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[TheBiggerFish]

Whatever did happen with negative temperatures?

The more people talked about it the less entropic it became, then it got so stable nobody even notices it anymore.

Ha.  I meant negative Kelvin, guys.

Quantum cryptography continues stronk.

Ooh!  Cool!

[Starver]

Ha.  I meant negative Kelvin, guys.

Not Rankine, then?

(Did you know that you can't get a temperature greater than 559.73°Delisle... It's more comfortable at 120°De, though. Trust me.)

[TheBiggerFish]

Or Rankine, but in general temperatures below absolute zero...

[iceball3]

Joking aside, going below absolute zero as defined and recognized by science is a bit... Logically nonsensical?
There exist no means in our knowledge to do so mainly due to the fact that a temperature below absolute zero isn't defined at all.
To elaborate, what is temperature?
Temperature in layman's terms would basically just be the presence of non-vectored kinetic energy in a mass, we'll go with that one. As a result, energy is measured in either the presence or lacktherof of energy. However, mass, and pretty much anything insofar identified as having a mass (or really, existing) is figured to have an amount of energy. As a result, getting absolutely to absolute zero seems to be, in general, impossible, as "having energy" is something inherent to most of the stuff we're aware exists. We can get pretty close, though, but it gets harder to drop temperature as we get closer.
As energy is, as observed,  a dichotomy of the presence or lack-thereof, then we have no proof nor observational reason to believe "negative energy", whatever that may be, exists. As a result, the idea of "negative kelvin" is a bit of a logical absurdity to expect results in when negative energy has not been proven to exist.

There may be some inaccuracies, admittedly due to some lack of rigorous fact checking, but I'm pretty sure i got the main ideas correct.

[sjm9876]

Okay, my understanding of 'negative temperature' is this:
'Negative temperature' does not imply negative energy.
'Negative temperature' is achieved by super cooling a sample then putting it in a potential well. The bottom of this well is very stable, with a gradient of zero, and all the atoms can be confined there.
By instantaneously flipping this well into a hill, one can maintain this stability (top of a hill still has a zero slope) whilst having a higher energy - this is considered 'negative temperature'.

This is experimentally verified, though I haven't had more than a cursory glance at the paper to try and evaluate it in any way.

[Sergarr]

Negative temperature is a funny thing you get when you use Boltzmann equation of state probability distrubution to calculate "temperature" of certain distributions in states with upper energy bound, where the probability of states with bigger energy is more than the probability of states with lesser energy.

By that definition, negative temperature is actually bigger than literally infinite temperature, since at infinite temperature you merely get the equal probability of all states, no matter their energy.

[Putnam]

Whatever did happen with negative temperatures?

The more people talked about it the less entropic it became, then it got so stable nobody even notices it anymore.

Ha.  I meant negative Kelvin, guys.

"The more people talked about it the less entropic it became" is a negative kelvin joke. Negative kelvins happen in a system where adding energy to said system makes it less entropic.

[sjm9876]

Negative temperature is a funny thing you get when you use Boltzmann equation of state probability distribution to calculate "temperature" of certain distributions in states with upper energy bound, where the probability of states with bigger energy is more than the probability of states with lesser energy.

By that definition, negative temperature is actually bigger than literally infinite temperature, since at infinite temperature you merely get the equal probability of all states, no matter their energy.

^ This is by far the best explanation of the concept I've heard.

But yeah, it's negative temperature in a statistical thermodynamic sense (not that temperature really exists in a non-statistical sense, as a macroscopic property, but still ). From an energy perspective, negative temperatures are above absolute zero.

[TheBiggerFish]

Has anybody been doing anything with it?

[Descan]

Could probably cook a really mean steak with it.

[Starver]

So, provisionally whilst objections are awaited, row 7 is due to be completed by Nihonium (₁₁₃Nh), Moscovium (₁₁₅Mc), Tennesine (₁₁₇Ts) and Oganesson (₁₁₈Og).

(Flerovium already got proposed at 114, and Livermorium at 116, if you weren't keeping up...  )

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I will never call Elerium (₁₁₅E) by such a name.

[Frumple]

Then you should have found a way to get NASA better funding. This is what happens when you don't: The russkies beat you to looting UFOs and gets to name the fancy space materials.

[Sergarr]

So, you'd have two X-COM-like competing teams, and they would try to beat each other in who gets to loot them first, to get those sweet research boosts? But wait, wouldn't they also want to fight aliens last, to minimize casualties and expenses involved?

That sounds like an interesting idea for a game.

[miauw62]

That does sound very interesting, but I wonder how you'd pull that off in PvP... You'd essentially have to make the geoscape turn-based, and if one player decides not to do a mission but the other does, one player is left doing nothing for ten minutes.