Is there such a thing as the highest temperature ?

[dgatsoulis]

I think that I understand that temperature is a man made construct to explain how much energy is (or isn't) in a system.
I also think that I can wrap my mind around the notion of absolute zero (the theoretical lowest temperature), the same way I can about the speed of light.
What I understand is this:
-SPEED OF LIGHT-
You need to "pump" energy into something that has mass-in order to make it go faster-eventually you need an infinite amount of energy to get to the speed of light.
-ABSOLUTE ZERO-
You need to "take out" energy off something, in order to make it colder, and the only way to do that is to "pump" energy into another system that does that. In the end, you also need an infinite amount of energy to get to absolute zero.

I'm just wondering about these things and I understand that all of my assumptions could be fundamentally wrong.

Is there such a thing as "the highest" temperature that can be ever achieved -in a closed system that has mass- and how many degrees would that be? (I suspect that Celsius or Fahrenheit or Kelvin will make no difference).

 

[orb]

1.416833(85) × 10³² K

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_temperature"]Planck temperature - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]
[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_hot"]Absolute hot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

 

[Grover]

a strange way to describe absolute zero, heres my own explanation

all objects in the universe have some heat energy, that is, the atoms have energy enough to move, then vibrate, rotate and fluids also allow their atoms to move about (oxygen atoms at 30 degrees C move faster than the speed of sound)

if you take energy away from them, they get "colder" they lose heat energy, so their temperature drops. eventually, there will be no energy left in them, so they will reach absolute zero

but, that is impossible to achieve; absolute zero has never, and possibly will never be achieved, even in laboratory conditions

 

[Fizyk]

1.416833(85) × 10³² K

Planck temperature - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Absolute hot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I wouldn't jump to conclusions so quickly. This value is just some combination of the fundamental constants, but there is AFAIK no reason (other than that it's a really large number) to consider it the highest temperature possible.

My answer would be: currently established theories don't indicate any upper limit on the temperature.

Also, there are some specific systems where you can get negative absolute temperature, and it works as temperature higher than infinite An example is a system of N objects, with each of them having two possible energy levels. Temperature of such a system can be negative, and given two such systems, one with negative temperature and the other with positive, the energy would flow from the one with negative temperature to the one with positive, as if the one with negative temperature was warmer.

 

[orb]

I wouldn't jump to conclusions so quickly. This value is just some combination of the fundamental constants, but there is AFAIK no reason (other than that it's a really large number) to consider it the highest temperature possible.

If you look at the 2nd link I posted, there is already listed what you said. No conclusions, just a temperature from cosmological model.

 

[Fizyk]

If you look at the 2nd link I posted, there is already listed what you said. No conclusions, just a temperature from cosmological model.

Right, my bad, I missed that. Also, the reference right next to the sentence you are referring to (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/absolute-hot.html) provides a nice insight into the topic. It also mentions the negative temperature

 

[Eccentric]

I now have a headache, but I think you all just solved the Origin of the Universe. Now we know how the Big Bang got "wound up".

I went reading and found the expression of coldest to hottest like this:

+0 K, . . . , +300 K, . . . , +∞ K, −∞ K, . . . , −300 K, . . . , −0 K

So we start with 0K, which is impossible to achieve because it is an asymptote thing. Then we increase temperature through +∞ K to reach −∞ K, which is also impossible (maybe, we just don't have the physics to describe this yet), but apparently we can "cheat" if we do it right and actually achieve a -ve temperature. We don't know what happens up there in extremely high temperatures, but we can have negative temperatures that are hotter than the postulated ~10^32 K but do it within the realms of known physics, with normal matter. Then we move towards -0 K which I guess is also impossible for reasons similar to why we can't get +0 K.

Now, in this case, +0 K is the opposite end to -0 K, even though numerically +0 (should be) equivalent to -0. I'm thinking that at these bizarre extremes, laws of physics as we know them fail to describe the state of the universe.

Could it be so simple? Could it be that at some point, with the universe at heat death, everything very close to 0 K, that certain conditions are met, and the +0 simply flips to -0?

Just a simple, fundamental consequence of some unassuming event, like (near-)zero entropy universe-wide.

You know, something really obvious like you are flying heading 090, and pull back to start a loop. All the "normal" things go on as you apply forces to steadily increase your pitch, yadda yadda, but your heading is 090. It just is. Until suddenly it is the opposite, you are heading 270. At some point, nothing really special happened, except one parameter flipped opposite. :tiphat:

Perhaps at universal heat-death something will flip. Space-time? Everything is everywhere and everywhen. Or you can say that everything is in the same place, which is one place, at the same time. Means the same, except it is also the opposite. Just like +0 and -0. And that is what happens. When that slow, inexorable, nothing-to-see-here event finally arrives (heat-death) then that +0 flips to -0. Or perhaps it gets cheated just like how we got around being unable to go hotter than 10^32 yet still reach -ve temperatures, perhaps also we need only reach some low threshold, say 10^-32, and voila! :facepalm: We flip to -10^-32 and everything is supper hot, concentrated in a single point in space-time, but this scenario cannot be sustained, so an explosion of astronomical proportions occurs in which our laws of physics again falter completely... :cook:

...oh wait, that's the Big Bang.

Heck, look at the time... I'm late taking my meds. :leaving:

 

[RisingFury]

Now we know how the Big Bang got "wound up".

We know nothing of the sorts.

The rest of your post, however, would make for a nice Star Trek episode.

 

[Pipcard]

What is so hot that it's cool but so cool that it's hot?

