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 is like fast and slow. It only has meaning in the context of a reference.
Compared to absolute zero, an ice cube could be described as warm.
Cold doesn’t exist in the same way that darkness doesn’t exist. Things are either illuminated or not. We use dark to describe an absence of light. Just like we use cold to describe the absence of heat. You can’t make darkness just like you cant make cold. But you can make light or heat. When things have no light or heat than they are dark or cold.
TLDR: you can’t add or take away darkness or cold. You can only add or take away light or heat. Darkness and cold are just the absence of light and heat.
Heat is a measurement of, basically, how much something’s molecules are moving around. The word “cold” is just a shorthand way to say “when the molecules are moving around less”, but “coldness” isn’t a value that you can measure.
It’s fine in terms of most physics, there is no cold, just absolute 0 and heat.
In terms of humans though there is obviously cold and hot but it’s not simple and not fully understood, we are thought to have 2 types of thermoreceptors, warm and cold, which respond to innocous warming or cooling and then pain receptors which respond to extreme temperatures hot or cold. But we don’t simply respond to actual temperature but rather heat flow so 20C water will feel cold while 20C air doesn’t because it conducts vastly more heat, a windy day feels colder because the moving air cools you down more, and touching a 70C piece of metal will feel painfully hot but a 2000C ceramic heatshield won’t because it transfers less heat.
NB it’s not that heat transfer out of the body feels cold and heat transfer in feels hot, 34C air feels hot, but it’s still cooler than your core so you are pumping heat out, just not as easily as the body is comfortable with so it feels hot.
It means nothing generates coldness, it can’t be created, unlike heat. You get “cold” by removing heat sources.
It’s the same as saying there is no such thing as “dark”. Dark is the absence of light the same way cold is the absence of heat.
Dark is also the absence of light in the same way. Dark is not something you can “add” you can only take away light, dark is the default state.
The countryside is the absence of a city is incorrect; because the country side is one or many things that can occupy space without being a city.
Cold is the absence of heat is not a shower thought, it is the defining factor of “cold”
Why? Well temperature is measured in how hot something is (which is energy moving around particles)
Hot refers to a physical property
Cold is just an absence of hotness because we feel things as cold when they have less energy stored as heat than what we are used to feeling.
Instead of city and countryside, think of silence and sound instead.
You can measure the loudness of sound, but you can’t measure the silenceness of something, because it is not a property by itself; it is the absence of noise.
Um, countryside is the absence of a city? The entire country was countryside until we built stuff.
Heat is the minute vibration of the atoms that make up something.
Cold is the absence of that vibration.
So, cold is the absence of heat
0 degrees kelvin – or absolute zero – is the point at which no atomic vibration occurs
0 degrees kelvin is -273 degree Celsius
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