EXTREME TEMPERATURES
Why leaving our usual range of warm and cold makes materials do strange and exciting things
Words by Andy Extance
You
might be surprised by how mindbending the idea of temperature can be, even though it’s such an obvious part of our everyday lives. Few things are as easy to imagine as the shivering cold in winter and the warming sunlight in summer. But we live within a narrow range of all the temperatures that are possible. Outside of this Goldilocks window lie hot and cold extremes where everything becomes very strange. Go cold enough and the air around us would turn solid, turning everything into a single giant brick. Go hot enough and atoms no longer hold together, creating weird states of matter that we could not survive an encounter with.