My SO said the above statement and gave me an explanation “Cold is the absence of heat or energy”, it does make sense however in my head it is like saying (in very simplistic terms) “the countryside is the absence of a city” and that is just a ridiculous statement.
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It is true that “cold” is not really the presence of something and just the absence of heat, but that hardly makes it unique.
Darkness works the same for light. Darkness and shadows are not defined by the presence of something, but by the absence of something: light.
Silence is the absence of noise.
It is not uncommon for humans to treat the absence of something that is commonly there as if it was the presence of something.
From normal every day experience it almost feels as if shadows, cold or silence should be things rather than the absence of things and in some cases we can actually treat them like, but at some point the idea breaks down.
Fundamentally there are no particles or rays of cold. Cold is not something that you can create more of by adding something.
You can only create cold by taking away heat and moving the heat somewhere else. This might look at first glance a lot like adding cold, but it really isn’t.
One of the most obvious clues that these absence of things are different than presence of things is that there is a limit to them.
You can always make things hotter or brighter (and to a degree louder), but you can’t always add cold or darkness or silence.
At some point you reach a point when there is no more heat to take away to make things colder and you have reached absolute zero, when there is no more light to block and it is just complete darkness and when there is no sound left at all and you have complete silence.
For your example with the city and the countryside a better comparison could be the definition of “Wilderness” which officially means according to Wikipedia:
>Wilderness or wildlands (usually in the plural) are natural environments on Earth that have not been significantly modified by human activity, or any nonurbanized land not under extensive agricultural cultivation.
It is defined by the absences of man made structures like cities, roads, buildings or farmland etc
It is another of those things that is defined by the absence of something.
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