Cold turns out to have a history of its own, and this two-part film traces the scientists who chased it to its theoretical limit: absolute zero, the point where atoms stop moving. The story runs from Francis Bacon stuffing a chicken with snow in 1626 to Michael Faraday liquefying gases in his London laboratory, then on to the industrial race that gave the world refrigeration and Clarence Birdseye's frozen food empire. The second half turns to the strange physics that only shows up near absolute zero itself, where superconductivity lets electricity flow without resistance and helium becomes a superfluid that climbs the walls of its own container. Historical reenactments and interviews with physicists fill in the gaps between the eras, showing how each incremental gain in cold, a few degrees here, a fraction of a degree there, opened up technology nobody had asked for yet, from MRI machines to the exotic states of matter still being studied today. The pursuit of nothing, it turns out, changed everything around it.