Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What is negative temperature?
Episode Date: September 27, 2022Daniel and Jorge talk about hot and cold coffee, weather and desserts and wrestle with whether things can be colder than zero!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
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This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot.
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Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.
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Hey, Jorge, do you have any concerns about raising your kids in Southern California?
I don't. It's pretty great out here.
Although, I do feel like they miss out on some things.
They do. What's missing in Southern California?
Well, definitely not plastic surgery.
We got that covered for sure.
But, you know, there are experiences kids growing up here that they don't get that other kids do.
Yeah, like what?
You know, like experiencing winter, snowfall.
I mean, I guess I miss winter, but I wouldn't say I'm missing winter.
Would you say, you don't miss shoveling snow, putting on multiple layers of clothes?
Multiple layers of clothes? What does that even mean, man?
like layers of clothes. What does that even mean? I'm recording this naked. You don't think kids
should know about winter? No, I'm definitely anti-winter. That's what I'm teaching my kids about
winter. Avoid it at all costs. But what if they don't? What if they end up living there? And
then are you going to go visit them? Depends how cute the grandkids are, I guess. That's pretty
cold, Daniel.
Hi, I'm Horham, a cartoonist, and the co-author of Frequently Asked Questions About the Universe.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a physics professor at UC Irvine and a high-energy physicist,
and I definitely prefer high-energy air molecules.
Hmm, you don't like low-energy air?
No, I like it hot outside. You know, when I moved to California, I discovered that sunshine
makes me happy.
Do you think maybe that's your upbringing? You grew up in New Mexico, right?
And then you went to school in Texas?
I did.
I'm a desert person.
But, you know, New Mexico was pretty cold.
Los Alamos is 7,000 feet in elevation.
And so we got a lot of snow.
I remember one year we got 55 inches overnight.
I was not a happy camper.
Whoa.
So you remember of a desert person or a dessert person?
Dessert in the desert.
And do you like your desserts hot or cold?
I like them both.
I'm not picky.
But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge,
Explain the Universe,
of iHeart Radio in which we are hot on the mysteries of the universe and we think that everything
about it is pretty cool we want to understand how the universe works what the rules are that govern
how it operates and whether or not we can understand them we think one of the most fundamental
questions about being alive about being human is why are things the way that they are and what else
could happen in this universe that's right we don't give a cold shoulder to the big questions out
there because it is a wonderful universe full of amazing things. And sometimes we wish we could
freeze it all so we can study it a little bit better. That's right. These are hot topics for us to
understand. And as we look out around us in the universe, we want to understand why some things are
the way they are, why some things are hot, why some things are cold, why hot things tend to heat up
cold things, why cold things tend to cool down hot things. Yeah, because we want people to warm up
to the extremes of the universe and all of the amazing things that can happen. And
different temperatures out there. The universe has a pretty wide range from super hot, explosive
supernovas and hearts of neutron stars, really vast voids of empty space. Exactly. And one of the
best ways to understand how the universe works, to make it reveal its underlying truth, the rules
that govern it, is to look at the extremes to find out what is the most of something that can
happen. How bright can things get? How fast can they spin? How empty can space be? How empty can space be?
How dense can matter be?
So on this podcast, we'd like to explore those extremes
because we think those are the places that the universe is cornered,
is forced to tell us something about how the rules work.
These are the edge cases, the ones where we hope the truth will reveal itself.
Yeah, we have a whole series of episodes where we talk about extreme things in the universe,
the coldest, the brightest, the biggest.
Daniel, have we done the most delicious thing in the universe yet?
That's just been a side research project of mine for a long time.
You're just gathering data more and more every year.
Yeah, you know, I'm not trying to mind my personal experience for podcast episodes, but that's a good idea.
Or maybe the most delicious thing in the universe is the universe.
It's a pretty tasty place.
Well, the universe is the only thing in the universe, right?
So it's both the most delicious and the most disgusting thing to eat in the universe.
Also the most filling, I guess.
We have done a whole series of episodes on extremes, and we encourage you to go back through the archive and check them out.
did do the sort of the hottest and coldest things in the universe. Those are two episodes you can
download, right? Yeah, that's right. And we recently organized a curated list of all of our
episodes on our website. Listeners have been asking for us to sort the episodes by topic. And so now
we have them grouped by cosmology or particle physics or science fiction or extreme universe. So go to
our website, Daniel and Jorge.com and look at the list of episodes by topic. Yeah. So it's kind of like a
menu. So if you're feeling like, hey, you know, I could use a little cosmology today or I could use
a little, you know, fundamental particles with my meal. You can go and help yourself. That's right.
Order up a side dish of black holes. So we have talked about temperature a lot in this podcast,
but recently you've gotten a few questions about a new and interesting topic that's kind of
floating out there, right? Exactly. Folks are interested in the extremes of temperature all the way down
to absolute zero or all the way up to absolute hot, the hottest that things can get in the universe
before temperature doesn't even make any sense.
But over the last year,
so I've gotten a few emails asking me to talk about something
that sounds like it makes no sense at all,
something that has been bouncing around on the internet
and inspire the curiosity of several listeners,
whether or not it's possible to go even below absolute zero.
So today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question,
What is negative temperature?
Negative temperature?
what? Now, Daniel, is this temperature that is not an optimist or what? Always looks on the
dark side of things. Yeah, this is grumpy temperature, exactly. Whatever makes you feel bad.
