How do things become hot or cold?

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How do things become hot or cold?

In: Physics

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Particle theory dictate that there is no such thing as heat, that heat is just a human perception.

The particles in hot objects have more kinetic energy, therefore they move around faster. The opposite is true for cooling things down.

Let’s say for example, we cram a large quantity of people into a box, and we push one of them. That person will hit other people, who in turn will hit other people, et cetera, et cetera, granting them kinetic energy and turning them into a grumbly mess. If we replace the people with atoms, and do the same thing, you have just applied heat.

By cooling them down, we hold one of them still while everyone’s still hitting each other from the previous experiment. They’ll collide with the person we’re holding, and he won’t hit anyone because we’re holding him still. By removing energy from the mass of people we have stopped them moving as much. If the people were atoms, we have removed heat.

TL;DR heat is just kinetic energy of individual particles.

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