Chapter 16 DS summary

Extreme cold often causes elements to behave in completely unpredictable ways. The band of Englishman led by Robert Falcon that were determined to be the first to reach the south pole discovered this when not only having just discovered that the Norwegians had beat them by just a month but the return team found that the fuel that they had stored in tin-soldered containers had completely leaked out and all over the food supplies. All of them ended up dying because of this mishap but this showcases an interesting property. When tin gets extremely cold its atoms arrange themselves in different ways and when tin shifts into its weaker state in extreme cold a "white rust" is form and the tin crumbles and erodes away. Cold also brings up the idea that there are actually far more specific states of matter in the universe than our simple "solid, liquid, gas" deviation has accounted for.  For instance, when noble gases get forced into a solid state, even they will often start to bind with other elements. It wasn't until 2000 that Finish scientist were able to force argon into a solid compound. At extremely low temperatures there seems to be different rules for subatomic particles. Electrons will metamorphose in superconductors and whole elements themselves will begin to overlap in a state called coherence. Coherence can best be understood in the context of light and the way lasers work by coordinating the electrons jumping around in energy shells. But one thing that bugs scientists more than anything is the dual wave-particle nature of light and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle doesn't neatly able to the photons of light but when viewed as waves it is a little different. But that principle does able in the context of atoms getting cold enough to form the Bose-Einstein condensate that in theory could produce a single atom that had begun as thousands of separate ones.