My wife's kiln can reach temperatures about 2000° F. Without that device, our self-cleaning oven gives us the highest temperature we can reach at 900°F.
Heat is a fascinating subject and one that comes to mind easily in the north these days. Right now, our outside temperature is 5° F but it was well below zero last night.
I watched Sean M. Carroll, the astrophysicist, talk about dark energy and dark matter in the universe and he often talked about heat as energy. I know that calculations show that "perpetual" machines often show the energy that escaped as heat, which is why they don't work.
What I found most surprising is the fact that "absolute zero" was calculated to be 273.15° below zero on the Celsius scale. That figure was arrived at by noting that a gas shrunk its volume by 1/273.15 for each 1 degree drop in the temperature. The idea has been that heat is energy of moving atomic bits and that at absolute zero, all atomic motion ceases. However, scientists report recently that they have found a way to inch a bit below absolute zero. I am not clear on the details but over time, we may be hearing more about this.
This picture show three "witness cones", none of which are conical. They all experienced the same 2000° heat in the kiln but they are made of different materials. They are shown in order of their sensitivity to that level of heat, from left to right.
We know that at certain temperatures, humans can function well but at others, they will die. One web site reports the normal human body temperature to be 97.7 to 100.4°F. Once in a while, someone outside this range survives but if your inner temperature gets outside that tiny, delicate range, expect not to.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
