29.)

A quick quote from a PBS two-part documentary first broadcast in 2008 and based on the “definitive” book on cold, Tom Shachtman's Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold. The scientist quoted is Seth Lloyd, of MIT:

Getting to absolute zero is tough. Nobody's actually been there at absolute 0.000000, with an infinite number of zeros. That last little tiny bit of heat becomes harder and harder to get out. And, in particular, the timescales for getting it out get longer and longer and longer, the smaller and smaller the amounts of energy involved. So eventually, if you're talking about extracting an amount of energy that's sufficiently small, it would indeed take the age of the universe to do it. Also you, actually you'd need an apparatus the size of the universe to do it, but that's another story.

Full program transcript here.

(According to the Brookings Institution, “beneath this concrete dome on Runit Island, part of Enewetak Atoll, built between 1977 and 1980 at a cost of about $239 million, lie 111,000 cubic yards or radioactive soil and debris from Bikini and Rongelap atolls. The dome covers the 30-foot deep, 350-foot wide crate[r] created by the May 5, 1958, Cactus test.” Photo by the Defense Special Weapons Agency. Thanks, Capability B., for the link.)

(Photo by NASA/Michelle Murphy - WYLE.)

Behold! The world's largest vacuum chamber constructed for vehicle testing of the new Orion spacecraft.

Thermal vacuum testing and electromagnetic interference testing will take place in the vacuum chamber. Thermal vacuum testing will confirm that the spacecraft can withstand the extreme hot and cold temperatures present in space, and electromagnetic interference testing will verify the reliability of Orion's communication and electronic systems.

Adjacent to this chamber is an earthquake simulator that will also subject the ship to the violent conditions of liftoff.

The 75,000-pound craft will sit on a huge vibration table; comprising a 125,000-pound mass that must be shaken with an intensity equal to that of a launch.

And:

Twenty-four horns will blow high-pressured nitrogen gas to match the intensity level of the sounds produced during the launch. Most acoustic facilities have around two or three horns. But for this facility, everything is being built bigger in scale to more accurately assess the spacecraft.

In other words, when fully operational, or even when not, these will be two of the most interesting spaces in the world.

If ever Sandusky, Ohio becomes the unlikeliest host to an edition of Postpolis!, this certainly would be the perfect venue. Cut off from normal air, curators, speakers and audience will don pressurized spacesuits, communicate via crackling shortwave radio, move about and sit through sonic stillness. Can a lively, at times riotously boisterous, conversations be had under threat of suffocation? About such things as the testing grounds for space exploration and the messy historiography of their microearth capsules?

We think so.

In the Archives:
Portable Hurricane
Disaster Lab
Other Disaster Labs
Poseidon vs. Aeolus

(The LHC curving space and time even before it was operational. Photographer unknown.)

While everyone is waiting for the first high-energy collision of CERN's Large Hadron Collider sometime next month, might we interest you meanwhile with our previous posts on this mega-machine?

In our first, we wondered if all those scientists working at CERN — after having successfully mapped out the landscape architecture of reality, of course — would want to reconfigure The Machine so that it could levitate a grove of trees.

And self-powered lighting fixtures; some artificial turf and mildly meditative Zen boulders; a few dozen rabbits, cute or otherwise; anti-gravity hydrology; and of course, the all-important signage: “Warning: If Not Rapture, May Cause Death.”

And after you push a few buttons, flick one or two switches and drain Europe of all of its electricity, your floating garden then goes on an endless subterranean ringed journey.

It's Dante's unexplored Tenth Circle of Hell, which is reserved for landscape architects designing absolutely boring landscapes.

In our second, we were struck by how cavernous some of the underground spaces are. They are Europe's new naves, domed interiors, barrel vaulted arcades and side chapels, very fitting ecclesiastical vocabulary where Science is the de facto New Religion and CERN its St. Peter's.

We wondered, too, whatever happened to one of its unbuilt basilicas, the Superconducting Super Collider down in Texas, and learned that one company is marketing it out as a server farm to credit bureaus, banks and other industries in need of high security data centers.

In other words:

Where the Big Bang might have been simulated endlessly, extra dimensions observed for the first time, and the fundamental construct of Nature elucidated, it might soon be filled with the buying patterns of ex-urbanites at Wal-Mart, hilariously awful credit ratings of college graduates, and our entire archive of bukkake porn.

You can probably skip our third and last post, but do look at the two photos there — one of which appears above — and let us know who the photographer is, if you do know. We're rather pedantic when it comes to giving credit to all the images that we use.

Tunneling into the abyss to gaze out into the firmament. It's the Super-Kamiokande once more, simply because the whole thing's so incredibly beautiful, here photographed after its reconstruction and before it was filled with 50,000 tons of pure heavy water. Once disused again, can we have it, rent free? It'll be the summer residence for Pruned.

Download some high-resolution photos from here to decorate your websites and blogs.

In the Archives:
Unraveling the cosmos in the depths of Antarctica