The Secret Way to Get to Absolute Zero: Scientists Just Found It

If you’ve ever tried to cool leftover pizza in a freezer that’s already stuffed with ice trays, you already understand the vibe of modern physics:
getting colder sounds simple until you try to do it all the way.

Absolute zero0 kelvin (that’s -273.15°C or -459.67°F)is the famous “coldest possible temperature,” the point where a system is in its lowest-energy state.
Textbooks have long warned: you can approach it, but you can’t actually arrive.
And yet, a group of physicists reframed the problem and revealed a “secret way” that sounds like a cheat code:
reach absolute zero without infinite time or infinite energy… by paying with something else.

Spoiler: the “secret” is not a new freezer setting.
It’s a deeper rule about information, quantum control, and why the universe won’t let you get something for nothingeven if you promise to bring a really good thermos.

Absolute Zero 101: What It Means (and Why It’s Such a Big Deal)

Temperature is, at its core, a measure of how energy is spread through the motion and internal activity of particles.
As you cool something down, you’re removing thermal energy so that fewer energetic states are accessible.
At absolute zero, the system sits in the ground statethe lowest-energy configuration it can have.

But do atoms “stop moving” at absolute zero?

Here’s where physics does a little jazz improv: even at the lowest energy, quantum mechanics says particles still have
zero-point motion.
So “no motion” is a useful mental picture, but the truly correct picture is “no thermal motion left to remove.”
Absolute zero is about eliminating thermally driven randomness, not deleting quantum reality like an awkward social post from 2011.

Why Absolute Zero Is (Supposed to Be) Unreachable

One classic form of the third law of thermodynamics (often phrased as the “unattainability principle”) says you can’t cool any system to
0 K in a finite number of steps or finite time by any physical process.
As you get colder, extracting the last scraps of heat becomes increasingly costly.
Cooling is like trying to scoop the last drop of soup with a fork: technically a “method,” practically a cry for help.

In modern terms, the resources required to cool further tend to blow up as the target temperature approaches 0 K.
That resource might be time, energy, entropy export capacity, or something else you’d rather not put on a grant application.

So What’s This “Secret Way” Scientists Found?

The headline version is deliciously mischievous: absolute zero is theoretically attainable.
But the fine print is where the real science lives:
to hit 0 K exactly, you must have an infinite amount of at least one key resource.
Traditionally, the “infinite” was framed as time or energy.
The new twist: there’s a third currencycontrol complexity.

The new ingredient list: energy, time, and complexity

In a quantum setting, researchers showed that perfect cooling can, in principle, be achieved if
either energy, time, or control complexity diverges.
That means you could keep energy finite and time finite, but then the
complexity of the control operations must become infinite.
In other words, the “secret way” is not “free.”
It’s “pay with a different infinity.”

Think of it like reaching the top of a mountain:
you can take an infinitely long gentle path (infinite time),
you can try to rocket straight up (infinite energy),
or you can attempt an acrobatic, perfectly choreographed climb that requires infinitely detailed moves (infinite control complexity).
The summit is still brutalyou’re just choosing which kind of brutal.

Where Information Theory Walks Into Thermodynamics (and Starts a Friendly Argument)

The motivation for this “secret route” comes from a famous bridge between computing and physics called the
Landauer principle.
In simple terms: erasing information has a minimum thermodynamic cost.
If you erase one bit of information in a system at temperature T, there’s a lower bound on how much energy must be dissipated as heat:
approximately k_BT ln 2.

Now notice the delicious tension:
if cooling to absolute zero is like making the system’s state perfectly known (maximally “ordered”),
then cooling and “erasing” uncertainty look closely related.
But classical thermodynamics says absolute zero demands infinite resources,
while Landauer’s bound suggests a finite, well-defined minimum cost for erasure at a given temperature.
So which is it?
Infinite… or finite?

