temperature

Exhaled air is warm and close to saturated with water vapor. When it mixes into cold air, the mixture cannot hold all of that vapor, and a small cloud of liquid droplets appears.

Send ChatGPT the same message twice within five minutes and you will likely receive two distinct responses. The wording differs, the examples change, sometimes the conclusions shift. This is not a bug, and it is not the model lying — it is the intended consequence of probabilistic sampling, a deliberate design choice that trades consistency for coverage. Understanding why requires a look at how language models generate text one token at a time.

In 2021, physicists at the University of Bremen cooled a cloud of rubidium atoms to 38 picokelvin — 38 trillionths of a degree above absolute zero — the coldest temperature ever recorded in a laboratory. At the opposite extreme, the ALICE experiment at CERN produced quark-gluon plasma at 5.5 trillion kelvin in 2012, the hottest temperature ever achieved by human hands. Above both records, the Planck temperature — 1.416 × 10^32 kelvin — marks the point where physics itself breaks down. Between these endpoints, the temperature scale encompasses every phenomenon in the universe, from interstellar clouds barely above nothing to the supernovae that forge heavy elements.

Temperature, top-p, top-k, and min-p control how LLMs sample text. Learn what each does, when to use which, and provider defaults for 2026.

Charles discovered that gases expand proportionally with temperature (at constant pressure). His law, combined with Boyle's, unified gas behavior mathematically.

How systematic gas property measurements revealed fundamental relationships in chemistry

Mars air is roughly 160 times thinner than Earth's, and its temperature swings by more than 50 degrees in a day. Here is what rovers measure and why it matters.