In the 1850s, however, William Thomson, a British physicist, noticed something odd about Charles’ law: the specter of zero. Lower the temperature and the volume of the balloons gets smaller and smaller. Keep lowering at a steady pace and the balloons keep shrinking at a constant rate, but they cannot go on shrinking forever. There is a point at which gas, in theory, takes up no space at all; Charles’ law says that a balloon of gas must shrink to zero space.
