If the vacuum vessel containing a liquefied gas be kept in a cold medium, and particularly if two vacuum tubes be placed together, so that no exposed surface of liquid remains, a portion of liquefied air, for example, may be kept almost indefinitely. Thus it becomes possible to utilize the liquefied gas for experimental investigation of the properties of matter at low temperatures that otherwise would be quite impracticable. Great numbers of such experiments have been performed in the past decade or so by all the workers with low temperatures already mentioned, and by various others, including, fittingly enough, the holder of the Rumford professorship of experimental physics at Harvard, Professor Trowbridge. The work of Professor Dewar has perhaps been the most comprehensive and varied, but the researches of Pictet, Wroblewski, and Olzewski have also been important, and it is not always possible to apportion credit for the various discoveries accurately, since the authorities themselves are in unfortunate disagreement in several questions of priority. But in any event, such questions of exact priority have no great interest for any one but the persons directly involved. We may quite disregard them here, confining attention to the results themselves, which are full of interest.
The questions investigated have to do with the physical properties, such as electrical conductivity, magnetic condition, light-absorption, cohesion, and chemical affinities of matter at excessively low temperatures. It is found that in all these regards most substances are profoundly modified when excessively cooled. Thus if a piece of any pure metal is placed in an electric circuit and plunged into liquid air, its resistance to the passage of the electricity steadily decreases as the metal cools, until at the temperature of the liquid it is very trifling indeed. The conclusion seems to be justified that if the metal could be still further cooled until it reached the theoretical "absolute zero," or absolutely heatless condition, the electrical resistance would also be nil. So it appears that the heat vibrations of the molecules of a pure metal interfere with the electrical current. The thought suggests itself that this may be because the ether waves set up by the vibrating molecules conflict with the ether strain which is regarded by some theorists as constituting the electrical "current." But this simple explanation falters before further experiments which show, paradoxically enough, that the electrical resistance of carbon exactly reverses what has just been said of pure metals, becoming greater and greater as the carbon is cooled. If an hypothesis were invented to cover this case there would still remain a puzzle in the fact that alloys of metals do not act at all like the pure metals themselves, the electrical resistance of such alloys being, for the most part, unaffected by changed temperature. On the whole, then, the facts of electrical conduction at low temperatures are quite beyond the reach of present explanation. They must await a fuller knowledge of molecular conditions in general than is at present available--a knowledge to which the low-temperature work itself seems one of the surest channels.