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Why Does Temperature Have No Upper Limit?
You don’t have to be good in physics to appreciate this!
Temperature has no upper limit, yet a fixed lower limit. To elaborate, the lowest temperature possible is 0 K (zero Kelvin) or -273.15°C (degrees Celsius).
On the other hand, we do not know what the highest temperature possible could be, meaning we do not know temperature’s upper limit.
What about temperature makes it impossible for it to go below 0 K? And what about it makes the upper limit currently unknown to us? Those are the fascinating questions I am trying to address with this article.
I will be tackling these questions by solving the following 5 incremental puzzles:
1. How do we measure temperature?
2. What exactly is temperature?
3. Why does temperature have a lower limit?
4. Temperature has no upper limit!
5. What remains unknown to us about temperature?
As I solve each puzzle, the mystery will gradually unravel itself to you. On your part, you don’t need any deep knowledge about any of this stuff beforehand. I will be using simple language as much as possible so that anyone who reads can get it.
If you are as curious and excited as I am, let’s jump right into it!
How is Temperature Measured?
Part of our fascination about temperature in this article comes from its fixed lower limit. It is fixed at -273.15°C or 0 K. Here, -273.15°C can look like a random number.
It’s because Celsius was a measuring scale (unit system) that was invented with water and its phase change as the basis. 0°C is the freezing point of water, and 100°C is its boiling point (both at 1 atmospheric pressure; I’ll get into pressure’s relevance later).
Hence, when we generalize the Celsius unit system’s use, it leads to a random-looking number for the absolute lowest temperature.
