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Does a speeding observer feel things as hotter or colder?
Soroor Pouryazdan, Babak Vakili
May 30, 2026
When you move relativistically past a hot object, does it appear hotter or colder? Three competing formulas — due to Planck-Einstein, Ott, and Landsberg — have disagreed for decades. Analyzing photon gas, ideal gas, and electron gas using the energy-momentum tensor, the authors find that effective temperature consistently rises with velocity, siding with Ott. The catch: the exact factor depends on the material, meaning temperature is observer-dependent and only fully consistent when treated as a four-vector quantity.
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