Note: This article was originally published on astroibrahim on April 17, 2013.

Yes.

A few days back, a friend shared an article with me. It talked of how scientists had managed to achieve temperatures below absolute zero. Does it mean that temperature has to be redefined? Has our understanding of thermodynamics been flawed for the past hundred years. No, it turns out. It is all a matter of semantics.

Absolute Zero. This is the temperature at which a particle has the minimum possible energy. The energy is NOT zero because that would violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (that you cannot know the energy and its duration with absolute certainty). However that zero-state energy is a quantum quantity, so for all intents and purposes, the particle itself appears stationary. Classically, it is impossible to go below absolute zero because for all the matter that we know of, it will never have negative energy (because the zero state energy prevents energy from going past zero and into the negative).