If there's and absolute zero, (0 degress Kelvin), then could there be an absolute Kelvin? ( I use that in lack of a better name) Meaning, the hottest temperature possible? What are your opinions?

__________________
"Human curiosity and the desire to make the intangible tangible, has led us into a new age where the New World has been settled, and the West has been won. But if you think that we, the human race, has conquered everything there is to conquer, then just look to the sky--at space--last and greatest of the frontiers."

I guess we could ...

Temperature only really matters when it pertains to matter. Temperature in a vacuum is actually just a measurement of energy.

If you continued to pump energy into matter, I suspect that it would eventually cease to be matter. What it would be, I dunno. At that point, increased energy would no longer increase the temperature.

OR, maybe, at a certain heat level, extra energy would condense into matter. In essence, you'd get more and more absolutely hot matter.

But, really, how would we know? Neutronium is our currently hottest/densest matter. Can anything be hotter than a neutron star? What happens if you shine energy into a neutron star?

__________________
Live long enough to see Space!

We can get to space as a species. The above link is information about life-extension (living longer) so that you can personally see a space-based civilization.

The MPrize (a prize to encourage life extension research now contains over 3 million dollars.

What is Neutronium? I've look at the Periodic Table of the Elements and I've never seen that one. Is it past element #118? How hot is it?

__________________
"Human curiosity and the desire to make the intangible tangible, has led us into a new age where the New World has been settled, and the West has been won. But if you think that we, the human race, has conquered everything there is to conquer, then just look to the sky--at space--last and greatest of the frontiers."

Neutronium is kinda an informal term, it refers to what's in a neutron star.

There's a website www.onelook.com that's a whole bunch of dictionaries combined. I use it quite often when dealing with new medical terminology. I used it to confirm what neutronium is.

It would certainly be denser than 118, though!

__________________
Live long enough to see Space!

We can get to space as a species. The above link is information about life-extension (living longer) so that you can personally see a space-based civilization.

The MPrize (a prize to encourage life extension research now contains over 3 million dollars.

Thanks.

__________________
"Human curiosity and the desire to make the intangible tangible, has led us into a new age where the New World has been settled, and the West has been won. But if you think that we, the human race, has conquered everything there is to conquer, then just look to the sky--at space--last and greatest of the frontiers."

A singularity theoretically has infinite pressure and so it theoretically has infinite temperature. If a singularity does have infinite temperature then there would be no maximum temperature.

__________________
MacTalk - The Australian Apple Community - iPod, iPhone and Mac.

What about plasma?

What about the Planck temperature?

Actually, matter just ceases to be in its defined atomic state...at a certain temperature, matter is still matter, but in a different form...I guess what I'm saying is, you can't "melt" matter, but matter-matter or matter-antimatter collisions are the best methods of matter elimination - if you ever wanted to, that is...


By the way, what is meant by the following?:

I think the best definition of a maximum temperature would be;

the temperature attained if all the matter within the observable universe were converted to energy, and all that energy plus the available radiation were all used to heat one single particle- say a proton;
that would be the maximium temperature...

you can't get any hotter than that.
Call it the 'Hubble Temperature'.


It will decrease with time, in all probability.

__________________
Orion's Arm . The Starlark . Voices: Future Tense- Novella Contest Issue! . OA Flickr set

Concidering special relativity, you'd really need two particles, otherwise the temperature is just a frame of reference question. It's better still if they can both be aimed straight at each other, otherwise what's the point?

__________________
Forming opinions as we speak

An entertaining fantasy that may be remotely related to this topic, considering the equivalence of ev to hf to 0.5 mv^2, is the one that evaluates the energy of the photon that is of equal energy to that of all the mass in the universe (or a large finite portion of it-say a sphere of 10^1000 light years radius) travelling at a vanishingly small difference from that of light plus the energies of all the photons. My guess is that when we are smarter (perhaps some of you already are) we will learn that physics does not permit such energy being confined to a single photon.......but then what was it that "decayed" (experienced symmetry breaking) to initiate the BB.

__________________
For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
Whether there is a limit to the magnitude of a modulation of chaos below which order remains invariant? Or, is order but a fiction invented by perspectives applied over finite, however large, time intervals?

Why do we all claim something "decayed?" Just because there exists more than one physical law to govern our universe, doesn't mean all laws originated from one. Our group of laws could be derived from two former sets of laws that sorta "mixed" together at the time of the BB.

Depends which kind. Even as the universe cools, the thermodynamical laws permit entropical increase.

The highest temperature that can be calculated is the Planck temperature (as StarLab suggested) and that's 1.4 x 10^32K. This is calculated using the same constants as for the Planck length, time and mass plus Boltzman's constant.

That temperature was calculated by means of the k-theta relation: Boltzman's constant (k) times the absolute temperature (theta, in degrees Kelvin) yields the average energy per particle, for non-relativistic particles. If you know the particle's mass, this relationship gives you the average velocity. At really high temps, when the average velocity is a significant fraction of c, don't forget to modify all your equations-- for example, mv-squared/2 doesn't work anymore since m-sub-zero has become m-prime. This makes thermodynamics interesting at really high temps. Regards, Steve

__________________
Ignoramus et ignorabamus.-- Reymond

Wir mussen wissen. Wir werden wissen.--Hilbert

Pick one.