Like, I can just rub my hands together and make them hot, but I don’t know how to make stuff colder
In: Physics
When we deal with thermodynamics, one way to define temperature is average kinetic energy.
Imagine a box with a lot of little balls bouncing around in it like a game of brick breaker. Shaking the box around will most likely increase the speed of the balls on average. To slow them down you need to be much more careful and precise – you can’t just hit them randomly.
What’s an easy way to slow them down then? Put some slower balls in the box! Over time, the fast balls will give off energy to the slow balls until they even out somewhere.
This is the phenomenon you are asking about: fast = hot and slow = cold. Almost every interaction that isn’t fine tuned will add heat to the system and raise the temperature. Lowering it requires either a fine tuned process or using a colder material to reach equilibrium in a temperature mid point.
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