It’s an interesting question, but a bit vague. Even at room temperature, relatively needs to be considered for the motion of electrons.
You’re probably thinking about bigger stuff though. The short answer is that temperature is unbounded so yes, there is a temp at which it is significant for the motion of all particles. I think inside of stars this can happen, but my knowledge jn that area is pretty limited.
Veritassium has a recent video about some of this that you may find interesting if you haven’t already seen it.
Temperature is a measure of kinetic energy at the molecular/atomic level. That said, the gasses falling into a black hole would likely reach such hypothetical temperatures as they near the event horizon.
Not necessarily. In fact, it’s possible for gravity at the event horizon to be less than Earth’s gravity.
How?
Gravity at the event horizon is inversely related to the mass of the black hole. So for a supermassive black hole, gravity at the event horizon can be weak. But you still can’t escape because it’s too large.
Imagine light trying to escape the Earth’s gravity. Its path is slightly deviated by the Earth, then it gets far enough away that the Earth has little further effect.
Now suppose at that distance, it still experienced the same gravity. So the trajectory of light is deviated a little more. It keeps moving farther away but gravity barely changes, even at huge distances. Eventually all those little deviations add up and it’s going back where it came from. Light can’t escape. It’s a black hole.
I see what you mean… I think. Let’s see if I can be more specific:
Considering that time slows down for particles moving near lightspeed, I was trying to visualize the universe immediately after the Big Bang, if it being so hot - or energetic, I think I mean to say - made time slow down in the entire, still tiny universe. And what effect this may have possibly had in the outcome we observe today.
Surely time had also only just sprung into being so shortly after the big bang? If “everything” was moving near C, there was no “other” time to be relative to?
Yeah… what are the dynamics of such an extreme moment? How does a moment like that unfold from the perspective of a particle that was there?
Does time “start slow” before reaching the “stable rhythm” we experience today?The fact that I felt compelled to use quotes twice in the previous sentence betrays the fact that I don’t even know how to ask what I’m trying to ask.
I suspect you may be misunderstanding time dilation. From the perspective of a particle, time always passes by at 1 second per second. If you yourself were to travel at relativistic speeds (relative to, say, Earth) your perspective of time wouldn’t change at all. However, observers on Earth would see your “clock” to tick slower. That is, anything you do would progress more slowly from their perspective. In the very early Universe, a given particle would see most other particles moving at relativistic speeds, and so would see their “clocks” tick slower. These sorts of relativistic effects would influence interactions between particles during collisions, decay rates, etc, but are all things we know how to take into account in our models of the early Universe.
I think these are all excellent questions, but to my limited knowledge they haven’t been answered yet. I think these are all active areas of research in cosmology.
They are fun to wonder about though. If you have a deep interest maybe check out your library or bookstore. Once in a while scientists in these fields will write a book about their work in these areas.
The way I understand it, (which is virtually not at all really!) there is no overall universal time or background clock like a force field of time or “stable rhythm” that everything experiences. But every observer experiences its own time, relative to whatever point of reference is used.
This is where my meager brain fully melts down…
If everything is moving through spacetime, the faster through space, relative to C, the slower you travel through time, the slower through space, the faster through time.
So if every particle is moving away from each other equally at C, from each ones perspective it’s own time is slowed to 0, so now everything is eternally rushing away from everything else with no time passing.
Now my reasoning and vocabulary fail completely tbh,
Veritassium has a recent video about some of this that you may find interesting if you haven’t already seen it.
Are you referring to the one titled Something Strange Happens When You Follow Einstein’s Math.
Yes, that’s the one. Not exactly the same topic as the original question, but related.
We are talking of relativity, so something related should be fine.
Veritassium ignores a bunch of stuff in that video and hand-waves it away.
I only hear about his videos from other, better channels that correct his mistakes. He’s dead to me ever since that “faster than light” electricity video where he didn’t once use the word induction and made it sound super mystical. Fuck that guy with a thousand meters of wire.
Here’s the video I saw on it. Anyone watching the Veritassium video should watch this after:
Or better yet, find a different video on the relativistic movement of electrons and electron holes in wires, and how it causes magnetism. I don’t have one handy.
It’s a really bad sign when half of his videos need corrections by other channels. Sure, you could say they’re just riding on his popularity, but the fact that he needs corrections is the problem.
The video you linked summarizes the intent and benefit of Veritasium videos at about the 2:25 mark, stating that they are for a general audience. I agree that Veritasium isn’t perfect, and doesn’t provide complete depth, but they do a good job of creating interest in topics. So they accomplish their goal.
Additionally, the video you linked is wrong about the principles it discusses. The drift and diffusion velocity (group velocity) of electrons and holes is small compared to the speed of light. The relativistic effects discussed are caused by the phase velocity, which will be closer to the speed of light in the medium for even small currents.
