Who knew? The opposite of Absolute Zero is the Planck temperature, 10^32 Kelvin, the temperature beyond which the molecules of matter become black holes unto themselves, or something. Some scientists believe that we, or at least our universe, have already experienced the Planck temperature, although it went by so quickly you may have missed it. It occurred at 10^-43 of a second after the Big Bang, the great cataclysm in which the universe was born. (10^-43 of a second, in case you're not hip to the notation, is an incredibly tiny fraction of time. Time enough to create the universe, but not, as a University of Chicago physicist was once at pains to explain, time enough to get off a disputed last-tenth-of-a-second shot against the Chicago Bulls.)
(I had no idea that Planck had so many units.)
Thursday, April 12, 2007
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2 comments:
You know, infinite temperature actually does have physical meaning. But I hated Thermal Physics and refuse to try and remember any more about it.
As soon as I saw that there was a comment on this post, I knew that it had to be Clark. Yeah, I was right.
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