It's not a positive temperature. Yeah, this is a weird concept, I guess. Well, I guess people are
familiar with negative temperature, right? Like in some places, it gets so cold. It's like minus 15 degrees,
right? Yeah, and like negative 40 is where Celsius and Fahrenheit meet. So on some scales,
negative temperature is a pretty common experience, but I think people are probably thinking about
Kelvin. You mean this physical concept is more about absolute temperature and whether or not it can be
negative? Yeah, the Kelvin scale goes from zero, which is supposed to be the scenario where nothing
is moving and everything is basically frozen up to very high values when things are wiggling around.
So from that perspective, you know, like what does it mean to have negative temperature? Can you move
less than not moving at all? Right. That is pretty weird.
But is that maybe just a scalar thing?
Like we used the wrong scale?
But no, because it's absolute temperature, right?
There are like hard limits, or at least I thought there were hard limits to absolute temperature
or the Kelvin scale, right?
Zero to infinity kind of.
Zero to the plank temperature, actually.
There is this maximum temperature beyond which we think that gravity will take over.
And quantum gravity effects will be important and we don't even know what temperature means there.
Wait, what?
That's called absolute hot.
Absolute hot.
or absolutely hot?
Absolute hot is absolutely hot for sure.
Sounds like a new vodka brand.
But it touches on these interesting questions of like,
what is temperature anyway?
You know,
as humans,
we have experiences in the world
and then we try to build models,
physical ideas that describe those things.
And then we have to find a way
to like mathematically express some things that we experience.
Temperature is something that's like very intuitive to us.
But in our physical models,
we need like equations and numbers to describe
these things. And sometimes that's easy to do, like velocity or location. And sometimes it's a little
bit fuzzy. And so we're going to get into like, what is temperature really mean anyway? Man.
Yeah. So we have this temperature and the absolute temperature within the Kelvin scale. And so for
example, like what is room temperature in Kelvin? Zero in Celsius corresponds to 273 in Kelvin. And so a
comfortable temperature in Celsius is like 20, 25, which would be like 290 something in.
in Kelvin. Okay, so room temperature is 298, let's say, in Kelvin, and then freezing is 273. And I guess what
temperature does water boil? So it'd be 373 or 100 Celsius. Okay, so then as you start to cool things
and make things colder, the Kelvin goes down and down and down and down. And I think we talked about
what is the coldest thing we've gotten something here on Earth, right? Yeah, we have done the coldest thing
in the universe and the coldest thing on Earth.
And physicists regularly do experiments with super duper cold objects, things that like
the micro Kelvin temperature, just above what we thought was the absolute minimum temperature,
which is actually a tiny little bit above absolute zero.
That's right.
We talked about how maybe the coldest thing in the universe is something here on Earth,
that scientists have been able to cool down to almost zero Kelvin, 0.00001 Kelvin.
And so the question is, can you actually go below, right?
Is there such a thing as negative absolute temperature?
Exactly.
That is the question today.
Or is it even possible, I guess?
And what are physicists thinking?
So as usually we're wondering, how many people out there had thought about this question
or wondered whether temperature can go negative?
And so Daniel went out there into the internet or your campus?
These are internet answers.
And thanks again, everybody who volunteers to answer these weird email questions.
If you'd like to receive some strange questions for future podcast,
podcast episodes in your inbox, please don't be shy.
Write to us to questions at danielanhorpe.com.
That's right, and you can be as positive or as negative as you want in your answers.
But think about it for a second right now.
Do you think absolute temperature can be negative?
Here's what people had to say.
This is a loaded question.
But if my bank account can have a negative balance, so too can a thermometer.
Unless it's measuring in Kelvin, he never goes below zero.
Well, because you're asking this, I'm going to assume that that's what the topic is.
But my first instinct would be, no, you can't have a negative temperature because I'm thinking like Kelvin, right?
I mean, obviously you can have like a negative Celsius or something, but like you can't have like a negative like Kelvin amount of temperature.
So no.
I don't think you can.
I think at zero Kelvin the molecules actually stop moving.
Not molecules, I mean particles actually stop moving as far as I know.
Probably wrong, but that's my understanding.
Well, on the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales, you can have a negative value for your temperature.
But on the Kelvin or Rankin scales, with a positive temperature being amount of energy and zero, absolute zero being no heat energy, in that case for a negative temperature, you would have to have this, you'd be like a black hole of energy or just the potential to absorb.
energy from somewhere else, but maybe you don't actually exist and you're just something mathematicians use
like I.
My first impression would be no.
I don't think you can since if your particles are static, then your temperature would be
absolute zero.
I don't know, maybe unless the particles are moving back in time some way, then you could
have negative temperature.
I really don't know.
I'm making this up as I go.
Daniel, I think you forgot about Chicago.
You moved in California and you forgot that you can go negative during the year.
I do not believe it's possible to have a negative temperature.
There is a reason why absolute zero is called absolute.
Temperature is the sum of the kinetic energy of the particles of the objects being measured.
And I don't believe something can have negative motion unless there is some oddity in the fact that measuring motion,
requires the existence of a reference point and with a boundless infinite universe, where is that
absolute reference point? But otherwise, there is no possibility for negative temperature.
I'm going to go with no, and also it depends on what context we're talking about this in.
For example, if you're dead, I think your temperature can be negative because you'd be frozen
in a refrigerator or something. But as a living human being, having a negative temperature,
I think would be impossible because we are made up of,
water and that water would freeze if it was a negative temperature, meaning we wouldn't be
able to be alive. Blood would not be able to move. Our heart couldn't beat and things like that.
Okay, a lot of negative responses. Not a lot of positive yeses. No, not a lot of believers in
negative temperature, but some good creative answers. You think they should have been more positive,
like, yes, maybe it can. I believe in you, universe. You're beautiful. I think that they should have
had more faith in physicists to break the rules and think outside the bounds of what is normally
possible.
It should have been more temperature positive, that it can be negative.
Exactly.
