Researchers Chill Mirror to Near Absolute Zero

An anonymous reader writes "Physicists have managed to cool a dime-sized mirror to within one degree of absolute zero. This is the lowest laser-induced freeze yet achieved with a visible object. Laser cooling involves firing pulses of light at a specific frequency that exactly matches an atom's motions."

See, kids?

[FlyByPC]

Science *is* cool. Sometimes literally!

Re:

[packeteer]

Puns like that are why kids dont like us scientists...

Mirror

[biocute]

What's the significance of chilling a dime-sized mirror, vs chilling a dime?

I imagine that

[pavon]

the surface has to be highly reflective for this to work. If it absorbed the photons, then it's temperature would increase, and if it was transparent the photons wouldn't interact with the material very much, and thus would not be able to cool it.

Re:

[weighn]

IANAP, but I'd guess that a super-flat surface is needed so they can have a precise measurement of the distance between the laser and the object being zapped. That way they can time the laser freq with the atomic vibrations. There's just too many mountainous bumps on a dime.

Re:

[gardyloo]

The beauty of laser-cooling is that surface roughness (on a moderate scale; the face of a dime is pretty rough, but a "smooth" piece of metal probably wouldn't affect things too much) isn't a problem. Nor are small motions in the direction of the laser axis. In fact, it's the doppler effect of the motions to and fro in the laser beam axis that *helps* laser cooling work. It's nice to have atomic transitions near the laser's frequency, but it's not especially necessary. And I kind of doubt that phonons prese

Re:

[LurkerXXX]

Mirrors absorb light?

Wow.

And they are hoping to reflect photons (which are light) not electrons.

I think you need to go retake some science classes. Seriously.

Re:

[shaitand]

'Mirrors absorb light?

Wow.'

Yes. Everything absorbs light but your typical glass mirror absorbs quite a bit more than say mylar.

'And they are hoping to reflect photons (which are light) not electrons.'

Yup, I thought one word and my fingers typed another. It happens to me quite a bit, especially at 4am.

'I think you need to go retake some science classes. Seriously.'

I would always love to take more science classes. That doesn't change the fact that there are much more reflective surfaces than mirrors. Drywall

Re:

[shaitand]

Silvered glass mirrors absorb more light than freshly painted drywall and substantially more light than a reflective substance like mylar. Feel free to ask any high school science student. Actually a high school stoner might be a better choice, they discover this when they need to save every possible photon because the under-powered light they use to grow their pot in the closet.

Re:

[shaitand]

'It's common for mirrors used in optics research to be coated not with silver, but with thin layers of dielectric that achieve >99% reflection at the wavelength of interest. (Silvered mirrors, on the other hand, reflect a broad swath of the electromagnetic spectrum, but commonly with 80-90% efficiency.)'

I didn't know this but it would certainly explain this puzzle. Thanks for the information. :)

Re:Mirror

[glwtta]

Makes you look cool?

Re:

[ProfessionalCookie]

Probably about $99,999.90. Im guessing that the mirror had to be specifically designed!

Re:

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Well, when they get the mirror close enough to absolute zero, apparently it will "show its quantum behavior for the first time," which I assume means it will reflect THE FUTURE.

Re:

[MoralHazard]

What's the significance of chilling a dime-sized mirror, vs chilling a dime?

No idea, but the significance of chilling WITH a dime is that I'm high as hell on some stinky, stinky weed.

JK, Mom.

Bad luck

[brer_rabbit]

This should answer the age old question, if a mirror at absolute zero breaks, do you have bad luck?

Re:

[pyite]

Anything multiplied by 0 is 0!

So n * 0 = 1?

Just kidding, playing on the fact that 0! = 1.

I thought this was a breakthrough

[Barkmullz]

IANAP, so I figured this was some sort of breakthrough. As it turns out:

1. Others have gotten much, much closer to 0 K using atoms and laser cooling.
2. Others have gotten much, much closer to 0 K using solid objects and different cooling methods.
3. Their method has the potential of getting closer to 0 K.

So, even if it is not a breakthrough it is still impressive.

Re:I thought this was a breakthrough

[btgreat]

Actually, this really is a breakthrough. According to the article, laser supercooling has been used in the past by researchers, but never on anything more than a few atoms. These researchers successfully lasercooled a mirror the size of a dime (which would probably be about .01 to .1 moles, on the order of 10^21 or 10^22 atoms, more than just "a few" (probably meaning on the order of 10^6 or so, but IANAP, so don't quote me there)).

