Fahrenheit used the temperature of the human body to create his system, which makes a lot more sense than other systems.
What is 0°F in terms of the human body? I’m guessing that 100°F is supposed to be a normal human body temperature, but in reality that will vary from person to person and everybody I’ve met is usually 97-99 unless they have a fever.
In Celsius/Centigrade, 0° is the freezing point of water at 1 atmosphere of pressure, and 100° is the boiling point.
In Kelvin, 0 is absolute zero, and it scales with Celsius/Centigrade because anchoring it to water just makes sense.
Fahrenheit is fucking silly and people only defend it because it’s what they were familiar with growing up, so they teach the next generation the same thing, thus perpetuating the cycle of tradition for the sake of tradition.
There is a theoretical max temperature, the Planck Temperature ≈ 1.416 x 10^42 K. It’s the temperature at which the wavelength of emitted light is the Planck length.
Basically, a system at planck temperature probably would consist of many tiny black holes, and adding energy to said system would create a larger black hole, thereby lowering the temperature.
That sounds like a misconception based on the misconception that the Planck Length is the smallest distance possible. Admittedly, I dropped out of physics 10 years ago so I might have no idea what I’m talking about.
The idea is that the tiny black holes are planck scale and they evaporate before they get anywhere near each other. Picture this:
It takes 10^20 Planck lengths to equal the diameter of a proton. It takes 10^20 protons to equal the diameter of the earth. And it takes 10^20 earths to equal the diameter of the observable universe.
Simplified: A black hole is the result of density – how much mass you cram into how little space. If something is heavy enough, even light passing near it gets pulled in and swallowed, so there’s some area where no light escapes: a black hole.
The difficulty is that you need a lot of gravity to bend the course of light. Gravity gets stronger the closer you get to the center, so at a certain distance, it will be strong enough no matter how little mass the object has.
But most objects are simply too large: Light will bounce off without ever getting that close to the center. You’d need to squeeze them together real hard to make them small enough, but there are other forces trying to keep them in shape that will resist you.
What you mean with “a whole lot of stuff” is the way more stable black holes work in space: A bunch of stuff so heavy that its own gravity is stronger than the forces trying to keep shape. If it’s strong enough, it can pull itself together so close that it gets smaller than that distance. Thus, there’s now an area around it where light can be trapped.
If you involve quantum physics, things get fucky, and supposedly there actually is some radiation still escaping, which is what the other post referred to, but I’m out of my depth there. There are also different types of black holes with their own complications, a bunch of details I skipped and a lot more I don’t even know.
Space is awesome and big and full of nothing and tons of tiny, really fascinating bits of not-nothing sprinkled in, and we could spend our entire lives studying it and never know just how much we don’t.
What is 0°F in terms of the human body? I’m guessing that 100°F is supposed to be a normal human body temperature, but in reality that will vary from person to person and everybody I’ve met is usually 97-99 unless they have a fever.
In Celsius/Centigrade, 0° is the freezing point of water at 1 atmosphere of pressure, and 100° is the boiling point.
In Kelvin, 0 is absolute zero, and it scales with Celsius/Centigrade because anchoring it to water just makes sense.
Fahrenheit is fucking silly and people only defend it because it’s what they were familiar with growing up, so they teach the next generation the same thing, thus perpetuating the cycle of tradition for the sake of tradition.
Removed by mod
There is a theoretical max temperature, the Planck Temperature ≈ 1.416 x 10^42 K. It’s the temperature at which the wavelength of emitted light is the Planck length.
Basically, a system at planck temperature probably would consist of many tiny black holes, and adding energy to said system would create a larger black hole, thereby lowering the temperature.
That sounds like a misconception based on the misconception that the Planck Length is the smallest distance possible. Admittedly, I dropped out of physics 10 years ago so I might have no idea what I’m talking about.
Removed by mod
The idea is that the tiny black holes are planck scale and they evaporate before they get anywhere near each other. Picture this:
It takes 10^20 Planck lengths to equal the diameter of a proton. It takes 10^20 protons to equal the diameter of the earth. And it takes 10^20 earths to equal the diameter of the observable universe.
Removed by mod
Simplified: A black hole is the result of density – how much mass you cram into how little space. If something is heavy enough, even light passing near it gets pulled in and swallowed, so there’s some area where no light escapes: a black hole.
The difficulty is that you need a lot of gravity to bend the course of light. Gravity gets stronger the closer you get to the center, so at a certain distance, it will be strong enough no matter how little mass the object has.
But most objects are simply too large: Light will bounce off without ever getting that close to the center. You’d need to squeeze them together real hard to make them small enough, but there are other forces trying to keep them in shape that will resist you.
What you mean with “a whole lot of stuff” is the way more stable black holes work in space: A bunch of stuff so heavy that its own gravity is stronger than the forces trying to keep shape. If it’s strong enough, it can pull itself together so close that it gets smaller than that distance. Thus, there’s now an area around it where light can be trapped.
If you involve quantum physics, things get fucky, and supposedly there actually is some radiation still escaping, which is what the other post referred to, but I’m out of my depth there. There are also different types of black holes with their own complications, a bunch of details I skipped and a lot more I don’t even know.
Space is awesome and big and full of nothing and tons of tiny, really fascinating bits of not-nothing sprinkled in, and we could spend our entire lives studying it and never know just how much we don’t.
About the maximum temperature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHyctwgE6m4
Actually both freezing and boiling vary depending on your altitude…