Abstract
THE Science Museum, South Kensington, has recently performed a most useful public service in arranging, in connexion with the Very Low Temperatures Exhibition, for a series of demonstrations and lectures by eminent authorities on recent scientific and technical developments. The series was concluded on Wednesday, May 27, by Prof. F. Simon, late of Berlin and Breslau and now of the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford. Of the problems which can be investigated by experiment in the new temperature region below 1° Absolute, one of the most interesting is the specific heat of paramagnetic salts. In experiments carried out in conjunction with Kiirti, Rollin and Laine with the huge electromagnet of the Paris Academy of Sciences, it has been proved that the paramagnetic salts used become ferromagnetic at very low temperatures, showing Curie points of about 0.01° Absolute (see p. 961). The small helium liquefier used in the experiments was transported from Oxford. At the Science Museum, Prof. Simon succeeded in demonstrating a temperature of 0.12° Absolute, a noteworthy achievement, of which Prof. Simon and his co-workers, Mr. G. L. Pickard and Mr. A. H. Cooke, who were responsible for erecting the apparatus in the Science Museum and for the fact that the demonstration went off without a hitch, may well be proud. The magnet used in the experiment was lent by the Imperial College of Science and Technology; the hydrogen and helium pumps by Messrs. W. Edwards and Co.; the Cambridge Instrument Co., Ltd., provided a galvanometer. The limiting temperature region for this method lies between 0.01° and 0.001° Absolute. Further reduction of temperature will depend on the use of nuclear paramagnetism, starting at about 0.01° Absolute. Even to this method there will be a temperature limit, and the distance from the absolute zero, although very small when measured in degrees, is in reality an infinity. Although this unique series of lectures has now come to an end, the Exhibition of Very Low Temperatures will continue until the end of June. The Exhibition has so far attracted more than 140,000 visitors, and interest in it has not in any way diminished during the three months in which it has been on view.
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The Approach to the Absolute Zero. Nature 137, 939 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137939a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137939a0