h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

According to somebody's law (one part of the Ideal Gas law,) the volume of a gas decreases steadily as the temperature decreases, assuming constant pressure. At absolute zero, it has been calculated that gases would have a volume of zero. Since it is physically impossible for matter to have zero mass, absolute zero is impossible to reach in the gaseous state. Weird, huh?

Would the gas not then just turn into a solid or a liquid then?

Neocordite, what you say contains some mistakes. Absolute zero can't be reached according to the Third Law of thermodynamics, also known as Nernst's law. It has nothing to do with ideal gas theory, in particular, it is not a logical result of it.

The ideal gas theory isn't valid in the realm of low temperature, because the particles begin to interact heavily and thus one of the conditions of an *ideal* gas doesn't apply any more.

By the way, your "zero mass" should read "zero volume".

To fisher_sco: You're right, and there are some weired additional forms of matter in the realm of low temperature: van-der-Waals crystals, superfluids, Bose condensates, ...

Probably but we have never found out yet about it.

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