Yeah I’ll get excited after it gets peer reviewed
It’s already been published. But it’s superconducting at 10 K. This is a new high temperature record, but pretty far from room temperature.
Yeah the headline makes you think it’s even within “normal” temperatures, and then you see that it’s like 10°C
belowabove Absolute Zero.Nitpicky but it’s above absolute zero
Even if it was somehow 10° below absolute zero, it would still be 10° above absolute zero
I thought negative Kelvin were sometimes used to describe very very high temperatures but I could be wrong.
Thanks for the downvotes y’all, enjoy being wrong:
" Negative absolute temperatures (or negative Kelvin temperatures) are hotter than all positive temperatures - even hotter than infinite temperature."
Lmao I was kind of making a joke there, it’s an absolute scale so a negative number can’t actually exist, i.e. |-10| = 10
Additionally, temperatures expressed as negative Kelvin aren’t actually negative Kelvin in reality (“reality” meaning the actual physical existence in our material world) because, as you pointed out, the material would actually be more temperate. Negative Kelvin is useful to represent systems where adding energy decreases the entropy of the system, rather than the standard of increasing entropy, but to relate it to the actual heat or energy of the material gets murky.
That’s not what an absolute scale is tho. It’s just because of the second law of thermo. -10 K would never be 10 K (maybe that’s the joke? I don’t get it. Maybe it was intended as an absolute/absolute pun). Either way, to me did not make sense.
Further, based on this article it seems rather correct to tie negative Kelvin to actual temperatures, especially considering it’s been experimentally achieved…
What makes you say that isn’t what an absolute scale is? It definitely is what an absolute scale is. For example, distance is measured on an absolute scale. Negative ten meters would be equal to positive ten meters. In the classic definition of temperature measuring the total kinetic energy of matter, a negative temperature would be equivalent to a positive temperature, as it is measuring how much the particles are moving. Similar to velocity (also an absolute scale), if a particle is moving at a particular speed, X, then moving at that same speed backwards would be -X, but it is still the same speed.
Negative temperatures are used to express something different from the classic definition of temperature, because the particles are not doing less than zero movement. Once a particle reaches absolute zero, it cannot move any less, but it can still have other properties that are directly tied to temperature change. Therefore, if purely expressing the classic definition of temperature, a negative temperature cannot exist, so any negative temperature would necessarily have to be equivalent to the same positive temperature. Of course, in any actual scientific conversation, the classic definition of temperature would be understood to be inadequate.