0 degrees kelvin

[Ethanadams]

What would happen if you could an object to absolute zero?

[ZetaX]

Such questions are ill-defined. It is the same as with "what is 1/0" or "what happens when I accelerate to the speed of light".

In other words: there is no meaningful answer.

[KwerbalBase]

wouldnt the atoms and everything just stop? like, everything would be in a static form.

[Sampa]

essentially, all molecular movement would cease...end of all matter that reaches this state

[UmbralRaptor]

Assuming a sufficiently ideal system that is truely isolated from the outside world, 0 K means that you have minimized a system's internal energy and entropy. In a classical system this (I think) means no motion, but quantum weirdnessâ„¢ means you can still have some. (A classic example being that Helium must be under a fair amount of pressure to freeze, no mater how much you cool it.)

Oh, and about "degrees Kelvin..."

[Xannari Ferrows]

You would have a pocket of space that contains no energy.

[GreeningGalaxy]

You would have a pocket of space that contains no energy.

Except, like UmbralRaptor said, vacuum energy. Then again, you might count that as a reason that getting to absolute zero is impossible, and handwave it away in the process of assuming that you reached it to begin with.

I don't think absolute zero would really be terribly interesting, anyway, at least not more so than nanokelvin experiments. It's like any 'stationary' object - you can slow it down until it's as still as you may like, but it's always going to be moving a little bit. In significant figures for nearly all applications, half a nanokelvin is essentially zero Kelvin - the difference would ordinarily be undetectable.

[MartGonzo]

As has been stated above reaching absolute zero is impossible because of quantum jitter but as you get very close you get some very interesting states of matter like Bose-Einstein condensates

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_condensate

[Ethanadams]

Soooo should I go beat up the guy that said it would make matter float?

[N_las]

Soooo should I go beat up the guy that said it would make matter float?

You really should provide more context to that. Maybe he just doesn't know what he is talking about and he meant something like this:

[cpast]

Soooo should I go beat up the guy that said it would make matter float?

I was unaware that violence was the standard response to people who are mistaken about scientific facts.

[Ethanadams]

Figure of speech

[K^2]

As has been stated above reaching absolute zero is impossible because of quantum jitter

This is not correct. Classical thermodynamics already prevents going to absolute zero. And the difference that QM makes is in what state it corresponds to. As mentioned above, 0K is minimal internal energy. Absolute ground state. Classically, it would mean zero kinetic energy. No motion. But in QM, Pauli Exclusion means that only a few particles can take such low energy state. This results in considerable kinetic energy still present in ground state. But temperature is still 0K, because it has more to do with energy distribution than amount.

Calling any of it a jitter is very imprecise. There is no randomness to it. 0K is a very well defined state. It simply has non-zero internal kinetic energy for any system containing fermions.

[UmbralRaptor]

I appear to have been somewhat misrepresented -- this is a property of matter, not space. (And the energy and distance scales are such that barring a rather strange case you can treat space as flat...)

[Tommygun]

What would happen if you could an object to absolute zero?

Wouldn't basically nothing happen, I mean literally nothing.

All the electrons and any atomic movement would stop or close to it.

You'd have the ultamate ice cube, but that's it.

Edited February 24, 2015 by Tommygun

[K^2]

All the electrons and any atomic movement would stop or close to it.

Not even close. Kinetic energy at Fermi levels in a metal are huge. For example, Aluminum's Fermi Energy is 11.6 eV. Electron's mass is 511keV. So the fastest electrons are buzzing at over 2,000 km/s. This is a pretty extreme example, as aluminum a great conductor for a reason, but for all of the metals, typical velocities of electrons at absolute zero are far above the escape velocity.

[AngelLestat]

Of course is not possible, but we can imagine an object so cold, so cold.. that at certain point would disappear and cease to exist.

Also, the quantum laws rules in objects close to 0k, no matter how big the object.