Past a Certain Critical Temperature, the Universe Will Be Destroyed

StartsWithABang writes: If you take all the kinetic motion out of a system, and have all the particles that make it up perfectly at rest, somehow even overcoming intrinsic quantum effects, you'd reach absolute zero, the theoretically lowest temperature of all. But what about the other direction? Is there a limit to how hot something can theoretically get? You might think not, that while things like molecules, atoms, protons and even matter will break down at high enough temperatures, you can always push your system hotter and hotter. But it turns out that the Universe limits what's actually possible, as any physical system will self-destruct beyond a certain point.

Comments

Old topic

[Dutch Owl]

Isaac Asimov posted a column in 1957 asking the same question. The column was subsequently published in a book of his collected scientific columns. A graduate student took the question posed by the column and used it for his doctorate thesis over fifty years ago.

Re:This guy...

[Baloroth]

This guy has anawful lot of confidence in how the universe works, I'll give him that much. I am only a lowly being compared to him, but isn't this all speculation? I'm pretty sure this is not a science with any kind of proof or even basic consistent knowledge, but don't let me get in the way.

You are correct, it's mostly a bunch of pop-sci woo-woo. For example, a massless particle no matter how energetic cannot on it's own convert into a black hole as he claims, because no matter how much energy it has you can always Lorentz boost into a frame where it has arbitrarily small amounts of energy. Likewise the photons in your room have arbitrarily large amounts of energy, depending on the reference frame you choose. But they have no mass, and a system requires a certain amount of mass to convert into a black hole (and the mass of system is invariant, i.e. it's the same in every reference frame).

The "the Universe would be destroyed" bit is also completely and purely theoretical at this point: we have no real proof for inflation at all. Our physics just doesn't really extend to those energy scales yet.