 

[Eli13]

What is so hot that it's cool but so cool that it's hot?

Simple.
Pop-Tarts.

 

[Pipcard]

Simple.
Pop-Tarts.

IT'S NOT POP TARTS!

 

[n72.75]

"It's magic."

Actual quote from my thermodynamics professor.

 

[Keatah]

When the universe is crushed into a pinhead, that's the highest temperature.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

IT'S NOT POP TARTS!

No, not pop tarts I agree. Toaster strudel...

Magic what I use to explain pulse coded modulation in communications class (until we get "under the hood").

 

[RisingFury]

When the universe is crushed into a pinhead, that's the highest temperature.

Ugly assumption.

 

[orb]

Discovery News: Highest Man-Made Temperature: 4 TRILLION Degrees:

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory doesn't have anywhere near the name recognition of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. But for the time being, it can lay claim to its own impressive achievement: it's just been recognized by Guinness World Records for achieving the "Highest Manmade Temperature." Go, RHIC!

The honor comes courtesy of the STAR (Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC) collaboration, designed to study the formation and characteristics of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a state of matter believed to have existed for ten-millionths of a second after the universe's birth.

{...}

The folks at Guinness are right: It is the hottest temperature yet created by mankind: 4 trillion Kelvins, 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun.

And here's the fascinating bit: physicists have now observed the same "near perfect liquid" state of matter at temperatures near absolute zero.

{...}

 

[orb]

The highest manmade temperature is now 5.5 trillion Kelvins.

Discovery News: LHC Smashes Highest Man-Made Temperature Record:

{...}

The LHC, with its much-higher energies, had no problem beating PHENIX's temperatures by some 38 percent, boosting the record for the hottest manmade material from around 4 trillion degrees Celsius to an eye-popping 5.5 trillion degrees Celsius (that's nearly 10 trillion degrees Fahrenheit).

{...}

CERN Press Release: LHC experiments bring new insight into matter of the primordial universe

 

[Quick_Nick]

Any predictions for temperatures when LHC reaches full power?

 

[Starman]

Temperature is a measure of the average amount of kinetic energy in a collection of particles. Absolute zero is a state where there is no KE whatsoever.

However, since all atoms and molecules involve electrons moving about nuclei, there is going to be some residual "wobble" motion inherent in the atoms themselves; this is analogous to the 2-body motion of orbits. The electrons will always be in motion in bound atoms, the mutual forces between electrons and nuclei result in some small motion of the nuclei always being present. Quantum mechanics calls this "zero-point energy". No way to remove it. So, absolute zero cannot ever be achieved.

The higher a temperature gets, the more radiation will be present. At very high temperatures, the radiation is most of the energy. It is theoretically possible for the radiation energy to reach the point where photon energies exceed the mass-equivalent (E=MC^2) energies, and the radiation starts to turn into mass; but this would result in equal amounts of matter and anti-matter being produced. The anti-matter would annihilate with ordinary matter and turn back into radiation, so there would be an equilibrium point that would depend on the temperature. This would limit the temperatures attainable. Eventually temperatures would get so high (Big-Bang levels) that you have Higgs Field conditions, where concepts such as temperature no longer really apply.

 

[RisingFury]

Temperature is a measure of the average amount of kinetic energy in a collection of particles. Absolute zero is a state where there is no KE whatsoever.

However, since all atoms and molecules involve electrons moving about nuclei, there is going to be some residual "wobble" motion inherent in the atoms themselves; this is analogous to the 2-body motion of orbits. The electrons will always be in motion in bound atoms, the mutual forces between electrons and nuclei result in some small motion of the nuclei always being present. Quantum mechanics calls this "zero-point energy". No way to remove it. So, absolute zero cannot ever be achieved.

The higher a temperature gets, the more radiation will be present. At very high temperatures, the radiation is most of the energy. It is theoretically possible for the radiation energy to reach the point where photon energies exceed the mass-equivalent (E=MC^2) energies, and the radiation starts to turn into mass; but this would result in equal amounts of matter and anti-matter being produced. The anti-matter would annihilate with ordinary matter and turn back into radiation, so there would be an equilibrium point that would depend on the temperature. This would limit the temperatures attainable. Eventually temperatures would get so high (Big-Bang levels) that you have Higgs Field conditions, where concepts such as temperature no longer really apply.

No, no, just no. Alright?

1. You can't think of temperature as the kinetic energy of bound systems like atoms.

2. Atoms do have a certain amount of energy even when they're in their ground state (zero-point energy), but what you implied about not being able to reach absolute zero is nonsense. Atoms have a discrete amount of energy, higher than 0, however you can get arbitrarily close to absolute zero. The kinetic energy of the atoms is regarded as the kinetic energy of the entire atom (nucleus and electrons combined, thought of as a single object). That can be arbitrarily close to 0.

3. You can't think of an atom like a solar system, with the electron whizzing around and causing the nucleus to wobble like a star.

4. Photons don't just turn into particles spontaneously. Never! Ever! If that were the case, just about any photon flying from the Sun to Earth could turn into a particle-antiparticle pair. The only way for a photon to turn into matter is to interact with something - hit a particle, for example. Even so, the amount of energy the photon carries is irrelevant once it reaches high enough energy for certain heavy particles to form. A 511 keV photon has enough energy to turn into an electron and that's only X-ray, not some bizarrely insane energy density.

5. Even if the state you described existed, it wouldn't limit the upwards temperature.

6. "Higgs field conditions"? Can you translate that into English for me, please?