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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(Thermal energy ≠ heat, it’s a common misconception. Heat is thermal energy only during transition, so it’s incorrect to say “Cold is the absence of heat”. Cold is the absence of thermal energy.)
“Cold” is a real sensation we feel, however it’s misleading because you’re not feeling something called cold. You’re feeling a bit of the thermal energy in your body leaving you to know an object is cold. You’re feeling heat being transferred away from you. And if you feel cold, that just means you don’t have enough thermal energy for the body to like it.
Something can have a lot of thermal energy, which makes it hot. It can have not a lot of thermal energy, which makes it cold. Things can only have or not have thermal energy, it can’t have something called “cold”.
“The countryside is the absence of a city” is not quite an accurate comparison. I think more accurate comparisons could be:
* Darkness is the absence of light. You flick on a light, there’s light. You turn it off, now there’s darkness. But there isn’t actually something called darkness that is filling the room, it’s just that there isn’t any photons in the room, making you experience darkness.
* A vacuum is the absence of matter. If you go into the vacuum of space, you’ll die. So it’s definitely a real concept and a word that describes an observable thing in the world. However, it’s not like there’s a thing there called vacuum. You can have a bottle with nothing in it, you can have a bottle with air in it, but you can’t have a bottle with a substance called “vacuum” in it.
* Crimelessness is the absence of crime. You can commit crimes. You cannot commit crimelessness. The only way to be free from crime is to avoid crimes, not to have more of crimelessness. The only way to be cold is to have less thermal energy.
* Tiredness is the absence of energy. (In this case, “energy” doesn’t fit the physics definition of the word, but it’s similar in the sense that we can have energy and feel energetic and be able to do a lot of work. When we are tired, we say we don’t have a lot of energy. We don’t say we are having a ton of tiredness. We sleep to refill energy, not to have something called tiredness leave our body like an exorcist getting a demon to leave.)
I hope at least one of these examples can resonate with you.
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