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In a programme first broadcast in 2013, Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss absolute zero, the lowest conceivable temperature. \\xa0In the early eighteenth century the French physicist\\xa0Guillaume Amontons suggested that temperature had a lower limit. \\xa0The subject of low temperature became a fertile field of research in the nineteenth century, and today we know that this limit - known as absolute zero - is approximately minus 273 degrees Celsius. \\xa0It is impossible to produce a temperature exactly equal to absolute zero, but today scientists have come to within a billionth of a degree. \\xa0At such low temperatures physicists have discovered a number of strange new phenomena including superfluids, liquids capable of climbing a vertical surface.

With:

Simon Schaffer\\nProfessor of the History of Science at the University of Cambridge

Stephen Blundell\\nProfessor of Physics at the University of Oxford

Nicola Wilkin\\nLecturer in Theoretical Physics at the University of Birmingham

Producer: Thomas Morris