Scientists have created a gas with the lowest-ever level of entropy, which will help the study of elusive quantum effects and potentially create new high-temperature superconductors. Entropy measures how ordered or disordered a system is, with lower entropy corresponding to more order. A room-full of people all speaking at the same time would be disordered, the noise makes picking out individual voices harder.
In thermodynamics, cooling down a system would be equivalent to hushing the hum. At a certain point enough atoms in a cooling gas would reach the state of lowest energy possible to allow quantum effects to manifest at a macroscopic level. The gas exhibiting such properties is called Bose-Einstein condensate after physicists Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein, who predicted it. Measuring one nanoKelvin, or one billionth of a degree above absolute zero, the Bose-Einstein condensate created at the University of California, Berkeley has entropy about 100 times lower than in previous experiments and is the quietest gas ever made.
INC News, 06/08/2015 - via RT
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