Helium the Lawbreaker

Two of the fundamental "laws" of physics are being outrageously violated in laboratories by a liquid, helium II. This is ordinary helium reduced to 2.2 degrees above absolute zero (-273.18DEG C or -459.72DEG F). And physicists discussing this remarkable substance last week were delighted, for when a field of science is wholly reduced to law, scientists lose interest in it, long for unexplained phenomena to puzzle over.

The laws broken by helium II, and not yet completely revised to accommodate its eccentric behavior, concern 1) the flow of fluids, 2) the flow of heat. Some of its lawbreaking properties so far discovered by English, Dutch, Russian and U.S. researchers :

>A liquid, it is more fluid even than hydrogen gas. It will flow freely through the most infinitesimal cracks and pores in containers, between two face-to-face surfaces of optical glass.

>"If a cup partly full of helium II is lowered part way into a bath of the same liquid, the levels within and without come gradually ... to the identical height, as if there were a perforation in the cup or a siphon over its rim--but there is no siphon and there is no perforation," writes Physicist Karl Kelchner Darrow of the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Reviews of Modern Physics. "The cup need not even be partly full to start with-it can be empty initially, and the liquid will climb invisibly over its rim from the bath."

>It conducts heat some 200 times better than silver and copper, best thermal conductors hitherto known.

When two vessels filled with helium II at slightly different temperatures are connected by a fine tube, a heat-carrying current of liquid will flow into the cooler vessel almost as fast as it would drain off into an empty one. And the countercurrent returning in the same tube will move completely without friction.

This behavior fits none of the most hallowed formulas, whose Greek and Roman letters now lie tumbled about like a child's alphabet blocks. Faced with the need for elaborate rebuilding of formulas, Physicist Darrow exults: "To have come on a fluid like this is like finding unexplored land in the midst of an ancient community, or a tract of primeval prairie among the cornfields of the Middle West."

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