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.
In: 66
It’s like saying stillness is a lack of motion. It’s an apophatic definition, but “there is no such thing as cold” is false. It’s Kelvin 0.
Yes, as you have noticed, it is a very overly simplified and rather disingenuous statement completely void of nuance, phrased in such a way to generate the most shock value while offering the bare minimum of truth.
It’s basically conversational clickbait designed to generate controversy, then make the person who stated it sound smart by then subverting everyone’s expectations by getting off on a technicality.
*Of course* there is such thing as “cold”; and yes, it is just the absence of heat. Heat and cold are opposites, this is not a controversial statement. If you touch something colder than your body, then it’s going to feel cold.
I can’t possibly see how anyone could argue against this fact by stating “well technically it’s just the heat going from your body to the other object blah blah temperature gradient blah blah” please just stop, you are *just defining cold in a convoluted way* and admitting it exists. You can’t have one without the other.
Other similar statements are:
* “There is no such thing as darkness”, as it is just the absence of light. Yes, of course there is such thing as darkness, you can observe it quite easily. And yes, it is the absence of light. Just because you can’t have one without the other doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist.
* “Magenta is not a real color”, as it is just a combination of red and blue and does not have its own wavelength. Of course it is real, as you can easily see it; saying it’s not a real color because there’s no wavelength for it is using a very narrow and unreasonable definition of color; under the same definition, white and black aren’t real colors either, which is just absurd.
* “Money has no value”, as it is just paper that we all collectively and arbitrarily agreed has value. Yes, that’s what value means: the collective belief that something is desirable. If money doesn’t have value, then please give me all of yours. No? Didn’t think so.
Basically, if you say something like “x doesn’t exist” and immediately need to follow it up with “well I mean, of course x exists, but technically…” then you are being a smug jerk who intentionally communicates ineffectively for your own gain.
Richard Feynman put it best (I’m paraphrasing):
> It’s all just jiggling.
Atoms jiggle. More jiggling, more heat. Less jiggling, less heat. Your SO is right, OP. Sorry.
[Jiggling Atoms](https://youtu.be/NA4odJfINkE?si=b50l6p79xLu14u9j)
You should also check out the full [Fun to Imagine interview](https://youtu.be/P1ww1IXRfTA?si=qsNxaCpbxEulG6uG)
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.
“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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