Because you know, the history of physics is littered with examples of doing things that we thought
were once impossible, of discovering the universe works in a way different from the way that
we had imagined, of breaking the rules that we once thought were ironclad.
Are you saying physicists just basically do things on a dare?
Like you have some kind of chip on your shoulder?
Hey, Daniel, I dare you to understand the universe.
I think it's exciting to imagine what's impossible, might be possible, to think about it.
You know, that's the job of science fiction authors to think, could we get to a nearby star faster than the speed of light?
How might that be possible?
It's also the job of physicists to think like, what are the actual rules of the universe?
Which ones can be broken?
Which ones can be bent?
Which ones seem like rules, but only in certain circumstances and actually aren't fundamentally rules at all.
Although I guess you have to be careful where, like, you don't want to dare a physicist to find a way.
to blow up the world or create a black hole in the center of the of our planet.
Yeah, I think we've tried that already, actually.
Oh, I see.
You were there and what?
I guess you gave up?
You, well, I hope or failed.
No, we are still trying to create black holes at the large Hedron Collider.
In fact, we recently turned the Collider back on a few weeks ago.
Oh, man, you're not going to give up, are you?
You know, just after we turned on the Collider, the government of the UK collapsed and Boris Johnson was forced to resign
as prime minister.
Really?
Do you think there's a correlation there?
There's definitely a correlation.
I don't know by causation.
We'll have to turn the thing on and off a few times and see what other governments fall.
I think there are other things going on besides you switching on the collider.
Just, you know, a few things here on our world stage.
I don't know.
I don't keep up with politics, man.
I see.
You just flip on the switch.
All right.
Well, this is a fascinating question.
Can absolute temperature go negative?
Can it be minus something degrees?
Absolute.
And so, Daniel, that is a weird phrase, negative temperature.
What does it mean?
It all comes down to what we mean by temperature.
And normally, when we talk about temperature, we're talking about how hot something feels.
You know, you touch something, it feels hot.
You touch something, it feels cold.
You have a sense for whether it's hot or cold outside.
That's about like the energy flow between you and some other object.
But we also have a concept for like what's going on inside, like micro physical picture
of why some things are hot and some things are cold.
going on inside something that's hot that makes it different from something that's cold.
And this microphysical picture mostly is about like how much the atoms inside are moving.
Like if they're zooming around a lot and jiggling a lot, if they have a lot of energy, then the thing
they make up feels hot.
If they're mostly not moving, they're not jiggling or whizzing around, then the thing they make
up feels cold.
Right.
And we have ways to measure that, right?
Like we have devices called thermometer, as you probably know, that can tell you.
a little bit about that kind of internal moving around of things.
Yeah, and what's interesting is that thermometers measure things that are related to temperature.
None of them actually directly measure temperature itself.
Wait, what?
A thermometer does not meter matter temperature?
I know.
It's called a thermometer, but it doesn't actually meter thermo.
I mean, take, for example, the classic bulb thermometer.
What is it?
It's a little pot of liquid with a tube above it.
And what it's really measuring is the volume of the liquid, because there's a right.
relationship. As the liquid gets hotter, its volume increases. And so it climbs up that cylinder.
And so you're not directly measuring temperature. You're measuring the volume, which is you think related
to the temperature. Right. It's like those glass tubes with the little red line. What's actually
happening is that when you stick it into like, let's say, boiling water, it heats up the little
red liquid and it expands. And the more it expands, I guess, the hotter the water was. But you're
saying it's not actually measuring the temperature of the water? No, it's measuring the volume.
of that little red liquid inside the thermometer, which of course is related to temperature,
but it's indirect, right? There are other ways that are also indirect that you can measure temperature,
like the thermostat in your house, the one that decides whether or not to turn on the air
conditioning. That doesn't have a little ball of liquid in it. It has something called a bi-metallic
strip. It has two kinds of metal bonded together, and the two kinds of metal have different
properties. One of them expands faster when they heat up than the other one. So if the metallic
strip heats up, then it tends to bend in one direction because half of it is expanding
faster than the other one. And then it like closes some circuit and decides to turn on your air
conditioning. So that's measuring the bending of this piece of metal, which again is related to the
temperature, but it's one step indirect. Right. Well, I mean, maybe it depends on what you mean by
measure, but it does sort of measure the temperature of the metallic strip, right? Which is, I guess,
related to the temperature of the air around it. Yeah. I mean, it's measuring the bending of the
metallic strip, which is related to the temperature, right? Like, how would you actually measure the
temperature directly? You'd have to go, like, measure the velocity of those particles themselves
inside the object, how much they're wiggling, and that would tell you the temperature. Instead,
you're measuring something which is determined by that property. So, I mean, I'm not criticizing
thermometers. I'm not saying the whole thing's a hoax, right? It's not a scam. Are you anti-thermometer?
No, I'm pro-thermometer. You were saying it's all a big,
pharma conspiracy. No, but if we're going to think carefully about what temperature means, then let's
think about what our devices are actually measuring what they're really probing and not just what
numbers they're reading out. Maybe we should have a disclaimer, you know, you should trust your
thermometer. If it says you have a 106 degree fever, maybe you should call a doctor. Yeah, I'm not a
thermometer denier or anything like that. You're a temperature denier. No, I'm not like that guy who
says birds aren't real. All right. Well, so you're saying usually we measure things like the effects
of temperature, not maybe what we define temperature to be exactly. Yeah, that's right. But we do have a
model again for what temperature is. We imagine that what's going on inside that liquid or inside the metal
is that they're made of atoms. And those atoms wiggle and move or they fly around or they flow around.
