What is the Highest Possible Temperature?
” will depend on their implicit opinion of the completeness of our current set of physical theories. Temperature is a function of the motion of particles. If the speed of light is the universal speed limit, then a gas of maximum temperature may be defined as a gas whose atomic constituents are each moving at the speed of light. The problem is that attaining the speed of light in this universe is impossible; light speed is a quantity that may only be approached asymptotically. The more energy you put into a particle, the closer it gets to moving at light speed, though it never fully approaches it. At least one scientist has proposed defining the maximum possible temperature as what we would get if we took all the energy in the universe and put it into accelerating the lightest possible particle we could find as closely as possible to the speed of light. If this is true, then discoveries about elementary particles and the size/density of the universe could be relevant to discovering the
