{"id":2158,"date":"2008-01-09T14:20:52","date_gmt":"2008-01-09T14:20:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/01\/09\/the-conquest-of-cold\/"},"modified":"2008-01-09T14:20:52","modified_gmt":"2008-01-09T14:20:52","slug":"the-conquest-of-cold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/01\/09\/the-conquest-of-cold\/","title":{"rendered":"The Conquest of Cold"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first half of NOVA’s Absolute Zero<\/a> program aired last night, and I was able to watch the whole thing. Well, more or less– it was a long day, so I was drifting off a little bit about fifteen minutes in, and didn’t get all of the Michael Faraday story, but a phone call woke me up, and I watched the rest of it.<\/p>\n

This half was mostly devoted to the history of ideas about cold, and the technology of making things cold. It didn’t include any of the atomic physics topics of most immediate interest to me– those will be in next week’s installment– but it did present a lot of fascinating historical material, regarding both science and technology. In some ways, the technology material was more itneresting– I’ve already heard several different presentations of the historical development of thermodynamics, so there wasn’t much surprising there, but I knew nothing at all about the ice-making industry in New England in the 1800’s.<\/p>\n

The historical segments were well done, and while there were a few “re-enacted” scenes, they didn’t overuse it, or get too cute. The talking-head bits were pretty good, although Tom Shachtman has a slightly unfortunate accent, and they kept things reasonably lively.<\/p>\n

Best of all, unlike most of the other tv science programs I’ve seen recently, they didn’t stop every five minutes to recap what they just finished talking about. I’m tempted to mail the producers five bucks, just to thank them for not insulting my intelligence.<\/p>\n

On the whole, I thought it was very well done, and I look forward to seeing the next installment. They’ve also added some nifty web-based games to their web site since I originally looked at it, so if you’ve ever wanted to be a simualted ice tycoon, here’s your chance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first half of NOVA’s Absolute Zero program aired last night, and I was able to watch the whole thing. Well, more or less– it was a long day, so I was drifting off a little bit about fifteen minutes in, and didn’t get all of the Michael Faraday story, but a phone call woke… Continue reading The Conquest of Cold<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,37,11,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-pop_culture","category-science","category-television","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}