Maximum achievable temperature/pressure

[mep]

Just as there is a absolute temperature minimum, should not there also be a maximum temperature with no physical way to exceed this?
How can this limitation be described?
If temperature can be related to atomic movement then the maximum temperature could be reached when this movement reaches the speed of light.

And as there is a minimum pressure should there not also be maximum possible pressure?
This might be limited by a value when the atoms come so close to each other that they start to touch. But what happens then? Will it be possible to compress them even more bringing them to merge into each other?
Will the atomic movement stop then?
Is this then related to very high temperature, or to cold as cold is usually related to little atomic movement?
Can the maximum achievable temperature then be limited by a maximum pressure where the atoms constantly touch each other?

[Websta]

You are more or less correct. The theorised maximum temperature achievable is defined as the Planck temperature which is around 1.4*10^32K. This temperature is approached in the dying stages of a blackhole when it rapidly radiates energy. I think the planck temperature was also produced momentarily during the Big Bang.

Atomic movement would never actually reach the speed of light though, so those conditions would never define the highest temperature achievable as you stated. Simply, the highest possible temperature is limited by the amount of available energy in the universe. Theoretically, if all the mass of the universe was converted to energy and that energy was transferred to a single particle, it would produce the highest possible temperature. Essentially the reverse of the Big Bang.

[mep]

hmm thats high.
Is there nothing else limiting the maximum achievable temperature than the pure maximum amount of energy in the universe?

And how about pressure?

[Nando]

I wonder if weird things start to happen as you reach the maximum temp like with minimum temp.

I can't remember exactly but electricity flows freely at point zero, matter will liquify and at absolute zero you basically have "free energy"

[hollus]

I'll chime in for fun, as there is no physical limit to distraction:

Those questions sound akin to "since there is a minimum positive integer, which is the maximum positive integer?". Zero, or nothing, is an abstract concept rather than a number, and in the other side you will only find infinite.

For temperatures:
Instead of thinking of atomic speeds, one should rather think of energy density, with atomic speeds being the obvious thing to measure and trade with in usual conditions in the surface of earth. If you have too much of it, you simply stop having it stored in atom velocity, and eventually you stop having atoms at all, yet one can still define temperature. If you think of it in terms of energy, it becomes obvious that the speed of light does not pose a limit.
I would also think that the total amount of energy doesn't limit you, you can always concentrate it in a smaller space, thus increasing energy density. I guess there is a limit to how small you can make that volume and quantum mechanics limit how you can confine energy, and that would define said Planck temperature (Thanks, Websta, I had never heard of it before).

For pressure:
Again there only seems to be a limit if you think of atoms, and if you think of atoms as billiard balls. Atoms are fluffy, diffuse and mostly empty space. If you increase pressure enough, you never find a hard "touching" limit, but eventually you will break them into subatomic particles and get things like neutron stars.

Nando: There is suck thing as zero drag, but there is no such thing as free energy.

[Nando]

Notice the " "..

by "free energy" i mean Thermodynamic free energy.