Of course you can’t reach absolute zero, but theoretically you could go below it, and reach a form of temperature that works opposite to how our temperature works in terms of energy, but… what would it look like? I’m having a little trouble visualizing it. Would my hand heat up or cool down, and would it the negative value just keep rising?
In: Physics
You can’t go “below” absolute zero.
Negative temperatures are actually extremely ***hot*** values, not cold values, and the fact that they’re mathematically resolved with a negative sign is more because of a problem with the way we resolve temperature in physics.
Any physics problems involving negative temperatures can’t actually use temperature, but instead uses the *inverse* of temperature, known as thermodynamic beta.
Temperature isn’t a measure of heat, it’s a measure of how much an atom is moving, or the speed of the atoms within a space, be it a molecule, solution or entity.
Absolute zero (0K) is where atoms don’t move. So there is no movement in atoms at all. Something less than no movement cannot exist. It would be like saying you’ve got a car going in negative mph. You may be going backwards, and feel like you’re traveling at negative speed, but you’re speedometer never goes below 0.
To put it more in terms of science, less than abosulte zero would mean atoms having negative energy, which is also a concept unknown to modern science, which will be why you have difficulty conceptualising it, since something that complex would need some complex mathematics to describe it.
Absolute zero is when all subatomic particles stop moving. There is no movement, no energy, no heat. How could you go below that?
Negative temperatures are hot. Heat flows from -10K to -100K. And from -100K to +9999999999999999999K. 0K approached from the negative side would be the hottest things possible.
You’ve probably heard temperature is the average kinetic energy, but that’s just a truth for an ideal gas. The actual definition is the relationship between energy and entropy. Positive temperatures are where more energy means more entropy. At absolute zero, everything is in the same rest state. As you add energy, things start taking on a variety of higher energy states. This is more chaotic, higher entropy.
Negative temperatures rely on a maximum energy state existing. Once you pass a halfway point of maximum entropy, population inversion occurs. Adding more energy tends to put more things into the maximum energy state. This is more orderly, as things are now lining up into the same state again. Just a higher energy one. So more energy means less entropy, so temperature is negative. Everything being in a maximum energy state is clearly very hot, and in contact with anything that still has most of the stuff in a lower energy state (positive temperature), heat will flow to that.
No. You cannot reach a negative temperature.
Temperature is merely the average speed (technically the average kinetic energy) of the molecules moving.
If all of the molecules completely stopped moving, temperature would be absolutely zero.
What do you mean by negative temperature?
It’s actually hotter than anything
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130104143516.htm
> These negative absolute temperatures have several apparently absurd consequences: although the atoms in the gas attract each other and give rise to a negative pressure, the gas does not collapse – a behaviour that is also postulated for dark energy in cosmology.
This was from 2013 so there may be more on the topic today.
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