Cold

If it were possible to cool a system to absolute zero, all motion of the particles in a sample of matter would cease and they would be at complete rest in the classical sense.

Microscopically in the description of quantum mechanics, however, matter still has zero-point energy even at absolute zero, because of the uncertainty principle.

[7] Some time around 1700 BC Zimri-Lim, king of Mari Kingdom in northwest Iraq had created an "icehouse" called bit shurpin at a location close to his capital city on the banks of the Euphrates.

During the Tang dynastic rule in China (618–907 AD) a document refers to the practice of using ice that was in vogue during the Eastern Chou Dynasty (770–256 BC) by 94 workmen employed for "Ice-Service" to freeze everything from wine to dead bodies.

[7] Shachtman says that in the 4th century AD, the brother of the Japanese emperor Nintoku gave him a gift of ice from a mountain.

[7] Shachtman says that King James VI and I supported the work of Cornelis Drebbel as a magician to perform tricks such as producing thunder, lightning, lions, birds, trembling leaves and so forth.

[10] Shachtman says it was the lack of scientific knowledge in physics and chemistry that had held back progress in the beneficial use of ice until a drastic change in religious opinions in the 17th century.

The intellectual barrier was broken by Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle who followed him in this quest for knowledge of cold.

He explained his approach as "Bacon's identification of heat and cold as the right and left hands of nature".

The first ice box was developed by Thomas Moore, a farmer from Maryland in 1810 to carry butter in an oval shaped wooden tub.

The cut blocks of uniform size ice was a cheap method of food preservation widely practiced in the United States.

Cold environments may promote certain psychological traits, as well as having direct effects on the ability to move.

Extreme cold temperatures may lead to frostbite, sepsis, and hypothermia, which in turn may result in death.

[19] No scientific evidence of this has been found, although the disease, alongside influenza and others, does increase in prevalence with colder weather.