Elon Musk's Latest Twitter Question Is Baffling Social Media UsersThe eccentric SpaceX founder left many people wondering aloud about "Carnot efficiency."

ByJustin Chan

Pool | Getty Images

Elon Muskis no stranger to social media. The 49-year-old business magnate, who has nearly 49 million followers on Twitter, shares almost everything that comes to mind, from the latest Tesla updates to random musings.

One recent tweet, however, has particularlystumped followers. On Monday, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO took to the social media platform to simply ask, "Carnot efficiency of the Universe?" — a question that, as of this writing, has been retweeted more than 5,000 times and generated in excess of 110,000 likes.

The tweet has also garnered approximately 6,000 responses, some from users who tried to make sense of Musk's inquiry.

Related:Elon Musk Is Creating a City in Texas. It Will Be Called Starbase and It Will Be Ruled by 'The Doge'

"Elon I have two very important questions," one personasked. "1. What is Carnot? 2. Does Carnot have anything to with #dogecoin?"

"I carnot understand what you're saying," anotherjoked.

At least one person, nevertheless, attempted to provide some context behind Musk's tweet by explaining what the Carnot efficiency actually is.

"For those wondering, the Carnot Efficiency is the theoretical maximum efficiency one can get when the heat engine is operating between being too hot and being too cold," the usertweeted.

In other words, the Carnot efficiency describes the optimal amount of heat that can turn into useful work when a heat engine runs in between two temperatures.

Some additional Twitter users who seemed to understand the concept offered answers to Musk's question.

"Pretty darn efficient actually," one personhypothesized. "The Big Bang had a temperature estimated at 1,000 trillion degrees C, and the universe sits at 2.73 K at a given time. So pretty much, Carnot efficiency is 0.99."

"Big Bang -> 1-(T2/T1) -> T1 was infinite," a secondsuggested. "But then again, the enclosed volume was infinitesimally small. And space expands. The entropy and temperature has been decreasing ever since. Cannot imagine Carnot being valid on the universe's scale. (The Big Crunch scenario will differ)."

Despite the influx of theories, one woman appeared to accurately capture most peoples' sentiments when she replied,"This is beyond science."

Wavy Line
Justin Chan

Entrepreneur Staff

News Writer

Justin Chan is a news writer at Entrepreneur.com. Previously, he was a trending news editor at Verizon Media, where he covered entrepreneurship, lifestyle, pop culture, and tech. He was also an assistant web editor atArchitectural Record, where he wrote on architecture, travel, and design. Chan has additionally written forForbes,Reader's Digest,Time Out New York,HuffPost,Complex, andMic. He is a 2013 graduate of Columbia Journalism School, where he studied magazine journalism. Follow him on Twitter at@jchan1109.

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