Edit: originally, I incorrectly worded the last sentence which implied that the electrons and holes had a phase velocity equal to the speed of light. I hope the statement is more clear now, but I’m happy to provide additional clarification if necessary.
Kugelblitzes might (theoretically) be a thing…
To wit, a sufficiently dense concentration of heat, light, or radiation could produce an event horizon similar to that of a black hole, which definitely would count as a noticeable relativistic effect.
There are places in the universe that are so hot that weird things start to happen. Like the core of Jupiter could be a giant hard hydrogen crystal or in the center of suns where lighter chemicals fuse into heavier ones. Or my favorite, the temperature of the early universe which may have contributed to hyper inflation which would constitute what you refer to as “relativistic effects”.
In terms of noticing them we have detected the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Based on one of your comments clarifying what you’re wondering, I don’t know that this helps you in what you’re looking for, but the “OMG particle” came to my mind. It was traveling at such high energy when it hit our atmosphere that…
If the proton originated from a distance of 1.5 billion light years, it would take approximately 1.71 days in the reference frame of the proton to travel that distance.
…
The energy of the particle was some 40 million times that of the highest-energy protons that have been produced in any terrestrial particle accelerator.
…
In the center-of-mass frame of reference (which moved at almost the speed of light in our frame of reference), the products of the collision [with a particle in our atmosphere ] would therefore have had around 2900 TeV of energy, enough to transform the nucleus into many particles, moving apart at almost the speed of light even in this center-of-mass frame of reference. As with other cosmic rays, this generated a cascade of relativistic particles as the particles interacted with other nuclei.
I don’t know if that cascade is the same as the Cherenkov radiation it produced, but that radiation is how they detected this particle, and it’s interesting a.f.
[It is] emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through a dielectric medium (such as distilled water) at a speed greater than the phase velocity (speed of propagation of a wavefront in a medium) of light in that medium. … Its cause is similar to the cause of a sonic boom…
I.e., (layman’s understanding here) the particle, having a dual particle- and wave-like nature, is propagating through the vacuum of space “close” to the max speed of propagation of causality itself. As it encounters a medium, our atmosphere, it is going faster than causality itself can possibly propagate through that medium. But the energy is still there and isn’t going to just vanish, so it has to split out into multiple particles that would, with their fraction of the original energy, then be able to propagate through the medium. Or something amazing like that?Edit: My layman’s understanding of Cherenkov radiation requires a bigger disclaimer, like a strike-through. :)
I have never heard that causality slows down in a medium. I understand the use of “speed of causality” to refer to the speed of light in a vacuum, and while I’m aware that light slows down in air, water, etc I’m not sure it has ever been shown that causality itself slows down. My understanding is that also light slows down just because it’s captured and re-emitted by other particles. Though I would be happy to learn something new if my understanding is wrong.
That said, the OMG particle stuff was very interesting, thank you for sharing.
Good point, I think you’re right. I’ve probably been making an unsupported leap in logic there.
The required temperature depends on the mass of the particles you’re considering. You could say photons are always relativistic, so even the photon gas that is the cosmic microwave background is relativistic at 2.7 K. But you’re presumably more interested in massive particles.
If you apply the kinetic theory of gases to hydrogen, you’ll find that the average kinetic energy will reach relativistic levels (taken to be when it becomes comparable to the rest mass energy) around 1012 K. For the free electrons (since we’ll be dealing with plasmas at any sort of relativistic temperatures), this temperature is around 109 K due to the smaller mass of the electron. These temperatures are reached at the cores of newly-formed neutron stars (~1012 K) [1] and the accretion disks of stellar-mass black holes (~109 K) [2], but not at the cores of typical stars. Regarding time dilation, an individual particle’s clock would tick slower from the perspective of an observer in the center-of-mass frame of the relativistic gas, but I don’t think this would have any noticeable effect on any of the bulk properties of the gas (except for the decay of any unstable particles). Length contraction would probably affect collision cross-sections, though I haven’t done any calculations for this to say anything specific. One important effect would be the fact that the distribution of speeds would follow a Maxwell–Jüttner distribution instead of a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, and that collisions between particles could be energetic enough to create particle-antiparticle pairs. This would affect things like the number of particles in the gas, the relationship between temperature and pressure, the specific heat of the gas, etc.
You mention the early history of the Universe in your other comment. You can look through this table on Wikipedia to see the temperature range during each of the epochs of the early Universe, as well as a description of what happened. The temperatures become non-relativistic for electrons at some point during the photon epoch.
There’s also a Planck temperature, which is the highest we can currently predict in the Standard Model - that’s the temperature at which thermal radiation is at the highest possible energy
