It's easy to understand the theoretical minimum temperature: absolute zero. . The absolute maximum, on the other hand, is squirrely. "We just don't know whether we can take energy all the way up to infinity," says Stephon Alexander, a physicist at Dartmouth University. "But it's theoretically plausible," The most straightforward candidate for an upper limit is the Planck Temperature, or 142 nonillion (1.42 × 1032) Kelvin (K)-the highest temperature allowable under the Standard Model of particle physics. But temperature comes about only when particles interact and achieve thermal equilibrium, Alexander explains. "To have a notion of temperature, you need to have a notion of interaction."
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