The reconciliation: what you count as a “resource” matters

The resolution is that energy isn’t the only limiting factor.
Perfect cooling (or perfect erasure) can be analyzed as a resource trade:
you can keep the energy cost near the Landauer limit, but then you must spend enormous amounts of
time, or implement increasingly elaborate control operations on an increasingly complex system.
Once you include control complexity as a real physical resource, the apparent contradiction relaxes.

What “Infinite Control Complexity” Actually Means (In Human Language)

“Infinite complexity” can sound mystical, like a wizard’s spellbook or your group chat trying to pick a restaurant.
In physics, it’s more concrete: it refers to how complicated the operations must be to steer a quantum system into a perfectly pure ground state.

As you push closer to absolute zero, you may need operations that:

• act on many particles at once (highly collective control),
• require extremely precise timing and calibration,
• depend on fine-grained knowledge of the system’s microscopic state,
• and involve unitary transformations too complex to implement with any finite device.

So the “secret way” isn’t a new refrigerator coil.
It’s a statement about the limits of control in quantum mechanics:
if you had an impossibly powerful quantum conductor’s batonand an orchestra with infinitely many instrumentsyou could conduct your way to 0 K.
But in the real world, the baton shakes, the orchestra sneezes, and the funding cycle ends.

How Close Have We Actually Gotten to Absolute Zero?

Even without impossible infinities, scientists have gotten ridiculously close.
But “close” depends on what you’re coolingand how you measure.
Cooling a metal chunk to millikelvin temperatures is a different sport than cooling a dilute gas of atoms to nanokelvin or picokelvin levels.
Both are impressive; they just live in different leagues of experimental technique.

Millikelvin: the realm of quantum hardware

Many superconducting quantum devices operate in the millikelvin range using
dilution refrigerators, which exploit the weird mixing behavior of helium-3 and helium-4 isotopes to pull heat out in stages.
Other techniques, like adiabatic demagnetization refrigeration (ADR), can also push temperatures down into the tens of millikelvin for specialized setups.
These are the workhorse machines behind a lot of quantum researchbig, expensive, and louder than you’d expect something cold to be.

Microkelvin to picokelvin: the realm of ultracold atoms

For atoms in a vacuum, laser cooling can bring temperatures down to microkelvin,
and evaporative or specialized “lensing” techniques can go far below that.
Experimental teams have reported effective temperatures in the picokelvin regime for ultracold atomic clouds for very brief windowsnumbers so small they look like a rounding error got a PhD.

None of these experiments violate the third law in the practical sense:
they approach, but do not reach, 0 Kand they typically do so for carefully isolated systems over limited times.

Why This Matters Beyond Bragging Rights

If absolute zero is unattainable in practice, why care about theoretical routes that still require an infinity somewhere?
Because physics is full of “unreachable” limits that still shape real engineering.
The speed of light matters even when your car isn’t a spaceship.
Similarly, the “true cost” of perfect cooling and perfect erasure matters because it tells us what can be optimizedand what can’t.

Implications for quantum computing

Quantum computers are exquisitely sensitive to noise.
Lower temperatures can reduce certain kinds of thermal disturbance, improve coherence, and stabilize superconducting behavior.
But the new framework emphasizes a broader point:
even if you had the coldest fridge imaginable, perfectly erasing quantum information or
preparing perfectly pure states runs into fundamental resource limits.

Practically speaking, quantum engineers don’t need perfectionjust “good enough” purity and error correction.
But understanding the resource tradeoffs (energy vs time vs control complexity) clarifies why certain designs scale smoothly and others hit a wall.

Implications for thermodynamics itself

This work also highlights a modern theme: classical thermodynamics was built for steam engines and bulk matter,
while quantum thermodynamics deals with individual systems where information is not a metaphorit’s a measurable physical quantity.
As we build smaller and more coherent machines, the old laws aren’t discarded, but they do get upgraded with new definitions of “cost.”

What the “Secret Way” Does NOT Mean

Let’s keep the hype in a safe, climate-controlled container:

• It does not mean scientists have a practical method to reach 0 K tomorrow.
• It does not mean thermodynamics was “wrong.”
• It does mean the third law has a richer resource accounting in the quantum regime.
• It does mean information and temperature are more tightly linked than your high-school physics class had time to explain.

