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Thursday, December 11, 2008

Cool man Reaall cool

Seems Obama ignored my advice to name the reality based community collective energy secretary (except for its found Mark Kleiman who would be the official drug bizarre). Instead he named the coolest dude on the planet -- Steven Chu who "won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 for his work in the 'development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.'"

Huh cooling with lazers ? Yeah the idea is that atoms absorb light of exactly the right freequency. If you shine a lazer whose freequency is slightly too low to be absorbed at atoms, the photons are only absorbed by atoms from the point of view of which they are blue shifted, that is by atoms moving towards the lazer. With such lazers pointing from all sides, atoms can be stopped cold -- reall cold -- by far the closest anyone has gotten to absolute zero.

This is not related to global warming, but Chu (known by rappers as Helium ice) apparently has shifted his interest to much higher temperatures and keeping them from going much much higher.

I think that Chu will be the first Nobel laureate secretary if his nomination isn't stopped cold by a red shifted senator.

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