I’ve seen hot food get cooler when left out, and I’ve seen cold food get warmer when left out. Would it be possible for warm food to get cooled, and then warmed back up just from being left out?
In: Physics
Temperature is the idea that energy is within a given object. If there is a large amount of energy within an object, its gonna want to spread all over the place. This concept is called equilibrium. Imagine a bunch of pingpong balls in a box. If you place two pingpong balls on top of each other, the top one is gonna roll off and go somewhere else inside the box. Now imagine you drop 100 pingpong balls into a box. The balls are going to spread out evenly and stacks up. Now think about the number of pingpong balls as energy, the height the balls stack up to as temperature. If you had a very hot potato for example, this would be like you putting a bunch of pingpong balls on top of each other. These balls are gonna roll off of the top and balance out dropping the height of the energy tower therefore dropping your temperature of the potato. Now imagine you pulled out icecream from your fridge. This is like you having a bunch of pingpong balls stacked up high and putting a giant hole in the middle. Those balls are going to rush to the center to equalize the height therefore raising the temperature of the icecream and pulling energy away from nearby sources. One thing to note here is that coldness is not real. There is only the lack of energy, therefore the lack of temperature.
Long story short, if object cold and outside air hot, cold object becomes hot. If object hot, and ambient temp cold, object becomes cold.
There is no* situation where an object can get colder in a hot room and vice versa. The reason I put an asterisk next to the “no” is because of entropy can technically cause all molecules to stop moving randomly, but that just won’t happen in real life.
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