Recently, he and Friedrich developed a way to eliminate the random tumbling of molecules so that the molecules all can be oriented in the same direction. That will enable us to obtain a slow-motion view of what goes on when two chemicals react with each other. Herschbach will describe their experiments at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco next month. Waves Matter Air is pumped out of the traps, of course, to prevent unwanted collisions with air molecules. And they are cooled down to within a fraction of the lowest temperature possible, near minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit.
Heat provides the energy of motion, so that in such cold, molecules move very slowly.
That's not the way it is in nature. Everything has a dual nature, an atom can behave like a solid particle, or like a cloud of waves. But an extremely lightweight particle, an atom or molecule, moving at very low speed, can behave like a wave. That means we could see a whole new type of chemistry, one we've never before explored. Physicists see other intriguing intellectual experiences at the very cold, very slow, very light end of the matter tunnel.