Why do vacuums help insulate so well?

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Wouldn’t it be the opposite? Because with nothing to impede the heat dissipation, wouldn’t it dissipate faster instead of slower?

In: Physics

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Anonymous 0 Comments

When you get down to brass tacks, heat the measure of how fast molecules vibrate or move. Add heat energy to a thing and you make the molecules that compose that thing move faster. That’s what is actually happening.

Heat transfers by one molecule bouncing into another molecule. Just like a pool ball hitting another, one ball bounces off the other, slows down a bit equal to how much speed it imparts to the other ball that now starts moving. This is how heat transfers, “convection”.

If you have a bowl of cold water that’s a bowl of water molecules that are moving slowly. You also have a jug of hot water and that’s a jug of water molecules that are moving quickly. Add the jug to the bowl and the hot molecules bounce off the cold ones and impart part of their movement speed to the cold ones and the molecules start moving at the average speed of both, this is the heat equalizing.

A vacuum means there are no molecules there. If there are no molecules there, there’s nothing to bounce off. This means heat doesn’t transfer. Heat transfer is one molecule bouncing off another and averaging their speeds together, in a vacuum there are no molecules to bounce like this so heat doesn’t transfer.

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