Re:

[imsabbel]

What _you_ seem to know as laser cooling is esentially using a modified penning trap with 6 circular polarized lasers. There is no way to use such an assembly on any _visible object_ (thats why that sentence was used in the blurb). It needs the volume of entrapment to be translucent.

Re:

[Bozdune]

So what you're saying is, it doesn't make a dime's worth of difference, right?

That's nothing

[edwardpickman]

My exwife could do that with just a glance. It may not have been one degree over Absolute Zero but it sure felt that way.

Re:

[Air-conditioned cowh]

Hey!

The Fonze could do this every time he combed his hair.

I said before and I'll say again...

[The Great Pretender]

You want to get to absolute zero, go see my first wife

Beer Cooler

[truckaxle]

Now we would all be a lot more impressed if they cooled a glass of Guinness down to the requisite 5 degrees Celsius.

A functional laser operated beer cooler... now that would be a patent i wouldn't complain about.

Re:

[weighn]

...requisite 5 degrees Celsius...

although the "serve at room temperature" thing is a bit of a myth for Irish/British beers, the best temp for pouring a Guinness [beertravelers.com] is around 7-8 degrees. Sounds like I'm nit-picking, but there is a difference for us piss-heads^H^H^H connoisseurs.

Website on laser cooling and trapping

[XchristX]

The JILA group at UC Boulder does lots of work on laser cooling and trapping (the Weimann/Ketterle/Cornell group got the 2001 Nobel Prize for generating BEC by laser cooling). They have a neat java applet demonstrating the effect

http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/lascool1. html [colorado.edu]

CU not UC

[Skadet]

Just a nitpick, but the UCs are in California (University of California) and U of Colorado is called CU. So it's CU-Boulder.

Conservation of Energy...

[btgreat]

A couple of people made posts that got my brain ticking.. Someone mentioned that this confirms quantum theory in that adding light energy reduces the temperature, thereby reducing the energy of the system. In response, someone mentioned it was like noise cancellation. The problem I see with this analogy, and the idea of the experiment in general is that while I can see similarities, when we talk about noise cancellation, no energy is lost. It is still there, even though destructive interference cancels th

Re:

[smaddox]

We start with high speed atoms and light, and end with low speed atoms and no light; isn't the energy being destroyed?

You actually DO end up with light. More energetic light, to be more specific.

It can almost be simplified to classical collision physics. The photon hits the atom and bounces off, slowing down the atom and in turn, the photon "speeds up" (gets red shifted).

Re:

[Engine]

You are correct. The scattered light is blue shifted due to the energy it takes away.

Freeze-Ray!?!

[ziekrage]

"Laser cooling involves firing pulses of light..." I believe Victor Fries [wikipedia.org] would be proud.

Ah, a balmy 0.8K

[xPsi]

Using LASER cooling to bring a macroscopic object o 0.8K is pretty darn neat. But cooling big things in general to sub-Kelvin temperatures is not that unusual (the article only gives a nod to this idea). For example, in our bolometry experiment [mib.infn.it], we cool 40 kg of TeO2 crystals down to just 10 milliKelvin using an ancient Oxford (brand) dilution refrigerator.

Can I overclock with this technique?

[Derling Whirvish]

When will we see this technique used to cool the CPUs in gaming machines?

What quantum effects expected

[mattr]

If the mirror was cooled lower still it supposedly would exhibit quantum effects, TFA says. Would this mean the mirror could interfere with itself, like in the single photon double slit experiment? How could this create more sensitive mirrors for the LIGO?

Oblig.

[SeaFox]

"Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, who's the coolest one o-- AAAAAAAH! MY EYES!

cooling 1g under 1K trivial. TFA has typos/errors?

[viking80]

There must be some error in TFA. Looks like it was written by someone with little understanding. To cool a 1g item under 1K is trivial. You can buy coolers that can keep large volumes way down in the mK range. Commercial literature give numbers like 1mW cooling at 35mK.

TFA says that the purpose of cooling was to "...cancel the natural forces entirely, so quantum forces apply exclusively."

