Kelvin and Absolute Zero for Physics Dummies

Comparison of temperature scales: F, C, and K

At our Friday staff meeting, one of the research crew suggested that we take another look at our files -- they're voluminous, to be sure -- of other dumbass posts written by some of our more prolific awardees. These folks are like the Michael Phelpses or the Meryl Streeps of stupidity... although perhaps we should call them our Susan Luccis, since they're perennial losers. That being said, we pulled out the file of the most prolific of all, Houstonian Joan Whetzel, to see what she had posted to her HubPages.com account. That's where we found he paean to temperature scales, "Absolute Shiv-v-ving in Absolute Zero."¹ Jeez, Joan, shouldn't you have said "shiv-v-vering"? Dumbass...

In addition to her inability to write coherent titles, Whetzel is also pretty bad at synthesizing scientific information (she's already picked up eleven DotD awards in the sciences, mostly physics). This time she's attempting, or at least our researcher thinks, to introduce the Kelvin temperature scale and absolute zero. Nowadays, most middle-schoolers have been introduced to the concept of absolute zero, which we found defined by the nice folks at Wikipedia as

"...the lower limit of the thermodynamic temperature scale, a state at which the enthalpy and entropy of a cooled ideal gas reaches its minimum value..."

But that definition's full of words Joan doesn't understand, so she reworded it:

"...absolute zero is, theoretically, the absolute lowest recordable temperature at which the temperature cannot get any colder and there is no longer heat energy being produced in a substance or a body. Basically, what it's saying is, that at this point, no work is being done, so no kinetic energy is being produced, hence no heat can be produced and no heat transfer occurs; nothing is moving or producing heat even down to the cellular, microscopic, and subatomic levels." Really? No movement at the subatomic level? We'll bet that claim would make milk come out some physicists' noses (not to mention that one of Joan's references specifically states that quantum mechanical particle motion continues)... and then Joan explains that "Absolute zero is considered to be 0°Kelvin (k)..."

...which, again, caused milk fountains; and she says this twice, to boot! Joan, you ignorant dumbass, it's the other way round: 0 K is defined at absolute zero. Oh, and by the way: by convention, you capitalize "K" and don't use the degree symbol -- it's not a "degree kelvin," it's a kelvin. Dumbass.

Our high-school intern, who'd just finished a semester of physics in tenth grade, wondered aloud why Whetzel didn't point out that a kelvin and a Celsius degree are identical quantities, and also didn't mention the Rankine scale (she'd never heard of it, we guess). Clearly, she's better qualified to have written such content than Whetzel, not to mention that she'd have spelled "shivering" correctly. Our intern, however, will probably never pick up a Dumbass of the Day award – unlike Joan, who now has twenty of 'em!

¹ This post has been deleted, and archive.org's Wayback machine never made a copy of it. Oh, well, no loss...

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