Category: world's highest temperature

The highest temperature anywhere on Earth ever,  anywhere in today's universe for all I know, has been briefly inferred in the teeny fireballs of colliding particles at the US's Brookhaven National Laboratory. The Guinness World Record people are in agreement. To set the mark, the physicists banged gold nuclei into each another at near-light speed. They have a whole program devoted to smashing gold that way. This record is just a footnote. But superlatives are natural stories. They grab eyeballs (Fastest! Smallest! Densest! Farthest! Anythingest! will do). Hottest makes the A-list.

But this has the advantage of not only being cutting edge science (quark gluon soup comes...