That is of course incorrect. Quantum mechanics *are* the natural forces(,excluding gravity?), and cooling is often used to bring matter to the ground state or similar, so quantum effects take on macroscopic and often more observable (and intriguing) properties.

If there is a real breakthrough here, does anyone have the original scientific reference?

Laser Cooling

[FreemanPatrickHenry]

"Laser cooling involves firing pulses of light at a specific frequency that exactly matches an atom's motions."

I may be wrong on this, as I'm just an undergrad physics major, but in my experience laser cooling involves detuning a laser slightly below some atomic transition frequency, and counterpropagating the same beam back. What happens is as a laser moves quickly in the direction of the beam, it observes the laser's frequency to be higher due to the Doppler shift, and suddenly this laser that was not resonating with the atoms comes into resonance, and the atom starts absorbing photons, which have momentum. This knocks the atom back such that it can't move quickly in the direction of the laser. Often this is done with six beams along three orthogonal axes so that you cool the atoms in all directions.

If ...

[can56]

Scientists can use lasers to cool atoms/crystals/mirrors to near absolute zero, does that mean: a) really god-damn-cold-fusion is possible, or b) by increasing the power of the lasers, hot-fusion may occur?. Sorry, but I'm waiting for someone (less drunk and more eloquent than I) to comment on the definition of temperature, the scales (K/F/C), and what this experiment could lead to.

should have used spinal tap's laser

[speculatrix]

their laser goes up to 11, which might have allowed them to get below 1 degree!

One step closer to the chill pill!

[elrous0]

In the 21st century, the evolution of ice beer continued unabated...

Moving heat vs. creating cold.

[neo]

My refrigerator repair man was explaining to me in a very pedantic way that a refrigerator doesn't make cold, but rather it moves heat out of the inside and pushes it to the outside. This is the conservation of energy.

If a laser can counter the speed of atoms, thus creating an object at near absolute zero, couldn't this create a cold environment without creating equal heat outside the environment? Am I misunderstanding the experiment or are they creating cold without removing heat?

The applications of this

HMM, would it be possible

[Some_Llama]

I have always wanted the reverse of a Microwave, something that can rapidly cool food/drink, I wonder if it is possible with this technology?

Seems limited to things that are made up primarily of the same types of atoms?

I wonder if you could do this with sound waves, (or with this tech) kind of like how noise cancelling tech works, but tuned to the water in food/drink, if you specifically shot the slight or sound waves at the frequency of water (OR H or O atoms instead) molecules to steady them it would theo

Re:

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

My goals where of course shot down when I did research into how the limitations(thing to work really have to me microscopic)

Clearly not anymore. Your dreams can become reality! People do eat mirrors right?

Re:Thought of that once....

[SnowZero]

I've heard that eating a mirror was bad luck.

Nothing came up on Snopes.com, so it must be true...

Re:

[Sj0]

It's surprising how well that actually works.

Re:

[Merc248]

Overclocking!

Re:This is cool stuff and all...

[camperdave]

could someone explain what the significance of this is?

Perhaps we could reflect on it.

Re:This is cool stuff and all...

[sarge apone]

could someone explain what the significance of this is?

Perhaps we could reflect on it.

Absolutely... to a degree.

Re:

[roman_mir]

could someone explain what the significance of this is?

Perhaps we could reflect on it.

Absolutely... to a degree.

Reflection to that degree requires an unclouded mind, so chill.

Re:

[Sj0]

Pickup trucks!

Re:This is cool stuff and all...

[sholden]

You could try reading the first sentence of the article.

Re:

[camperdave]

You could try reading the first sentence of the article.

If you want to really see quantum mechanics in action, you've got to turn the temperature down so low that even atoms stop moving.

Hmm... Nope. No explanation as to why they're using a dime sized mirror at all. You could just as easily* chill a cube of carbon, the plastic plug from the end of a ball point pen, or a leftover piece of cheese from last night's pizza. Perhaps the scientists had an old dental mirror lying around. Who knows? Whatever the reason, it certainly isn't explained in the first sentence.

* I have no idea how easy or hard it would be to chill these it

Re:

[sholden]

Maybe you could try reading the post I replied to, and then point to me where in:

This is cool stuff and all... ...but could someone explain what the significance of this is? Does this tell us anything interesting about the universe? Or is this just a "let's see if it can be done" kind of thing?

is the question about why it's a dime sized mirror?

