What's the opposite of absolute zero?

[Bill Morris]

How hot can hot get? The Planck temperature (10^32 K)?

There are various things on the Web, but this one touches upon some other theories:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/zero/hot.html

 

[Christopher]

(In physics, Max Planck is the king of the eponymous.)

What a great line!

Oh, and they misspelled the "tera" prefix in TeV.

 

[Bill Morris]

Make that Tera-electron-volts (TeV), not terra (earth?) electron volts.

 

[AlxxlA]

It would make sense that the Planck Temperature is the opposite, since Absolute Zero is the temperature where matter ceases to move at all, and the Planck Temperature is where matter moves so much it disintegrates into energy.

Hmm... Perhaps someday that could be harnessed as a way to convert matter into energy, without worrying about antimatter containment. Well, actually, protecting a few grams of anti-deuterium would probably be easier than protecting something that's about an octillion times hotter than the sun.

 

[Zachary Smith]

Indefinate zero?

 

[Meredith]

AlxxlA said:
It would make sense that the Planck Temperature is the opposite, since Absolute Zero is the temperature where matter ceases to move at all, and the Planck Temperature is where matter moves so much it disintegrates into energy.

Hmm... Perhaps someday that could be harnessed as a way to convert matter into energy, without worrying about antimatter containment. Well, actually, protecting a few grams of anti-deuterium would probably be easier than protecting something that's about an octillion times hotter than the sun.

Depends we hit tempratures millions times that of the core of the sun in tiny tabletop accelerators.


That would be cool, a furnace that can burn ANYTHING!!!

 

[Christopher]

^^But a furnace that could burn anything would burn itself the first time it was used. Just like a universal solvent would dissolve its container.

 

[scotthm]

Meredith said:
Depends we hit tempratures millions times that of the core of the sun in tiny tabletop accelerators.
`
That would be cool, a furnace that can burn ANYTHING!!!

Why must high temperatures burn anything? I remember reading a few weeks ago about Voyager 2 travelling through the termination shock of our solar system, and finding temperatures out there of about 200,000 F. All that heat doesn't seem to have done Voyager 2 any harm.

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[Meredith]

scotthm said:

Meredith said:
Depends we hit tempratures millions times that of the core of the sun in tiny tabletop accelerators.
`
That would be cool, a furnace that can burn ANYTHING!!!

Why must high temperatures burn anything? I remember reading a few weeks ago about Voyager 2 travelling through the termination shock of our solar system, and finding temperatures out there of about 200,000 F. All that heat doesn't seem to have done Voyager 2 any harm.

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No the heat doesn't but that is the temprature of a very diffuse gas, less dense than even the solar wind.

 

[Christopher]

^^Right. There's a difference between temperature and heat. A small amount of gas at very high temperature contains less heat overall than a large amount of gas at a much lower temperature.

Also there's the question of how heat is transmitted. In a diffuse gas, only a few occasional molecules will come in contact with the probe and transmit energy to it. It's a very different situation from being in a fluid as dense as Earth's atmosphere or denser, where there's constant contact with the high-energy molecules and heat is therefore transferred far more quickly. It's the flipside of the issue I raised a couple days ago in the "Why is the bridge on top?" thread in Trek Tech, namely that a ship in vacuum would lose heat very, very slowly because there's no medium to conduct or convect heat away. It's the same with delivering heat as removing it.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

LCARS 24 said:
What's the opposite of absolute zero?

Absolute Zero plus Infinity Minus One.

 

[Christopher]

Relative everything?

 

[RoJoHen]

Christopher said:
^^Right. There's a difference between temperature and heat. A small amount of gas at very high temperature contains less heat overall than a large amount of gas at a much lower temperature.

Also there's the question of how heat is transmitted. In a diffuse gas, only a few occasional molecules will come in contact with the probe and transmit energy to it. It's a very different situation from being in a fluid as dense as Earth's atmosphere or denser, where there's constant contact with the high-energy molecules and heat is therefore transferred far more quickly. It's the flipside of the issue I raised a couple days ago in the "Why is the bridge on top?" thread in Trek Tech, namely that a ship in vacuum would lose heat very, very slowly because there's no medium to conduct or convect heat away. It's the same with delivering heat as removing it.

Let's pretend for a minute that a person could exist in space. Would these random super-hot molecules burn you? Or would they be so small and so infrequent that you wouldn't even notice?

 

[Christopher]

^^The latter. A single tiny molecule, no matter how high its temperature, doesn't contain a substantial amount of heat. Heating is cumulative. A pot full of boiling water can burn you severely, but a single tiny drop of it would be an annoyance at most. And a molecule is much, much smaller compared to that drop than that drop is compared to the pot. Maybe a billion trillion times smaller. So even if that molecule were a trillion times hotter than boiling, it would impart only a billionth as much energy to you as the drop of boiling water.