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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.
Is there a certain critical limit of Medium.com posts per day before Slashdot is destroyed? Fucking seriously, guys, this is getting out of hand.
So, you've got a pop-sci article about what happens at high temperature. Let's break down just a few of the failures:
i) It talks about things that have been known for decades - not exactly news.
ii) Talks about phenomena like eternal inflation as though they are fact, rather than quite speculative.
iii) The summary contradicts the article itself claiming a max temp is necessarily imposed.
iv) The article claims that if we convert all the energy in the observable universe to heat we hit a maximum, completely ignoring the fact that cosmology doesn't work with fixed volumes.
v) A maximum temperature contradicts a big bang model - you can argue with a singularity just fine, but no-one has good evidence that we didn't start in one yet. Particularly ironic given the name of the blog...
Weak. Pathetically weak. I guess I shouldn't be shocked - StartsWithABang is always at the wide-eyed woo-woo end of communicating physics but this is SlashDot. We can do better...
Instaclose!