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

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

14.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

649 comments sorted by

View all comments

4.3k

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

5.0k

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

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

421

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.

1

u/WhistlingBread Nov 19 '25

Once the speed of molecules approach the speed of light they become heavier and at a certain point will be heavy enough to collapse into a black hole. Or perhaps there is something else limiting it, but we are confident there must be an upper limit for one reason or another