Pssst! You! Yeah, you... are a passenger on a planet... on a blue-green planet that's orbiting a golden star. And, speaking personally, I'm fond of this part of our yearly orbit-around-the-sun that we call February. Every time we orbit through February, I remember ice skating under the stars on the duck pond in Ridgewood, New Jersey when I was a kid. While my Dad was teaching me how to skate, I was marveling at the magic of cold - a magic that has recently been verified by quantum physicists. While I skated, I wondered: What is this thing we call freezing? How does water that normally ripples and laps at the shore become as still and hard as glass? How does it become so slick that I can slide on it? I will never be able to forget the power of cold because the frostbite damage to my toes from so much ice skating reminds me of it any time the thermometer drops below 60.

As we orbit through February, I also remember a bitter morning in Toronto when I felt pulled to drive half an hour through deep snow to Lake Ontario. When I got there I thought I was hallucinating. The night before, during a wicked windstorm, the temperature dropped so fast that gigantic, arching waves had frozen solid in mid-air. Enormous, twisted tubes of frozen water that had been churned up by the wind looked like playground slides. A bunch of people, including me, climbed up several of these tubes and then slid down and out them through their holes.

Today, as I remember this, the magic of cold is being magnified for me by something I just read in a science magazine. Physicists are down on their knees in awe at a super-cold behavior called the Bose-Einstein Condensate. Satyendra Bose and Albert Einstein predicted this mysterious behavior in the 1920's, but not until recently were scientists able to create it.

As you know, what we call heat is atoms in motion, randomly jostling around, bumping into each other and creating friction. When atoms lose heat, they slow down, come together and condense, just as the steam inside the lid of a hot pot cools down and condenses into water droplets. As the temperature falls, the randomness of heat is replaced by the orderliness of cold. At unimaginably cold temperatures, atoms actually unite into a single matter wave. The many behave as if they were one. Matter flows with zero friction, a behavior so astounding that scientists describe this as a new form of matter - the Bose-Einstein Condensate. This condensate is like the coherent behavior of photons inside a laser, where all the atoms "march to the same drummer."

Yes, as we orbit through February, I'm marveling at the magic and the mystery of cold. I'm also wondering: Who is the drummer that super-cold atoms are marching to? How is it that the many behave as one? Is there something we can learn from cold about coming together with zero friction and thinking with a single, coherent mind?

This is Harriet Witt, your guide for this little ride on our passenger planet.


If you have any questions, drop Harriet an email: harriet@passengerplanet.com


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