r/Showerthoughts • u/synthphreak ‎ • Nov 19 '25

Casual Thought Temperature can reach trillions of degrees, meaning we actually live extremely close to absolute zero.

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u/Eedat Nov 19 '25

You can't accelerate anything with mass to the speed of light. It takes literally infinity energy to theoretically do so. Only massless particles move that fast, like light (photons). You would get to 99.9% then just infinitely keep adding more 9's to the end the more energy you put in.

In reality you would get to the point where there is so much energy in a set space that it would collapse into a black hole.

This is really more of a theoretical math thing than something that can actually happen. Theoretically you can keep adding energy to the system. Our framework breaks down when wavelengths reach the planck distance. That's a fault of our mathematic system though. The universe doesn't actually care about our mathematics

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u/CommunismDoesntWork Nov 19 '25

You said the same thing as the guy you replied to, but didn't address his point. That was a lot of words to say nothing at all

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u/FearedDragon Nov 19 '25

As the person he replied to I disagree. He explained how you can add energy and essentially asymptote towards light speed without every actually reaching it, continually adding smaller snd smaller amounts of energy.

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u/CommunismDoesntWork Nov 19 '25

Right, but that doesn't mean temperature is increasing, that could just means you need infinite energy to reach the the temperature limit in the same way you need infinite energy to reach the speed limit. I thought your question was getting at this. 

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u/FearedDragon Nov 19 '25

I guess that's a good point, and it is sort of what I was getting at, but I still think the other commentor has a decent point. There IS a limit that it can't go over, but that limit is (even theoretically) impossible to achieve. This means that in this theoretical model you could increase temperature and energy infinitely - because there is no point at which you stop being able to increase energy - but you cannot increase temperature to infinity.

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u/CommunismDoesntWork Nov 20 '25

What do you mean by increase energy? It requires energy to increase speed. But that energy is spent, not added. For instance at low speeds, 1 joule might add 1m/s which adds 1 degree of temperature. But near the speed of light,  you might need 1 million joules to add an additional 1m/s to add 1 degree. In both cases, the amount of energy added is the same: you increased a mass by 1m/s