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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“Hot” and “cold” are both relative terms we use to describe the temperature of something. It might be easier to think in terms of “hotter” and “colder” and what that means in the physics sense. If you put your finger in a glass of water that is 100 degrees vs 50 degrees you’ll be able to determine that one is hotter/colder than the other. But what does that mean?
The glass of water consists of a bunch of water molecules in it moving around at some speed. If you compare the speed of the molecules in the hotter glass of water to the ones in the colder glass of water, you will see that the molecules in the hotter glass of water are moving around faster than those in the cold glass of water. You can say they have more energy.
Check out [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6PB7IKeHs4) of someone putting food coloring in a glass of cold and hot water. You will see that without any stirring, the food coloring in the hot water diffuses noticeably faster than that in the cold glass. This is because the hot water molecules are moving around faster, spreading the food coloring faster.
So when your SO says something along the lines of “there is no such thing is cold” I think the point they are trying to make is that when you make something cold or something feels cold, it isn’t because it possesses some attribute that makes it feel cold. To warm something up and make it hot you add more heat/energy (movement/vibrations of molecules) to it, to make something cold you take away that heat/energy.
So when you’re saying something is cold, you’re saying it has less heat/energy than something else, not that it has more of “coldness” than something else.
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