August 15, 1994 - The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) achieves the record for sub-zero temperatures

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the United States manages to cool atoms down to 700 nanokelvins, this is 700,000 million times less than one degree above absolute zero, which stands at -273.15 degrees Celsius.

The mission of this institute is to promote innovation and industrial competition in the United States through advances in metrology, standards, and technology in a way that improves economic stability and quality of life, which is why its discovery has allowed the semiconductor industry to improve, some lithographic processes and the technology of atomic clocks.

The Celsius or centigrade (°C) scale is one of the best known and used, and considers zero (0°C) as the freezing point of water and 100°C as the boiling point, that is, there are 100 divisions that separate both points.

The Kelvin scale measures thermodynamic temperature, this is the measurement of the absolute temperature of an object. He proposes a model without negative values, in which zero corresponds to absolute zero, that is, there will be nothing that could be "colder" than this, although in reality we do not speak of cold or heat, but of absence or not. of thermodynamic energy, so the record achieved by NIST has been considered a milestone.

To get a clearer idea, the relationship between both scales is:

Degrees Celsius = Degrees Kelvin – 273.15

The truth is that in our daily life we will rarely use the Kelvin scale, but in the scientific or photographic field it is the most used.