Helium, the unruly liquid
AUG 01, 1948
Liquid helium creeps up over the walls of its container, conducts heat better than any other substance, and exhibits other strange properties. How this can be used as a key to the quantum behavior of matter is explained by an authority in the field of low‐temperature physics.
DOI: 10.1063/1.3066129
The behavior of liquid helium is so unusual that it is not unreasonable to consider it the only representative of a fourth state of matter; helium gas condenses not into the liquid state, but rather into the quantum liquid state. Liquid helium is thus unique in low temperature physics; it is important both in the techniques of producing low temperatures and for its peculiar properties.
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Laszlo Tisza, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
© 1948 American Institute of Physics
