Читать книгу Modern Alchemy and the Philosopher's Stone - Wilfried B. Holzapfel - Страница 46

Professor Wood produced another chart from his stack. He first drew attention to the vertical and horizontal axes on this new chart (Figure 19).

“Following the layout of the hypothetical phase diagram that I showed you earlier (Figure 14), my map of states for the universe depicts the landscape with respect to the pressures on the horizontal axis and temperature on the vertical axis. The scales for these axes also use powers of ten the same way that we did for the maps of the microcosm, but I have extended them to cover the unfathomable depths of space in the universe.

“In this map, unlike the phase diagram that we discussed earlier, I have labeled several areas, but I have shown no sharp boundaries. I have used different colors and symbols here to highlight different areas of special interest to us. Do you see these curves that are shaped like hockey sticks in the range of 10¹⁰ Pa, or 10 GPa? The brown curve shows the range of pressure and temperature that we experience on Earth. The red one corresponds to those of the sun. I have included several other regions marked with names that may be unfamiliar to you. The brown curve for Earth shows us that the pressure at the surface starts with the air pressure of one atmosphere or 10⁵ Pa. Inside Earth, at a depth of 30 km, the pressure increases to about one gigapascal (1 GPa) and then further to 366 GPa in the center of Earth as we have just discussed. The upper end of the brown curve in this figure corresponds to nearly 10¹² Pa.

“The temperature scale is in degrees Kelvin and the lower end of it is close to absolute zero at 1 K. As you probably know, 0 K is equal to minus 273.24 °C. That, of course, is a very low temperature. The boiling point of water is correspondingly +373.24 K. I chose these units because 0 K corresponds to the lowest conceivable temperature. In physics, there are many advantages to the use of this absolute temperature as a reference.