"Seeing quantum mechanics in action" seems a reasonable answer to "does this tell us anything interesting about the universe?".

I'm terribly sorry I didn't ask your co

Re:

[camperdave]

point to me where ... is the question about why it's a dime sized mirror?

In the word "this". Since the original post was a direct child of the story "Researchers Chill Mirror to Near Absolute Zero" (which later describes the mirror as dime sized), I assumed that the "this" in the question "could someone explain what the significance of this is" referred to chilling a mirror. Or to put it another way, I took the first question of the post to mean "could someone explain what the significance of chilling a

Re:

[sholden]

Whereas I was replying to what I was replying to, not the entire chain of posts.

The answer to your question is in the fourth last sentence of the article, far to far down for slashdot.

Re:

[camperdave]

Ah!

the team's specialized mirror resembles an atom more than a solid object in some respects because of its precise interaction with light.

Thanks! That explains a lot.

Confirms quantum theory

[quokkapox]

It confirms our understanding of light and matter and how they interact. You would think that shining light (energy) on something would warm it up. If it cools it down, something strange is going on.

In a broader sense, it means that we can manipulate matter and energy in ways nobody imagined 100 years ago (well, except for Einstein).

Re:Confirms quantum theory

[Anonymous Coward]

It confirms our understanding of light and matter and how they interact. You would think that shining light (energy) on something would warm it up. If it cools it down, something strange is going on.

You must not be familiar with how waves interact. The light waves and the material's "atom waves" are interacting so that maximum destructive interference is achieved; same frequency but half a wavelength out of phase of each other. The resulting wave of the atoms in the material should then have close to zero energy because other waves in the system may add constructively interfere with the atom waves.

In my opinion, scientists may be able to approach absolute zero but they will never effectively reach it. They may hit a point at which it can be proclaimed as "good enough", but since the entire system must contain no energy and energy will always leak into the system from the universe, absolute zero will not be reached in actuality.

The benefits of moving closer to absolute zero are that we can better understand exactly what atoms do when macro-forces are canceled out and only micro-forces apply, how the building blocks relate to each other in an energy-less environment, and if any other "laws" apply to our universe that we just weren't able to witness otherwise.

Re:

[asninn]

In my opinion, scientists may be able to approach absolute zero but they will never effectively reach it. They may hit a point at which it can be proclaimed as "good enough", but since the entire system must contain no energy and energy will always leak into the system from the universe, absolute zero will not be reached in actuality.

IANAP, but doesn't it immediately follow from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that absolute zero is not reachable, as well?

Re:Confirms quantum theory

[growse]

You are correct, and I believe GP is wrong to assume that matter at absolute zero has no energy. It actually has whatever the zero-point energy is (for it's particles), which all quantum physics and wikipedia-browsers will know is the expectation value of the Hamiltonian :)

Re:

[Hektor_Troy]

Nah, you can cool it to absolute zero, you'd just never be able to find it ;)

Re:

[LordVader717]

Correct.
It's also one of the ideas of "quantum" physics. You either have a quantum of energy or you don't, so you can't say there's an "inbetween" for zero and the first level of excitation.

Re:

[EvilSS]

It would also violate the 3nd law of thermodynamics.

Re:

[mstahl]

It actually follows from the third law of thermodynamics [wikipedia.org].

Re:

[aeonturnip]

I've had optical damping explained to me in a classical sense - rather than wave interactions causing maximum destruction, think of an excited atom being like a child on a swing, and rather than pushing them every time they start to move away from your to get their swing higher and higher, to push them every time they approach you to get them to swing lower and lower.

As you say, though, whichever analogy you use, it's not possible to remove all the energy in the system due to Heisenbergs Uncertainty princip

Re:

[kmac06]

What? That's nonsense. The light waves and atom waves cannot interfere since they are describing distinct particles. The process is much more like another poster described it, pushing on the atom completely out-of-phase with it. And scientists have already gotten pretty much as close as possible to absolute zero with a Bose-Einstein condensate. In a BEC, a significant portion of the particles are in their ground state, i.e. lowest energy possible.

Re:

[Sj0]

You may be right, but you shouldn't have +5 for it. You're just being a smug ass assuming that because the person doesn't say what "something strange going on" is, he doesn't know.

