The lowest temperature in the world

During the last decade there has developed in physics a strange partnership between the two seemingly distant and unrelated disciplines—nuclear physics and low‐temperature physics. Nuclear physics is concerned with the structure of the nucleus and with the very large forces that hold its constituents together. The energies involved in nuclear changes, such as radioactive transformations, are vast and correspond to temperatures of tens or hundreds of millions of degrees. How then could such changes be influenced by ordinary temperatures, let alone by temperatures of only a few hundredths of a degree above absolute zero.

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