Absolute Zero is a fascinating popular history of research into cold, from Francis Bacon through the present day, with a climax around the liquification of helium by Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. Popular in the sense that Shachtman avoids equations and a historical perspective, this book is comprehensive and enjoyable.

As Shachtman notes, cold presents an unusual negation of phenomenon for early physicists. Unlike light, sound, motion, or heat, cold is an absence. Francis Bacon, the proto-experimentalist, died of pneumonia after an impromptu test to see if snow could preserve chicken (yes), and after that the study of cold languished for centuries, a mere adjunct to the more important measurement of temperature.

The dominant caloric theory of the 18th century was intuitively satisfying, but its invocation of a ineffable and non-existent heat bearing fluid model the emerging technology of steam engines, or the mechanical production of cold by gas expansion. As physicists experimented with cold, they proved that gases could transform to new phases of matter at low temperatures and above atmospheric pressure. Carbon dioxide, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and finally helium were all liquified.

Onnes was the first to liquify helium, and the first to note the astonish property of low temperature superconductivity in mercury and a host of other substances, as well as the superfluid behavior of liquid helium. Low temperatures proved an experimental bridge between classical physics and the new quantum physics, where at low temperatures macro-scale objects that could be manipulated in the lab exhibited properties only explainable by quantum effects.

Today, commercial refrigeration and air conditioning are so commonplace as to be entirely unremarkable, but cold was once cutting edge, and this book captures the romance of the quest for absolute zero.