And the degree of that motion is usually what we talk about for temperature. But this is a model of
temperature. We call this the kinetic model of temperature. It's this idea that something is hot when the
atoms inside of it have more kinetic energy and something is cold when the atoms inside of it have
less kinetic energy. And it's not just motion. Like it's not just velocity. You can also have
spinning and vibrating and all this kind of stuff. And so it's related to this idea of kinetic energy,
right? How fast things are moving. So from that perspective, you might imagine like if temperature is
related to kinetic energy. Well, kinetic energy is either zero or more than zero. So how could you
possibly have negative temperature? It seems like that I should tell you that temperature is zero or
above zero. Right, because you're saying it's sort of a measure of the, I guess the average
kinetic energy of something. And I guess if it's air, you're measuring the kinetic energy of the
air particles flying around. Those have kinetic energy. But if it's like a block of wood or a
block of metal, then I guess the atoms aren't moving around, but they're still vibrating and
bumping against each other, right? And so if you kind of were to measure all of those
particles and take the average velocity and I guess squared it and all that, then you would
get the temperature. Yeah, and there's some mathematics you can look up about exactly how
temperature is defined based on the number of degrees of freedom, the number of ways it can move
or wiggle and all this kind of stuff. But that's the basic idea for your classic definition
of temperature. Right, the average energy. And in fact, can
kinetic energy, you calculated by squaring the velocity of something, right?
Which means that it should always be positive.
Yeah.
Kinetic energy is always positive.
Right.
Unless I guess you have imaginary energy.
Unless you have imaginary velocity.
Like, I imagined I went to the post office today, but I didn't.
Because you had negative energy.
Because I didn't eat enough dessert in the desert to fuel my trip.
There you go.
Easy solution.
All right.
Well, let's get into what exactly is temperature,
whether that definition of temperature as kinetic energy makes sense
and whether or not it's possible for it to be negative.
But first, let's take a quick break.
December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.
The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.
Then, at 6.33 p.m.
Everything changed.
There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.
Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass.
The injured were being loaded into ambulances.
Just a chaotic, chaotic scene.
In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay.
Terrorism.
Law and order, criminal justice system is back.
In season two, we're turning our focus
to a threat that hides in plain sight
that's harder to predict
and even harder to stop.
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My boyfriend's professor is way
too friendly and now I'm seriously
suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's
just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota,
it's back to school week on the OK Storytime
podcast, so we'll find out soon.
This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot.
He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her.
Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone.
Now, hold up.
Isn't that against school policy?
That sounds totally inappropriate.
Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age.
It's even more likely that they're cheating.
He insists there's nothing between them.
I mean, do you believe him?
Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet.
So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really?
cheated with this professor or not?
To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK
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Hey, sis, what if I could promise
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Welcome to Brown Ambition.
This is the hard part when you pay down those
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and it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and
dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it.
and make it even worse.
For more judgment-free money advice,
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This season, we're going even deeper
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with raw and honest conversations
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No, I didn't audition.
I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years.
Oh, wow.
That's a real G-talk right there.
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We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters
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And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles,
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You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the...
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I won't say white watch
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you know, it takes a toll on you.
Listen to the new season
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All right, we're asking a pretty trippy question,
which is, can you have negative
absolute temperature, which is sort of an oxymorne, right?
Negative absolute, because absolute usually means it can only be positive.
Yeah, it's a pretty psycho kind of idea, negative temperature.
And it really gets at the heart of this question, like, what is temperature anyway?
You know, which we talked about several times on the podcast, because it's kind of a slippery
idea.
Yeah, and I know you sort of hate talking about it, right?
You're not a fan of thermodynamics.
Wait, is it because you're a thermal denier?
Is this all making sense now?
It's because it's complicated and thermodynamics involves like thousands and thousands or millions or billions of particles.
I like thinking about individual particles bouncing off each other, really reducing the universe down to the simplest little bits and their rules.
It's hard to think about swarms, you know?
Right. Does that mean you're anti-democracy, Daniel?
I don't pay attention to politics, right? That's the official line.
Oh, that's right. We forgot. We established that earlier.
Yeah, so this kind of gets into the question of what is temperature anyway, like, is it really the kinetic energy of the particles inside of it? And what does that even mean?
It is really interesting question. And we talked about it several times. Even in this idea of temperature as like the kinetic energy of particles, you can ask weird questions like, what's the kinetic energy of one particle? Can a single particle have kinetic energy?
Well, a single particle can, right? You're wondering if it can have temperature.
Yes. Can a single particle have temperature? Because it can have kinetic energy. And that sort of shows you something about the limits of this idea of temperature as kinetic energy. Because we mean more by temperature than just like how much energy is in something. We also mean something about how heat flows, right? We have this intuitive experience that we want to somehow describe. That's if you put like a block of ice in your coffee, then the ice will melt, right? Because the heat will flow from the coffee to the ice cube. So temperature is also a
about how heat flows.
He tends to flow from hot things to cold things.
So when we define temperature,
we also want this idea of heat flow.
I guess you're saying there's some sort of tension
between our intuitive understanding of temperature
and maybe the official physics definition of it
because I guess we talked about the hottest things in the universe
and one of the hottest things in the universe
is kind of an empty space, right?
Or at least mostly empty space
because it's mostly empty, there's not much in it,
but there are particles in it that are moving really fast.
And so it does technically have a high temperature empty space, but if you were there, you would freeze.
And so I think that's what you're saying is that like, well, that's kind of counterintuitive.
How can I freeze if it's one of the hottest things in the universe?
And so it kind of makes your brain pop a little bit.
Yeah.
Out in the middle of empty space, there are very fast moving particles, but not very many of them.
So if you went into empty space, those particles would give you energy, but you'd be losing energy more quickly than you'd be gaining energy because you'd be radiating it out into space.
