273.15 �C | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: 273.15 �C | Previous Challenge Entry
By Dawn Winston
10/23/14
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273.15 °C
Kalte sighed deeply. They were almost five thousand light years away from home heading to the Boomerang nebula in the constellation Centaurus.The sight of it filled him with a strange sadness. “You know why they picked us, don’t you Jackson.”
“They picked you because you’re stupid.” Jackson took a sip from his protein drink, “They picked me because I’m fearless. They picked Sen because she is so damn cute.” He looked around to see if she was within earshot.
“Oooo yikes, I dare you to say that a little louder.”Kalte grinned broadly, crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “They picked us because…, no, I think you have a point, they picked us because we are the only one’s stupid enough to go.”
“If you say you were at the coldest place in the universe, you’ve got something to tell your great grand kids.”
“Ha!” Kalte laughs, “We will never get out of his one.”
They stared at the beautiful blue bowtie shaped galaxy before them. Kalte flashes back to his youth in Berlin when he first saw a picture of it. It moved him deeply, mysteriously then and now and he tried to shake the long term foreboding. He remembered how his great grandfather told him about discoveries in his great grandparent’s time. What form of matter is this, little one?” His great grandfather gave him a glass of water.
“Liquid!” Kalte pointed at it.
“And what about this?” his great grandfather gave him a glass filled with ice.
“Solid!” young Kalte clapped.
Great grandfather pointed to the steam rising from a pot, “and this?”
“Gas!” he said.
“So show me a fourth state.” Great grandfather smiled.
Kalte thought for a minute, which was like an eternity at that age, then shouted, “I do not know, show me great grandfather.”
“I can only show you in a very special laboratory or here,” he held up an image in a computer tablet of the beautiful boomerang galaxy. “It occurs at absolute zero which is 273.15 °C.”

“You see this is the state of absolute freezing. All the atoms cling and clump closely together, they lose most of their energy and no longer move. They are no longer billions of separate atoms but one and they are like waves. These waves overlap and stretch out. They are all unified. It was imagined by Einstein and an Indian man named Bose long, long before.”
“How could they see that, great grandfather?”
“I guess they were geniuses! Anyways science named this new state of matter after them, a Bose-Einstein condensate.”
“I cannot imagine such a thing.”
“It only gets stranger. Super cold matter becomes a superfluid. It would climb the walls of this cup it would be in, and crawl down the outside to drip off the bottom. It would be a superconductor and float. It would ignore gravity and go in the other direction. It is just like dark energy that pushes everything apart against gravity that pulls it together….”
Kalte and Jackson hear Sen scream then as if in slow motion glance at each other and toward the rear of the ship where she worked. Time stopped. The ship‘s structure dissolved before their eyes. How, Kalte thought, it had been tested and endured many states of outer space. He felt his heart and breathing slow to nothing. He could not yell to them nor think. Jackson was blue and puffed up, as was he, and was ripping off his clothes. Sen had dove below the control panel. He could not use his hands nor move. He could suddenly feel inside Jackson, as he was part of him, then Sen, then the ship and all its parts. He was beyond emotion, but filled with melancholy. It was all over gradually, yet in a flash. He, they were a part of the whole boomerang galaxy, and more- much more. There was one last though that came to him, one thought he had not had since he was young, he opened his mouth and thought, “God.”

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