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?
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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.
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