Talk:Negative temperature

I do exist. I do, I do, I do!

Had to laugh. Several comments were made as to the non-existence or bee-ess-ness of this topic. I suppose it would appear a bit hard to understand to the non-physics majors amongst us (myself included). However, after reading a couple articles it is apparent that it does indeed exist but probably only in that lofty realm of quantum physics (where all bets are off for the time being). Perhaps it will be the basis of transporter devices of the future! LOL Anyhow, a few links for those pondering edits to this and related articles:

E. T. Janes' 1964 paper, Boltzmann vs. Gibbs Entropies, published in American Journal of Physics in 1965.

What is the conceptual difference between Gibbs and Boltzmann entropies?

Gibbs Entropy, Negative Energy - discussion on Physics Forum

The Thomas Oikonomou -- the Physicist not the Greek actor -- paper on Clausius vs. Boltzmann-Gibbs Entropies.

References

— Preceding unsigned comment added by JimScott (talk • contribs) 21:13, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

Please revise grammar

I can't understand this sentence at all:

> Confined point vortices are a system with bounded phase space as their canonical momenta are not independent degrees of freedom from their canonical position coordinates

StainlessSteelScorpion (talk) 23:07, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Thermodynamic equilibrum

Are these systems even in thermodynamic equilibrium? It sounds like from the descriptions that most of these will spontaneously exchange energy with additional degrees of freedom that are not being considered but will (always?) have some finite positive temperature. Is this truly a meaningful definition of temperature, or is it akin to saying v can exceed c because KE=1/2 mv^2 by disregarding the domain over which our equations are valid? And can these negative temperature values be used in a meaningful way in other thermodynamic calculations?150.203.179.56 (talk) 04:44, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

New Article

"Science News" February 9, 2013, Page 10. "Hottest temp is as negative one: New record reached with ultracold gas at high temperature" by Andrew Grant. (It's in the "In the News section".) RJFJR (talk) 20:06, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

found the online link RJFJR (talk) 20:07, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

That link is broken. 2600:1702:1DE0:8FB0:109D:7D7:8939:A1C5 (talk) 18:25, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

Gigabyte?

does anyone know why the description mentions bytes instead of bits? I don't think octets are relevant here... 2A02:A420:222:C934:8C90:9388:374B:691F (talk) 19:12, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

Let's get physical, but not too physical

Since this is both a C-Class physics article and of low importance on WP, revising it won’t be a priority to editors, but readers not well versed in physics will find it hard to fathom, as in the instance (since altered) that StainlessSteelScorpion lists above. Even the lead section suffers—or benefits, depending on one’s point of view—from this problem, perhaps especially the curious sentence, “A system with a truly negative temperature on the Kelvin scale is hotter than any system with a positive temperature.”
I can see, though, that there may be no accurate way to simplify the subject. For that matter, anyone adept enough to grasp it may not understand lay readers’ problem with it in the first place. Mucketymuck (talk) 05:00, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

I expanded the lead by including some explanation. It cannot truly explain why it is hotter (that's a task for the body), but at least indicates where the resolution lies. The rest of the text needs more work. Jähmefyysikko (talk) 07:31, 18 June 2026 (UTC)