those gold/silver emergency blankets: do they really work, and how?
In: 3859
Going to focus on the LI5 part because there are very good explanations already.
Sometimes shiny things only bounce light back, that’s why they look shiny. But in this case the shiny blanket can also reflect heat back.
Imagine if we could see heat with our eyes like we can perceive light around us, turns out that’s kind of how heat works and it’s called infra red light. If you had infra red vision and you looked at a campfire it would be a very bright light in the normal vision we already have AND in infra red.
Emergency blankets are shiny to this invisible heat/infra red light too! They bounce both the invisible infra red and visible light and in this way. So, if you take the blanket and wrap it around yourself the heat our bodies put out normally will be bounced back and the blanket will keep it from escaping, which keeps us warm.
Something really neat about this shiny property is it also keeps out the cold to a lesser degree. Cold things look different in infra red than hot things but it is visible in infra red too, so the shiny blanket works both ways. It bounces back heat from one side where we are, and it bounces cold away on the outside.
Latest Answers