How It's Used

"Anthony Hopkins plays Stevens, a butler who has given long and faithful service at Darlington Hall and maintained his emotional temperature at absolute zero. This has cost him dear: first, he failed to see that his master (James Fox) was dangerously bent on appeasement with the Germans in the nineteen-thirties; and, second, he refused to accept, or even acknowledge, the love offered to him by the housekeeper (Emma Thompson)."

—Anthony Lane, "The Film File: The Remains of the Day," The New Yorker, 1993.

"A Dutch physicist, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, discovered superconductivity in 1911 when he cooled mercury to minus-452 degrees Fahrenheit, about 7.5 degrees above absolute zero, and all resistance to the flow of electricity vanished."

—[no author], "High-Temperature Superconductors Find a Variety of Uses," The New York Times, May 29, 2001.

"We might escape our increasingly bland cosmos, Mr. Carroll conjectures, by creating a 'baby universe.' Millions of fresh galaxies to strip-mine! If that doesn't work, we can still survive forever, the engineer Wil McCarthy insists, because the temperature of the universe will never quite arrive at absolute zero. In fact, Mr. McCarthy writes, by cleverly exploiting the bizarre quantum properties of extremely low-temperature matter, we may ascend to a level of intelligence 'so vast and unknowable that we might as well call it God.'"

—John Horgan, “The Shape of Things to Come,” The Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2008.

"If a week is a long time in politics, a year can seem an eternity. Last July, Gordon Brown basked in public and media approval. After waiting so long, and after so much bitterness between him and Tony Blair, he had finally succeeded to the premiership in triumph, or so it seemed.

"And all has now turned to ashes in his mouth. It was said of Stanley Baldwin by his biographer that, in a matter of months in 1936, 'From the highest place in public esteem and confidence he had sunk to very nearly the lowest,' and those words fit Brown. His government is in disarray, his poll ratings head towards absolute zero, Labour lost a safe seat at one byelection, came fifth behind the BNP at another, and is bracing itself for a yet more humiliating defeat in Glasgow East."

—Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "The depth of Labour's crisis is easily explained: this dead cat has bounced: The spike in support that greeted Brown's arrival was really relief at Blair's departure. The malaise set in long, long ago," The Guardian (UK), July 10, 2008.

"Boeckner's yelping vocals are never more effective than when he's crying after that woman who has walked out, in Evangeline. The sound of his voice and the archaic name both evoke the gut-shot sounds of old Appalachian laments. It's blues, no doubt about it, and the thunking drum-machine beats, isolated blasts of heavy guitar and Boeckner's fragmenting vocals bring it close to the absolute zero that all good blues aims for."

—Robert Everett-Green, "The Furs know where to inflict the cuts," The Globe and Mail, March 10, 2009.

Links

Related on eAlmanac
C (Celsius)
F (Fahrenheit)
K (Kelvin)

Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia article on Absolute Zero
Scientific American article "How are temperatures close to absolute zero achieved and measured?"
Nova article "Absolute Hot: Is there an opposite to absolute zero?"