Why do temperature get as high as billion degrees but only as low as -270 degrees?
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Temperature can be thought of as the speed of atoms. At -273 Celsius atoms would stop, since they can’t get slower than not moving that’s the coldest it can get.
Temperature is actually a measurement of how much molecules are vibrating. Higher temps means more vibrations, lower temps less.
At freezing, water molecules crystalize.
-270 is the theoretical limit at which absolutely everything stops. There’s no going below that
I remember a question similar to this and the best answer was something along the lines of temperature is just a measure of how much an atom wiggles. It stops wiggle at -270 degrees but there isn’t an upper boundary for the wiggle.
Heat is a thing. Cold is an absence of that thing. Theoretically, you can get to a point where there is none.
Everyday temperatures are really, really cold. That is to say, they’re quite close to how cold things can possibly get, and quite far away from how hot certain things out there can get.
There’s a floor to how much energy you can remove from something before there’s nothing left. However, there might not be a ceiling for how much energy you can put in.
It is not quite like that. If we use the proper temperature scale, there are simply *no negative temperatures*.
Then the question becomes: why in our everyday life the environment is mostly at 300 Kelvin, plus or minus a few tens of degrees, even though there are places in the universe where it is much hotter?
And the answer to that would require talking about our biology etc. It is not a question of fundamental physics.
The simplest answer is that your thermometer is stupid. When Fahrenheit and Celsius were invented, we didn’t know how cold the coldest cold could be, so the inventors picked an arbitrary temperature and said “This is zero”. They could have picked anything. Celsius picked the freezing point of water because, hey, water is everywhere, and decided that 100 would be the temperature at which water boils. Then the range between was divided into “degrees” to be an arbitrary unit of temperature.
Later, we figured out that there is a limit to how cold the coldest cold can be, and there was a new temperature scale invented called Kelvin. The absolute coldest a thing can ever theoretically be is 0 Kelvin. And then you work your way up by those degrees and eventually get to the temperatures we normally experience between ~250-350 Kelvin.
So, if your thermometer was smart, it would be using Kelvin and start at zero and only ever go up-no negative temperatures. Since temperature is a measure of how much/fast atoms are moving around (average kinetic energy) negative temperature doesn’t really make sense, any way. It’s not like you can move slower than being completely stopped, which is the state at 0 Kelvin.
So, in short, your question highlights a symptom of the fact that the commonly used temperature scales were made arbitrarily. Because of this, they don’t make sense once you get outside of the ranges we normally experience in weather.
Temperatures humans find comfortable are much closer to the lowest possible temperature than the highest. Therefore the scale we use to measure temperature is much closer to absolute zero than the maximums.
Temperatures that tend to be useful for humans are, on the grand scheme of things, remarkably cold. There’s no need for our “human useful” scales to be calibrated to such high numbers. To humans, there isn’t really a difference between 10,000C and 1,000,000C. They’re both too dang hot. That’s the same reason scientists use Kelvin, starting from zero makes the most sense in experiments.
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