absolute zero

i can't seem to get it together for blogging, so i'm going to tell you a story from a really long time ago.

like my junior year of high school. the two biggest fuckups in my chemistry class, dave and i were dumped together as lab partners because nobody else wanted us. if you had a chemistry lab, we could get it significantly wrong.

so there was this experiment to extrapolate the value of absolute zero because it's a thing you do in high school chem.

dave and i set to work cautiously but steadily, as if we tried hard and never got anything right.

and at the end of the lab we're drawing our line graph and ours looks NOTHING LIKE anybody else's, but we had a pretty straight line that came out at -274 celsius and we shrugged our shoulders and decided to turn it in anyway, because what the hell, we had tried out best and if our results were terribly wrong and different than everyone else's, it wouldn't be the first time it had happened. we were immune to the disapproving eyerolls of debbie and dickie and peggy and the other kids who didn't fail every chem lab. we looked at each other and said "well, if your'e going to fail, fail big."

so the chemistry teacher looks at our paper and calls us up to talk to him. and he's getting all ready to drop cheating on us and we were all like "if we were going to cheat, why would we have picked a result SO TERRIBLY WRONG?"

it turns out that dave and i have no actual clue what the value of absolute zero is in celsius. we have in our minds some OTHER number that to this day i don't know what it was, but it was not anywhere near -273.15

i'm not sure what else that teacher did that day when he was out of class, but i'm pretty sure laughing was a part of it.