Hot bodies are attractive

Our physical attraction to hot bodies is real, according to UC Berkeley physicists. To be clear, they're not talking about sexual attraction to a "hot” human body. But the researchers have shown that a glowing object actually attracts atoms, contrary to what most people - physicists included - would guess. The tiny effect is much like the effect a laser has on an atom in a device called optical tweezers, which are used to trap and study atoms, a discovery that led to the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics shared by former UC Berkeley professor Steven Chu, now at Stanford, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips. Until three years ago, when a group of Austrian physicists predicted it, no one thought that regular light, or even just the heat given off by a warm object - the infrared glow you see when looking through night-vision goggles - could affect atoms in the same way. UC Berkeley physicists, who are expert at measuring minute forces using atom interferometry, designed an experiment to check it out. When they measured the force exerted by the so-called blackbody radiation from a warm tungsten cylinder on a cesium atom, the prediction was confirmed.