Re:

[Tim C]

You must not be familiar with how waves interact. The light waves and the material's "atom waves" are interacting so that maximum destructive interference is achieved; same frequency but half a wavelength out of phase of each other. The resulting wave of the atoms in the material should then have close to zero energy because other waves in the system may add constructively interfere with the atom waves.

The thing about wave interactions is that neither wave is altered by the interaction.

Therefore, if you are

Re:

[ioshhdflwuegfh]

From what I understand about absolute zero, there is no energy in the system, including the energy required to keep electrons in orbit around the nucleus of an atom.

Absolute Zero means that the temperature of the system is exactly 0 Kelvin. What is temperature, on the other hand, is not so easy to define. For example, it has nothing to do with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which relates energy and time, or position and momentum. Energy is an all together different physical quantity than temperature.

Therefore, the atoms would collapse in on themselves, creating an extremely dense substance. Am I right in thinking this would happen?

Not quite: the laws of quantum mechanics would prevent such collapse: standard quantum-mechanical description of atom already presupposes that the atom is at 0 Ke

Re:Confirms quantum theory

[NightHwk1]

It seems like it's the same effect as noise cancellation... firing pulses at the exact opposite frequency of the atom.

And about the mirror versus using an actual dime or something else--a perfectly smooth, very thin object probably makes atomic-level laser targeting much easier than a relatively rough object such as a coin.

Re:Confirms quantum theory

[tomatensaft]

There is no such thing as opposite frequency. There is a thing like counterphase, though. So, noise cancellation works by emitting noise of the same frequency, but in a counterphase.

Re:

[Fission86]

Actually no, what they do is, and I had Nobel Laureate Eric Cornell explain this to me himself, use a very specific laser tuned to one of the main absorbsion energies of that atom. The atom absorbs the light, and then emits more energy than it takes in, as it is absorbing photons and then emitting them, during the emittion process the atom gives off the original momentum of the photon plus a recoil momentum equal to the original absorbed photon. This effect, being done by several beams around your object, r

Re:

[Anpheus]

Two reasons: One, the greater the mass, the more certain we can be of its velocity and position. Two, we're nowhere near that low of an energy.

Re:

[encoderer]

But he was a constant (and vocal) skeptic of quantum theory. I mean, not only did he devote the last 1/4 of his life on unified field theory, he publicly criticized quantum theory many times.

Hmm, the "laser-induced" part must be significant

[PaulBu]

... otherwise I can go to the lab tomorrow and drop a whopping *palm-sized* mirrow in a dewar of liquid He to get within a factor of 4 to their achievement! And then. if keep being nice to other guys around, I can sneak a dime-sized object to cool to, like, some mK... :)

Paul B.

Here's the sginificance.

[deft]

The real world application of this will be truly shown when they find the exact frequency on beer.

Then, gaze upon its brilliance.

Re:

[Phleg]

Sorry, but what person that actually likes beer wants to drink it at a temperature where your taste buds are virtually incapable of processing taste. Crappy American macrobrews? I wouldn't drink them frozen.

Re:

[norton_I]

Thermal motion of mirrors are a limiting factor in high precision experiments. This allows those fluctuations to be reduced, allowing cool physics.

Re:This is cool stuff and all...

[YGingras]

It has many applications in astronomy. During the winter, the only expedition to climb to the top of the Mauna Kea are to fill the liquid nitrogen and liquid helium tanks of those huge telescopes. We don't realize it but getting pretty picture in IR requires that you more of less shut down the black body radiation of your optics. With liquid helium they cool the CCDs to 4.5 Kelvin. They use so much of the stuff that they need to fill the tanks every other week. I admit that I have no idea how big is the said tank but laser cooling would open the way to mostly unattended (think orbital) telescopes for a much broader part of the spectrum. At the moment we send IR orbital scopes with big tanks of liquid helium which is dead lift weight that could be used for larger optics and we drop the scopes in the ocean when they run out of the stuff. Spitzer, unlike Hubble, will be useless soon and will not be able to perform observations even if all the mechanical and electronics are still in top condition. If you ever visit the Mauna Kea, notice the frost patches inside the observatory. It's kind of cold up there but the best experience is inside the observatory: it's freezing, everyone is dizzy after climbing the stair (the air is really thin) and you see all those big pipes with cryo-steam. It feels like the visit to the cryo chamber in Akira.

