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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.
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.
Yeah, it's a pop-sci article about what happens at high temperature. Your tone makes this sound like a bad thing, but I'm not sure what is wrong with explaining the currently accepted best model of cosmology in accessible language. Not everyone has a background in theoretical physics and I think it's kind of awesome that some people try to bring science to more people. i) It does talk about things that have been known for decades, but it never claims to be news. And I think a lot of people forget about the second half of the Slashdot motto, "Stuff that matters." ii) I didn't see anything about eternal inflation in the article, but as far as whether they are fact or speculative, in my experience most of physics is speculative. That's why we have the Theory of Relativity, the Standard Model of Particle Physics, etc. Notice the words theory and model. iii) It doesn't. Both the summary and the article claim the Universe limits the max temp. iv) I think the article was just doing some math with what we know about the composition of the observable universe to make a point. v) I'm not sure how a maximum temperature contradicts a big bang model. Possibly because a big bang model would mean that all the matter and energy in the observable and non-observable universe were condensed to a very small volume or singularity the temp according to the article would be higher than the temp for inflation and therefore that small volume or singularity could never have been reached in the first place because inflation would have taken place earlier and caused space to expand and cool? I'm guessing at your point. I guess I just don't get the hate towards StartsWithABang. They get a lot of posts on Slashdot which I guess is suspicious, but the information always seems objectively presented, accurate and maybe some people don't like the writing style, but I think it is ok to be excited about science when you are writing for a general audience and not presenting a piece of academic research.