Is there a physical limit to how much heat a scientist can hypothetically engineer, or is it like the speed of light which cannot break boundaries?
In: 1
Yes – there is a theoretical limit to how hot something can get. It’s called the Planck temperature, after the German physicist Max Planck, and it equals about 100 million million million million million degrees, or 10^32 Kelvin.
All heat is just molecular movement, and when molecules start moving _that_ fast, conventional physics starts to break down. As a result, we theorize that is the maximum possible temperature, though we have never gotten event close to proving this experimentally.
I think I’m following along with your question.
So “heat” in this case is a form of energy we call “enthalpy” when you add enthalpy to a physical thing it manifests in a property we call “temperature” but it’s important to note that Enthalpy and temperature are not the same thing. The same amount of heat energy will become different temperatures in different materials.
In the case of your example, you get into places outside of normal human daily life so it’s hard to explain what you’d see, because it doesn’t match up quite right.
Let’s assume you have a block of Material X and just keep adding enthalpy. First, you’d see a breakdown in the “bulk” structure of the atoms. For example a solid melts, or a liquid evaporates. That’s a change between the atoms and how they interact.
Next you’d see changes on the individual atomic scale, for example if the material is a molecule like water, you’d see the hydrogen and oxygen atoms break apart from each other.
After that you’d see the atoms themselves break down. The electrons, protons, and neutrons would break apart now you’d have less “a bunch of material X” and you’d have a “cloud” of sub-atomic goop. This is actually a another phase of matter called “plasma”.
As far as I know, the laws of physics imply that plasma can get infinitely hot, there is no “hard ceiling”.
BUT the situation is a bit like accelerating something to light speed. It’s not that light speed is the limit because the universe says “no!” at a certain point, it’s because it would take an infinite amount of energy to be put into the object to reach light speed. Similar is with plasma, in theory it can get infinitely hot, but that implies an infinite amount of heat being added. Since the total amount of heat possible in the universe is finite, the hottest achievable temperature can only be finite as well.
Hypothetically there’s a limit to how hot black body mechanics can fuction. As an object gets hotter it starts to glow. First on longer wavelengths like radio but also working up to shorter wavelengths like infrared, visible light, and then ultraviolent. However, there comes a point when the wavelength produced by such heat is so short that it’s within Planck’s length and Quantum Mechanics says this can’t be possible.
However, this doesn’t actually prevent things from getting hotter than that, it just says that our understanding of physics breaks down at this point.
Heat is just energy. When you look at physics we were taught it was mass that is the culprit when it comes to the limit of C. Well not really. Mass is actually the bi product. The energy in the system dictates the relative mass. This is why relative mass increases with velocity. The limit you are thinking about is the same limit. The more heat in a confined space will increase the relative mass. Gravity is the symmetrical balance to energy and mass is more like a side product. At some point you will cross the Schwartzchild limit and create a black hole. That is the theoretical limit. As to what humans can produce in a confined space is just an engineering issue.
Latest Answers