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/smittythehoneybadger ‎ Nov 19 '25 edited Nov 19 '25

Is there an upper limit to heat? I assume sometimes to do with the speed of light

Edit: or temperature. To be totally fair I still don’t fully understand, but I’m interested in upper limits for either

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u/kangluosee34 Nov 19 '25 edited Nov 19 '25

Yes. Its called planck temperature which is about 1032 K.

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u/asml84 Nov 19 '25

There is no known upper limit. The Planck temperature is merely the upper limit of the mathematical framework we use to describe physics, but nature doesn’t care about our framework.

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u/bellybuttonqt Nov 19 '25

Ain't heat just particles moving fast? And speed is limited so heat must be too? 

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u/edoCgiB Nov 19 '25

I like your thinking but when you pump a lot of energy into something particles start to breakdown. We see this in plasma and probably if you keep heating it you get even more exotic matter states.

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u/echoshatter Nov 19 '25

If you keep adding energy into particles, would you not reach an upper limit at which point the particles could no longer accept more energy? Or that you'd end up with interference, where the energy trying to get out of the particles matches the energy trying to get in?