So you would freeze.
That's counterintuitive.
There's another idea here, though, which is the idea of equilibrium.
We talk about temperature in terms of many particles rather than a single particle
because temperature really is about like an object in equilibrium.
It's like settled.
It's a statement about many, many things.
It's an emergent property, not the property of an individual object.
The way, for example, like the cost of something, the value of something is an emergent property of the market.
You can say, I'm going to make some piece of art and I'm going to claim it's worth a billion dollars.
Well, if you can only sell it for $74, then what is its value?
Its value really is $74.
So the value of your art is really determined sort of by like the market price for it
is willing to bear.
In the same way, temperature isn't really the property of a particle.
It's like the property of a system of objects.
It's an average emergent quantity.
Are you saying that that's one way to measure temperature?
Because right before you said that you can calculate it as the average kinetic energy of the
particles inside of something.
Yeah, but you can't define a temperature for a single point.
particle. Even for this kinetic theory of temperature, you can't define temperature for a single
particle. It has to do more with equilibrium sets of particles. But what if I have empty space and
there's only one particle in it? Wouldn't the kinetic energy of that particle basically define the
temperature of that empty space? Well, in the same way that like if you are the only person in the
world and you create some art and you say it's worth a billion dollars, you're defining the value of that?
You can't really sell it for a billion dollars as nobody else in that universe. So in that same way,
like a single particle doesn't really have a temperature.
I guess I'm not sure what you're saying.
That our definition of particle temperature doesn't make sense.
Is that what you're saying?
Or that it breaks down?
Yeah, it breaks down.
It breaks down intuitively or in actual like math?
I guess it breaks down intuitively, not in actual math.
I mean, an individual particle can hit an object and deposit its energy, right?
That can happen.
There's no problem there.
We can calculate how that happens.
But that doesn't mean that we can talk about the temperature of this object.
Temperature in the end is a macroscopic quantity.
It's not a microscopic quantity.
It emerges the way like consciousness does.
Like can you say that an individual neuron in your brain is conscious?
No, but somehow they come together to make your brain self-aware.
Not a process we understand, but individual neurons we don't think are self-aware.
In the same way, like a particle doesn't have a temperature.
And so it's a little bit slippery because temperature is this like intuitive thing we want to describe
and not something hard and fixed about individual particles.
Oh, okay.
So I think what you're saying is,
that our intuitive sense of what temperature is and the official physics definition of what
temperature is kind of matches up or makes sense if you have a lot of particles in something or
something is dense, but in some of these extreme cases, like if you're down to one particle
in empty space, then our intuitive definition and the official definition sort of like
start to diverge or don't start to match well together. Yeah, that's right. And to make it even
more confusing, we have more than one official definition of temperature. Like we have one
One definition of temperature, which is what we talked about earlier, related to the average kinetic
energy of the particles, but we have another completely separate definition of temperature.
Wait, what?
We have a second definition of temperature.
We do.
We have a thermodynamic definition of temperature.
So one earlier, we call that the kinetic theory of temperature.
It relates to the motion of the particles.
Now we have another one, thermodynamic definition, which is about how heat flows.
This one comes from the observation that heat flows from hot things to cold things.
And so this one tries to build a definition of temperature that says, if two things are at the same temperature, no heat flows between them.
And if one thing has a higher temperature and the other one has a lower temperature, heat will flow from the higher temperature thing to the lower temperature thing.
So it tries to build a theory of temperature that matches that experience.
I see.
You're saying like it's a different way to basically think about temperature.
Like temperature is not maybe the kinetic energy of the particles.
It's just kind of like a relative property or a relative quantity.
Like, you know something has more temperature than something else if the heat flows from the first thing to the second thing.
That's kind of what you're saying.
I guess zero would be if heat can't flow from this thing to anything, then it must be at zero.
That's kind of what you're saying.
Like, let's measure zero to be that.
Exactly.
And so then you can come up with a new mathematical expression or how to measure this other idea of temperature, thermodynamic temperature.
The same way that for the kinetic theory, you can say, oh, it's about the motion of the particles.
And then you can go and write the math and say, here's the kinetic energy and vibrational.
energy and I can actually calculate it and construct it.
In that same way, you can write down mathematical expressions for thermodynamic temperature
and they relate to entropy and to energy and they help you understand like why heat flows
from hot things to cold things.
So it gives you a really interesting thermodynamic insight into like why these things
happen.
But is that really sort of different in the kinetic, I guess, view of things?
Because I imagine if you have something where the all the particles are moving a lot,
that would be hot and something that's not.
not moving a lot, that would be cold.
And if you put them together, the moving things would, you know, bump up against the other things.
And that's why that's what kind of what heat flow is.
It's like the energy of one thing going to the other.
Most of the time these two definitions agree about what temperature is and also how energy flows from hot things to cold things.
So in many scenarios, you could use either one.
But as we'll see, thermodynamic temperature has some weird behaviors in strange systems at extremes that might allow the existence of negative temperature.
So I guess if you keep going and keep defining temperature in terms of heat flow, then that's when you might get into trouble.
Yeah, into trouble or into this weird territory where temperature can have non-zero negative values and like, what does that mean?
And in the end, it reflects something about, you know, what temperature means?
What question are you asking about the universe when you calculate this number?
So then you're saying this different definition of temperature is the thermodynamic version and it's related to enter.
What does that mean?
So thermodynamic temperature tries to give us a sense for like why things flow from one thing to the other.
You know, why when you put that ice cube in your cup of coffee and you come back in an hour, everything is about an even temperature, right?
Why do things like to even out?
And the answer is entropy.
The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always increases.
