Question: Here is an actual question. What is the reasoning for not being able to reach higher than a certain temperature on Earth? I believe it is 3000+ degrees and want to know why we cannot go higher.

Camilla Weiss answered on 26 Jan 2016:

I’m not sure what you mean by being able to reach higher temperatures but if you mean can we create temperatures higher than 3000 degrees then the answer is most definitely yes! I believe the highest temperature ever produced by man is a mind blowing 4 TRILLION degrees Celsius – that’s 4,000,000,000,000 degrees C and 250,000 times hotter than the centre of the sun! This temperature was produced in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York which is basically a giant atom smasher, like at CERN – atoms are sped up to near light speed and then crashed into each other to see what kind of new particles are created. Because this temperature is hot enough to melt the protons and neutrons that make up the atoms these particles are broken down into the even smaller particles that make them up, like quarks and gluons. We can learn a lot about what our universe is made of and the forces that hold it together by doing this – as well as trying to understand what happened during the very first microseconds of the Big Bang. Hot!