I don't see the obsession with temperature. Temperature is not the critical thing here, in fact, describing the temperature of these very tiny, very transient plasmas is probably a pretty vague thing. The critical thing is energy. I think, in the press releases, they talk about temperature because that is something the public can kind of relate to. They can't relate to TeV.

I was trying to think of an analogy - I couldn't come up with a great one, but as a quick one: which is "hotter", two atoms at a million degrees, or 10 tons of coal burning at 500 degrees. I don't have an answer, because it is not really a meaningful question. And that's my point - temperature is not really a very meaningful way to describe these events.

Temperature is familiar but very misleading.

While the temperature at the collision may seem extreme, it is highly localized (as in, restricted to the two particles colliding). They will not heat up the room since that temperature is an expression of kinetic energy, meaning they are moving very, very fast. (KE = 1/2mv². Consider the extremely low mass involved and you get an idea of how fast.)

Stop them (or even slow them down) as has been suggested in this thread and the KE has to go somewhere. The usual place is heat.

Using your experiment above, and making some very quick and dirty calcs, the two atoms have about 2x10^-17 joules of kinetic energy; the coal releases about 9 billion.

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