And people sometimes think about entropy is like the amount of disorganization in the universe, the messiness in the universe.
And like, you know, that works in some certain circumstances.
But that more accurate description of entropy is.
like how many ways can you arrange something? How many different configurations of an object can you
have like in the different microscopic particles that match, you know, the things that you're
measuring about it? And a basic concept in thermodynamics is that every configuration is equally
likely. And so if you have some state, some condition that has lots of possible ways to achieve
at many possible internal configurations, you're just more likely to end up in that state.
Say, for example, you have a bunch of coins and you throw them all on the
floor, right? How many ways are there to get all heads up? There's only one way. How many ways are
to get all heads down? There's only one way. There's lots of ways to get 50% heads up and 50%
heads down. So if you throw a bunch of coins on the floor, you're much more likely to end up in that
state. Those states have higher entropy. So the universe tend towards these arrangements where there's
lots of ways, lots of configurations to get the same value. So that's what entropy is. Right. I guess in
terms of that coffee cup and the ice cube it's almost like you're saying like if i take some water
and i take some coffee and i imagine water and coffee in a cup it's much more likely for it to be all
mixed up together in the tepid temperature right then it would be likely for all the water to be
congregated in one place locked together into an ice cube and then all of the coffee to be hot
surrounding that block that's kind of what you're saying and i think you're saying that the
melted ice cube, tepid coffee, watery coffee is more likely to happen and therefore it's a
state of higher entropy. Exactly. If you let the energy flow from the hot coffee into the ice
cube, then it opens up more configurations. You can arrange that in many, many more ways now.
That's why energy flows from hot things to cold things because when it does so, it increases
the entropy. It opens up the number of ways you can arrange the little internal bits.
Right, but that's not why it does it, right? I think.
where you're saying is that's how thermodynamic says it. Why does it, right? Like if you were to look at it
from a totally different perspective, you would see the molecules of the ice and the coffee interacting
and bumping against each other. And that's why you would say that the heat, the energy goes from
one place to the other. But if you were to put on your thermodynamic glasses, you would kind of
ignore all those interactions and just say, oh yeah, of course. It's because of the enterprise that
it's going up. Exactly. Yeah. So it's another way to explain it. It's like a completely different
approach, a different set of ideas, and most of the time they predict the same thing.
And so in this thermodynamic context where you're thinking about the energy flow and
the entropy, then it's this relationship between energy and entropy that tells us what temperature
is. If two things have the same temperature, then we don't want any energy to flow between them.
So what we want is if two things have the same relationship between energy and entropy,
then we shouldn't have any more energy flow. Like, for example, if moving some energy from
the ice cube to the coffee cup doesn't increase the entropy anymore, then energy won't flow.
So the definition of temperature for thermodynamics doesn't have to do with the kinetic energy
objects. It has to do with the derivative of energy with respect to entropy, how the energy and
entropy are related to each other. I feel like you're saying that maybe temperature is relative
if you look at it from a thermodynamic point of view. And so let's get dig into this connection
between energy, heat and temperature and entropy. But first, let's take another quick break.
December 29th,
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The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.
In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay.
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My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious.
Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit.
Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon.
This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot.
He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her.
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water gone. Now hold up, isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate.
Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age.
It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them.
I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet.
So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not?
To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
says, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance bro?
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And I just hit call, said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick.
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There's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling.
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All right, we are getting hot and heavy here talking about possibly negative temperature.
Can you have negative absolute temperature?
And it may be possible.
It depends on how you define temperature.
I guess most people know that, right?
Like if you define temperature in terms of Fahrenheit, then yeah, you can have negative temperature.
Or it's Celsius.
you think, yeah, you can have negative temperature.
But you're saying this is something more fundamental.
Like maybe the universe can allow negative absolute temperature.
Yeah.
And it goes to the heart of this question.
What do we mean by temperature anyway?
And, you know, we define these things to describe our experience.
And then we explore their extreme to say, where does this break down?
Does this really make sense?
Is this something that's universal or only something that's useful in certain contexts?
So we came up with this idea of thermodynamic temperature that basically tells you how energy
flows around to maximize entropy.
If two things have the same temperature,
then we don't expect energy to flow between them.
And you can have two things that are very different.
One thing could have a lot more capacity for different configurations than the other one.
And whether energy flows from one object to another depends on like,
are you going to increase the entropy by moving that energy along?
And so it's this relationship between energy and entropy that is the thermodynamic definition of temperature.
Technically, it's the derivative of energy with respect to
entropy. So do you increase the energy as entropy increases? That's the temperature. I see. And I guess
maybe my question is, why would you do that? Like, why would you define it this way? Is it because it
matches usually with our other definition of temperature? Or like, why would you call this
temperature also? It's a totally different approach. And it's the macroscopic approach. And it has
some advantages. You know, the microscopic one is weirdly time invariant. The laws of physics
governing how things bounce against each other. Those look the same.
forward and backwards. And so it's hard to go from like a microscopic picture of atoms as like
little balls to an understanding of how a state evolves forward in time with entropy. It's complicated
to go from one to the other. This is a picture of thermodynamics that deals directly with the
macroscopic quantities. It says, look, these are the things we can measure, the entropy, the
energy, these are the things we're interested in. Not all of science has to be reductionist.
There are other ways to gain understanding and explanation than just to tear things apart into
their tiny bits. Sometimes you do that and you don't get any understanding. Like when you look at
the brain, psychology is valuable even if neuroscience can't yet explain it. Right, right. Well,
let's dig into this a little bit because I am a little bit confused. So you're saying the thermodynamic
definition of temperature is the derivative. Oh, say it again, energy flow divided by entropy. Yeah,
it's the derivative of energy with respect to entropy. So energy is E and entropy is S. So temperature in
this sense is D-E-D-S. I apologize for introducing math to the podcast.
