The Color of Infinite Temperature

The generalization of this is the Planckian locus:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Planckian_locus" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Planckian_locus</a><p>That&#x27;s the image of the temperature range (0,∞), mapped to the corresponding blackbody color in chromaticity space. The limit T -&gt; ∞ is a point discontinuity near the center of CIE space.

I have just computed the colour and find slightly different value, i.e. computed [154, 181, 255] vs article [148, 177, 255]. Here is a Google Colab Notebook that has the colour for 10^200 along with comparisons with a blackbody:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;colab.research.google.com&#x2F;drive&#x2F;1Oyn913zkXYB8Uf8k1hiM8_5gifuMVqta?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;colab.research.google.com&#x2F;drive&#x2F;1Oyn913zkXYB8Uf8k1hi...</a>

weird, several years ago i had a dream i had entered some kind of device that started to accelerate me towards the speed of light, and at the end of it i came to a point where it reached &#x27;infinity&#x27; and it was like the most electric intense thing i had ever experienced, and i made a webpage to try and recreate and document what i remembered, and the color is almost exactly the same (strobe &#x2F; flashing gif warning) <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jollo.org&#x2F;LNT&#x2F;public&#x2F;dream.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jollo.org&#x2F;LNT&#x2F;public&#x2F;dream.html</a>

I can&#x27;t help being reminded of the passage in the book of Revelation where John describes the throne room of God, and he notes &quot;a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald&quot;.<p>That&#x27;s a little hard to imagine, because a rainbow contains a full spectrum of colours, whereas an emerald usually has a single colour, so some translations interpret the rainbow as being like the shine&#x2F;gleam&#x2F;glow of an emerald. But the idea that at infinite energy a spectrum might be perceived to human eyes as a single bluish hue is a nice thought, like the coincidence(?) that this colour happens to look like a clear summer&#x27;s sky.<p>Anyway, for comparison, here&#x27;s an image from Wikipedia of a synthetic emerald:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:SyntEmerald_0302.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:SyntEmerald_0302.jpg</a>

&quot;Perano&quot; is a terrible name. Some far better alternatives:<p>- neutronium<p>- catastrophic violet<p>- Rayleigh-Blue-Jeans

Is it just white? All I see is a white box as the color, though the text says otherwise.

Baez is also a noted category theoretician - I need to get around to reading <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;chapter&#x2F;10.1007%2F978-3-642-12821-9_2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;chapter&#x2F;10.1007%2F978-3-642-12821-...</a>, where he claims to find the conceptual framework unifying analogies behind physics, topology, logic, and computation. Discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15423027" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15423027</a>

“Perano” really sounds like it could be the name of some Italian village... oh wait: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Perano" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Perano</a>

&gt; gamma rays of arbitrarily high frequency<p>What a delightfully, understatedly terrifying phrase.

&gt; And according to the experts who sip latte all day and make up names for colors, this color is called ‘Perano’<p>Unexpectedly salty coming from a pure mathematician! But maybe it&#x27;s just professional jealousy of a field that comes up with <i>new</i> terms regularly? ;)

If 0 Kelvin means object particles at complete stop and &gt;0K meaning particles moving at a certain speed, shouldn&#x27;t infinite temperature be impossible, since no particle can move faster than the speed of light?

Wouldn&#x27;t infinite temperature object emit infinite amount of energy at all wavelengths, making the spectrum (and color) ill-defined?

Looks like the frame color of a C64 screen.

Considering that temperature is related to how agitated are the particles of a material and that there is a limit of how fast something can move (speed of light); doesn&#x27;t it imposes an upper limit on the temperature?<p>I mean, replacing v_rms by c in equation 3 in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chem.libretexts.org&#x2F;Bookshelves&#x2F;Physical_and_Theoretical_Chemistry_Textbook_Maps&#x2F;Supplemental_Modules_(Physical_and_Theoretical_Chemistry)&#x2F;Physical_Properties_of_Matter&#x2F;States_of_Matter&#x2F;Properties_of_Gases&#x2F;Kinetic_Theory_of_Gases&#x2F;Connecting_Gas_Properties_to_Kinetic_Theory_of_Gases" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chem.libretexts.org&#x2F;Bookshelves&#x2F;Physical_and_Theoret...</a> gives us an upper limit for the temperature of a gas, right?

The general concept is correct but there are a few issues with the article:<p>- Specific RGB values always depend on a selected white balance temperature. If the WB temp is the same as the object&#x27;s temp it would be white, not blue. If the WB temp were higher than the object&#x27;s temp it would appear red.<p>EDIT: the article does say sRGB which implies a 6500K wb.<p>- &quot;infinitely hot&quot; is not physically possible. The Neutron star example is fine, that temp would be around 10^12 K<p>At that temperature virtually all of the emission would be in gamma rays, but emission in the visible spectrum would not be zero. Blue wavelengths would be stronger than green, which would be stronger than red so the color would appear Blue for any &quot;normal&quot; white balance temp (like 5500 K).

Boy am I glad to see this color!<p>I was writing a black hole simulator, and needed to figure out the color shift of the stars as one approaches the black hole. The calculation gave me this blue at the one end of the spectrum which was very underwhelming tbh. For some reason I always though this color would be either 0xffffff, or some deep blue. Glad that my calculation is finally confirmed to be right!

It looks a similar colour to Cerenkov radiation. How similar? Is that a coincidence?

Converting wavelength to sRGB is remarkably difficult. The conversion used here doesn&#x27;t look quite right (see for example the sodium D lines), but I have never been able to figure out how to do much better.

For once, a good article. Short, clear, to the point. Thank you, author.

I haven’t seen the math for the conversion of the article but typically the conversion from CCT to xy&#x2F;uv are given for a particular domain. One of the conversion with the largest domain, i.e. Ohno m, covers domain [1000K, 100000K]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;colour-science&#x2F;colour&#x2F;blob&#x2F;develop&#x2F;colour&#x2F;temperature&#x2F;ohno2013.py" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;colour-science&#x2F;colour&#x2F;blob&#x2F;develop&#x2F;colour...</a><p>Infinity is very much in extrapolation territory.

Microsoft should change their BSOD screen background color to this.

Can someone explain this to me with undergraduate level math?

<i>So, for an extremely hot blackbody, the spectrum of light we can actually see with our eyes is governed by the Rayleigh–Jeans law.</i><p>This doesn&#x27;t make sense to me. If we&#x27;re talking about what color our eyes would see, all our cones would be 100% saturated. Correct me if I&#x27;m wrong, but we would still perceive that as white regardless of where the spectrum peak is.

I&#x27;ve always felt that temperature is one of the quantities what was wrongly defined. As a consequence, It&#x27;s working against you in most of the thermodynamics formulas. A better concept would have been (1&#x2F;T).

It looks like the blue equivalent of pink. But what is that, Periwinkle?

decent. I&#x27;m curious what it would be for a human tetrachromat (likely female) seeing in r4 space. Sadly, I can never know.

Nice to know when it hits

how about the color of negative temperatures?

Visited (from safari and chrome) on iPhone, it looks like entirely white [1]. It appears as the correct bluish colour on desktop. Might be just me. No idea why.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Bp1AW3u.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Bp1AW3u.png</a>