The discovery is best read as a conceptual map:
it tells you which directions are blocked by physical law, which directions are blocked by engineering reality,
and which directions are blocked by the fact that “infinite complexity” is not an item you can put in your lab cart next to gloves and ethanol wipes.

So… Is Absolute Zero “Possible” or Not?

If you’re asking as a philosopher: in a carefully defined theoretical sense, yesabsolute zero can be framed as attainable
provided you allow an infinite resource (energy, time, or control complexity).

If you’re asking as an experimentalist: nobecause every real apparatus is finite, noisy, and built by humans who occasionally drop screws.
The power of the “secret way” is not in promising a literal 0 K endpoint,
but in showing why that endpoint resists us, and which tradeoffs govern the near-zero frontier we actually live in.

Field Notes: What “Chasing Absolute Zero” Feels Like (Experiences From the Cold Frontier)

You don’t have to reach 0 K to understand why scientists obsess over it. Spend any time around low-temperature physicson paper or in a laband you start to see
absolute zero less as a destination and more as a personality trait: it’s the silent, stubborn character who never shows up on screen but drives the entire plot.

In many cryogenics labs, the “experience” begins with patience. Cooling isn’t instant; it’s a ritual of staged waiting.
Researchers will tell you that the coldest part of the experiment is sometimes the calendar.
A dilution refrigerator may take a long time to step down through temperature plateaus, and every stage has its own quirks:
vibrations to tame, heat leaks to hunt, and cables that behave like tiny thermal smugglers sneaking warmth into the system.
When your goal is millikelvin stability, a careless routing of a wire can feel like leaving the fridge door open during a heat wave.

Then there’s the emotional roller coaster of “almost.” The data might look beautiful at 30 mKuntil a tiny burst of noise kicks you back to 60 mK.
Nothing “broke,” exactly. The universe just reminded you it still has opinions.
This is where the new “secret way” to absolute zero feels oddly relatable:
the closer you push toward perfection, the more your limitations shift from obvious problems (remove heat!) to subtle ones (remove every pathway
heat could possibly sneak through). In practice, the battle becomes about control: control of electromagnetic interference, control of vibrations,
control of measurement back-action, control of the environment, andif you’re unluckycontrol of a lab mate who thinks “gentle” and “door” are optional words.

In ultracold atom experiments, the experience is different but just as dramatic. Instead of a fridge the size of a closet, you might have a vacuum chamber
full of laser beams. The “cold” is engineered with light and timing. Students learn quickly that lasers are not magical; they are moody coworkers with
strong feelings about alignment. A fraction of a millimeter can decide whether your atoms chill politely into a cloud or scatter like you opened an umbrella indoors.
And when the temperatures drop into microkelvin or below, your biggest enemy can be something as unromantic as background gas collisionstiny impacts
that dump energy back into the system like a toddler tossing Legos into a carefully sorted bin.

What sticks with many researchers is the way “temperature” turns from a simple number into a story about resources.
You learn that cold is not merely the absence of heat; it’s the presence of constraints.
Want colder? Pay with time.
Want faster? Pay with energy.
Want both? Pay with complexitymore calibration, more control sequences, more precision, more layers of understanding.
In that sense, the “secret way” scientists found isn’t just a theory result; it’s a description of lived scientific reality.
Every serious attempt to get closer to 0 K eventually becomes a negotiation with infinities: infinite patience, infinite precision, or infinite budget
(which, tragically, is the rarest infinity of all).

And yet, the pursuit is joyful in its own weird way. When an experiment finally settles into a stable, ultra-low-temperature state,
it feels like the lab is holding its breath with you.
Screens flicker with clean signals. Noise quiets down. The system behaves.
For a moment, you can almost believe absolute zero is just one more knob turn away
until physics clears its throat and reminds you: “Close is a place. Zero is a limit.”