Yeah, what are you doing to me here? Okay, so it's kind of like saying how energy changes
if you change entropy. Exactly, because the key idea, again, is that entropy is always
going to be maximized. And so what arrangement of the stuff, what arrangement of the energy
is going to give you the most entropy. And so to know whether something is going to flow from
one object to another, you have to know, like, how much energy?
does some entropy cost?
If I want to increase the entropy over here, how much energy does it cost me?
If I'm going to gain more entropy by moving the energy over, then I lose where the energy
came from, then let's do it.
So you have to understand, like, how much entropy do you get per energy?
And that's basically what temperature is?
Right.
But then what are you trying to measure the temperature of, like one thing or two things?
You know what I mean?
Like, if I told you what's the thermodynamic temperature of an ice cube, how would you
calculate that?
Well, I would measure how quickly it gains.
new possible configurations as I increase its energy.
As you put it in coffee.
I can measure the energy of the atoms in the ice cube or in some other way.
Yeah, I guess the question is just like, if I give you an ice cube, how would you measure
the thermodynamic temperature of it?
I would measure how its entropy changes as I change its energy, right?
So the temperature there is the relationship between the energy and the entropy.
So you change one and you measure the other.
Right.
But how would you measure its entropy?
Well, you know, you can measure entropy by measuring temperature and energy.
because it's a relationship between the three.
And that's the thing I always hated about thermodynamics
is that you feel like you're just going in circles sometimes.
Well, it's good we're spending an hour here
discussing something you hate.
I'm sure people are following along, right?
Right, right along.
All right, well, let's maybe take a step back.
I think what you're saying is that temperature is kind of this weird thing.
And if you look at it from a thermodynamic point of view,
you can look at it in terms of how it changes with respect to entropy.
Like if something has a lot of temperature,
something is hot in a thermodynamic sense, that means what, it takes a lot of entropy or it doesn't
take a lot of entropy? If something is hot in a thermodynamic sense, that means that it costs a lot of
energy to change its entropy. And so if you want to take some of that energy away, it doesn't reduce
its entropy very, very much. So if you have a really hot liquid surrounding your ice cube,
you can take some of that energy out of the liquid and put it into the ice cube, and you're not
going to lose a whole lot of entropy from the liquid, right? High temperature means high
DEDS. So you can take energy away without losing a whole lot of entropy. And because the ice cube is cold,
right, has low DEDS. And as you add energy to it, you get a lot more entropy. So you lose a little bit
of entropy from the hot liquid and you gain a lot of entropy into the cold ice cube for the
same amount of energy. I see. It's almost like the cost of entropy for something. Exactly. It's like
exchange rates. Yeah, it's like how much bang for your buck does energy give you in the
entropy of something. Like if something, an ice cube, which is cold, you get a lot of entropy just
by, you know, breathing on it with your warm breath. But a cold cup of coffee, you need a lot of
energy to reduce its entropy. Yeah. So now we have Jorge's economic theory of temperature.
Yes. My coffee theory, yes. You can buy entropy cheap from a hot liquid and you can sell it at a high
price in your cold ice cube. Exactly. Okay. So that's the thermo
dynamic definition and it matches up with the regular definition because I guess if something is
zero Kelvin entropy is cheap for something like that right like I just got to put in a little bit of
energy and I get a whole bunch of entropy but if something is like a million degrees Kelvin you know
it's going to take me a lot of energy to increase the entropy of something that's already super
entropic and it's also about the relationship like this makes a lot of sense for most things
because for most things as you add energy you get more entropy as you add energy to a liquid you
free the particles and then become gas
and they can move in new ways and find new arrangements.
And as you cool things down, they get less entropy.
So if entropy is always increasing with energy, then this makes perfect sense.
And that's what it does for the ideal gas and you're like kinetic theory of temperature.
And they line up, as you say.
You mean like you always get something for your money.
Mm-hmm, exactly.
But condensed matter physicists can imagine some kinds of weird materials where this isn't true.
Some kind of weird materials where as you add more energy, you actually get
fewer microstates.
You get decreasing entropy.
So as the thing has more and more energy,
there might be fewer ways to
arrange it, and that would lead to
negative temperature.
All right. Now we're getting to
the question of the episode, which is
you're saying that if you define
temperature in the thermodynamic
way, there are things
potentially or theoretically, I guess,
that could have negative temperature
because when you put energy into them,
they actually sort of get
neater, right? Or colder.
Exactly. They get neater. They have fewer ways to arrange themselves.
And here's an example. Imagine a bunch of particles in a line and these particles are fixed on
the line. They can't move at all. The only thing they can do is be spin up or spin down.
Put these particles in a magnetic field so that like spin up has more energy than spin down,
for example. Meaning more energy, meaning like it tend to want to spin down.
Yeah, exactly. It costs more energy to spin up than to spin down.
Like trying to stand up a stick.
Yeah, exactly.
So now imagine all these particles spin down, right?
Minimum energy.
There'd be no entropy because there's only one way to arrange all of these things.
It's just like getting all heads when you flip a bunch of coins or getting all tails, right?
There's only one way to arrange them so that they're all spin down.
So there's zero entropy.
It's minimum entropy.
It's like the block of ice, right?
Everything's like neatly ordered in a state that it wants to be in.
Exactly.
Now as you add energy, some atoms start to flip.
flip, right? And you quickly add entropy. There's lots of ways to arrange it. Now, if you say,
well, I have enough energy to flip one atom, well, there's a bunch of different ways to do that.