Re:

[tbo]

I'm a physicist. I even have a very small bit of experience with low-temperature work (as an undergrad, I once used a dilution refrigerator to get a macroscopic object down to about 0.5 K, or half a degree above absolute zero). I'm now a theorist, working (in theory) with laser-cooled cold atoms, among other things. Despite all this, I have no clue what the significance is.

Lower temperatures are reachable with conventional techniques (such as dilution refrigerators). TFA suggests that the technique can even

Re:

[grimwell]

Let's see... a mirror is used in optics, something chilled to near-zero isn't moving(atoms are near motion-less), putting those two together means my pr0n is going to be that much crisper.

Or maybe someone would like to use the demonstrated cooling effect to chill some hardware? Maybe superconductors without having to use liquid nitrogen?

Sometimes just seeing what you can do is enough of a reason. "Because it is there" [google.com]

Re:

[compro01]

Celsius.

Re:

[Beefslaya]

Actually, I thought it was measured in Kelvin?

Re:

[Darth]

absolute zero is zero degrees kelvin. the article notes that that is -273 degrees celcius.
(which i guess is why the gp assumed celcius)

i expect the scientists are measuring it in kelvin

Re:

[fabs64]

The unit size for Kelvin and Celsius is the same, it's only the zero-point that moves.

Re:

[Darth]

true

i meant that the scientists are probably using the kelvin scale for notation. i didn't intend to imply the units were different sizes.
i'm posting from the web browser in a ps3. typing with a controller is very distracting.
i'll go upstairs and use a keyboard from now on.

Re:

[Phil246]

iirc, the kelvin scale is identical in steps to that of celcius, the only difference is the starting zero point.
With kelvin it is at absolute zero, the point where atoms stop vibrating. With celcius it is at the freezing point of water

Re:

[shaitand]

'the baseline changes, the interval doesn't. a degree of kelvin is a degree of celsius'

Yes but he didn't ask if it was one degree away from absolute zero in Celsius or Fahrenheit he asked if it was one degree Celsius or Fahrenheit and the answer is that it is one degree Kelvin. One degree Celsius would be above the freezing point and wouldn't even begin to approach absolute zero.

Re:

[gardyloo]

You're saying that Henry Winkler is SOOO cool that his career has disappeared?

Actually...

[ABasketOfPups]

It's already pretty cool. HAHAHAHA I slay me.

Re:

[zazelite]

Well, it does say in the article that a major goal is the detection of so-called gravity waves. As far as I know, there's no irrefutable evidence that gravity doesn't propagate faster than lightspeed - that, in fact, it's speed might very well be unbounded. I can bet you that once we have a gravity wave emitter that the next step will be a coherent gravity wave emitter i.e. a gravitational laser.

Re:

[Frogbert]

You know, that chick with the snuke up her sniz.

Re:

[Duhavid]

Cool!

Re:

[Mifflesticks]

You realize that star trek reference (the star trek enterprise episode title) is itself a reference to Corinthians in the new testament, right? And that it's not the only time star trek has referenced it... another translation comes out not as "in a mirror darkly" but "through a glass, darkly", for the same passage, which Picard says in Star Trek Nemesis.

Plus many books have used the same reference too.... but now I'm rambling.

Re:

[Gilmoure]

Corinthians: Sounds Latin. Did Virgil write this? An early novel? Never heard of it.

Re:

[StikyPad]

This is Slashdot. We don't quote original sources, just the last famous person to utter them.

Re:

[somersault]

Like A Scanner Darkly, right? *puts on Captain Obvious hat*

Re:

[Boogaroo]

Only if they can get lasers to stop burning 10x the amount of energy that you put in to get it to fire.
(I know that some are more efficient than others, but you all know there's no free lunch)

I'd be willing to bet that the massive amount of power required to cool all the air in your house would make you bankrupt in less than a year(and really piss off your power company).

Re:

[PopeRatzo]

but you all know there's no free lunch

Tell that to my cousin Tommy, the mooch.

Re:

[somersault]

I'd be willing to bet that the massive amount of power required to cool all the air in your house would make you bankrupt in less than a year(and really piss off your power company).

Not to mention the cost of all those extra layers of clothing and cups of hot cocoa you need while walking around near absolute zero