You can flip any of the atoms. If you want to flip five atoms, you have enough energy to
flip five atoms, right? And there's lots and lots of ways. And so as you add energy, the
entropy increases, totally normal so far. But what happens once you pass the halfway point,
once more than half of the atoms are flipped up? And as you keep adding energy, you're reducing
the number of ways you can arrange the system until all the way up to the maximum energy.
When everything is flipped up, there's only one way to arrange the system at the maximum energy.
So in the second half there, after you pass the halfway point, as you're adding energy,
you're losing entropy.
So you have the opposite relationship between energy and entropy.
Whoa.
Okay.
So it's kind of like the coins, like you were saying, right?
Like if all the coins are heads up, that's minimum entropy.
Yeah, that's zero entropy.
And half of them heads up, heads down is maximum entropy.
But then if you go all the way, if you keep going and somehow you're able to flip all
of the coins, tails up, then that's also zero entropy.
Yeah, exactly.
And so you have maximum energy and zero entropy.
And this is a really weird system and not something we actually see in nature, but in
principle, because you are adding energy but reducing entropy, that's technically negative temperature.
So everything above the halfway point there has negative temperature.
It has D-E-D-S is a negative value.
I see.
In this weird situation, after all the coins are 50% heads and tails up,
you're saying it actually starts to have negative temperature again
because the entropy is going down again as I put more energy into it.
Exactly.
And so the system would prefer less energy.
It would flow towards a higher entropy situation, which is more of a mix.
Right.
It's like you try to buy more entropy with your energy.
but you actually lose entropy.
That's what it means to be cold in this definition of temperature.
And this gets really weird.
Like, let's say you have two of these things.
Now you have two of these lines of atoms and you put them in touch so they can share energy.
Where is the energy going to go?
Say one of them has a higher value of temperature than the other one.
Well, in this case, something with negative temperature actually has more energy than the thing with positive temperature.
right because they get to negative temperature you have to go above the halfway point so half of them
are flipped up so in this case the heat actually flows from the higher energy negative temperature
system to the positive temperature system which sounds kind of bonkers and backwards well yeah yeah
it does sound bonkers but i feel like you're trying to maybe try to fudge some of these definitions right
because like these things these coins only have this weird property because you kind of introducing this
bias with the magnet, right? It's not actually heat or energy, right? It's sort of something
different that's going from one to the other. It is energy, right? It takes energy to be like misaligned
with the magnet, for example. And so it really is energy. The question really is like, what does this
mean by temperature? We introduce this definition of thermodynamic temperature so that we could
describe the kind of things we see in the world, right? Heat flowing from high temperature objects to
low temperature objects. And this is just an example of this definition pushed to the extreme where it really
doesn't make any sense anymore.
The same way we push the definition of kinetic temperature to the extreme by asking,
what is the temperature of one particle?
In this case, while you can get technically negative temperature,
it really shows the breakdown of this idea of thermodynamic temperature,
more than like actually being negative in any meaningful way.
I see.
You're saying like if I define temperature as the cost of entropy per bang per buck for energy,
that doesn't work if you have a situation where it actually like,
If you put in more energy, it actually loses entropy.
Exactly, yeah.
It just doesn't really work.
And you can see that because it predicts that things flow from negative temperature to positive temperature.
What's the point of temperature then if it doesn't even align with our ideas and our experience?
All right.
Well, I mean, it's sort of like kind of kind of like going to Celsius or Fahrenheit, right?
You're sort of changing the scale of things maybe.
And so then therefore you can't have negative temperatures if you define things this way.
Yeah, that's true.
you could always define temperatures to be negative as well.
I think this one is interesting because it shows you not like that the universe breaks the rules
or anything, but it shows you that these ideas that we invent to try to describe by our
experience, they have limits.
And those limits aren't physical limits.
They're like conceptual limits.
So like this idea doesn't really work in that circumstance.
The whole concept of temperature doesn't really make sense for this weird invented system.
Right.
It's like maybe we have a way of describing and calling things in the universe and calculating things.
but maybe that's not really how the universe works.
Like maybe the universe has its own way of doing things that are beyond what we're able
to describe kind of or define.
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, it's like the way you can talk about feelings for a person, but can you talk
about feelings for like a rock or a river?
You know, it's an idea, but doesn't really make sense in the same way that like temperature
makes sense in certain contexts or certain behaviors emerge and have relationships, but not
in all context.
You can't ask what is the temperature of every arbitrary system that you invent.
It doesn't always make sense.
I see.
But what if I have an imaginary friend, Rob?
Can I still assign thermodynamic happiness to it?
Depends how much it's willing to spend to get more entropy.
Be flip it and it lands heads up.
What does that mean?
It means it's time for dessert.
All right.
So then that's kind of where this idea of negative temperature is.
I think what you're saying is that some physicists, if they go by this definition,
are allowed to call things as having negative temperature, right?
So maybe like most people would say, no, that's impossible.
You can't have negative temperature.
You would say, well, it depends on who you talk to and what you mean by temperature.
Yeah, exactly.
And whether you think it even makes sense to apply temperature to these crazy bonkers, weird situations that will never arise in our universe.
So does that mean I can be a thermodynamic temperature denier, but still a regular temperature positivist?
You can be whatever you want, man.
So thanks to everybody who wrote in to ask us to talk about that tricky concept.
I hope that was useful.
Yeah, we hope you enjoyed that
and maybe made you think about
what it actually means
for something to be hot and cold.
Like maybe what we experience in our everyday lives
is just what we experience in our everyday lives.
Maybe it doesn't always apply to everything in the universe.
Thanks for joining us.
See you next time.
Thanks for listening and remember
that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe
is a production of iHeart Radio.
For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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