mike_hawke's Shortform

mike_hawke

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In measuring and communicating about the temperature of objects, humans can clearly and unambiguously benchmark things like daily highs and lows, fevers, snow, space heaters, refrigerators, a cup of tea, and the wind chill factor. We can place thermometers and thereby say which things are hotter than others, and by how much. Daily highs can overlap with fevers, but neither can boil your tea.

But then I challenge myself to estimate how hot a campfire is, and I'm totally stuck.

It feels like there are no human-sensible relationships once you're talking about campfires, self-cleaning ovens, welding torches, incandescent filaments, fighter jet exhaust, solar flares, Venus, Chernobyl reactor #4, the anger of the volcano goddess Pele, fresh fulgurites, or the boiling point of lead. Anything hotter than boiling water has ascended into the magisterium of the Divinely Hot, and nothing more detailed can be said of them by a mortal. If I were omnipotent, omniscient, & invulnerable, then I could put all those things in contact with each other and then watch which way the heat flows. But I am a human, so all I can say is that anything on that list could boil water.

2Carl Feynman3y

The imaginary nomad in my head would describe 1,000 miles as “sixteen days ride.” That‘s humanly comprehensible. An American would say “Day and a half drive, if you’re not pushing it. You could do it in one day, if you’re in a hurry or have more than one driver.”

What's interesting about those examples is the domestication of the Horse and the mass production of the motor vehicle have changed the (intuitive?) intelligibility of distance, perhaps in a way that is not comparable to our interpretation of heat? But also that both are measured in days which implies rest and sleep.

10Carl Feynman3y

You can get a visceral understanding of high degrees of heat. You just need real-life experience with it. I’ve done some metalworking, a lot of which is delicate control of high temperatures. By looking at the black-body glow of the metal you’re working with, you can grok how hot it is. I know that annealing brass (just barely pink) is substantially cooler than melting silver solder (well into the red), or that steel gets soft (orange) well before it melts (white hot). I don’t know the actual numerical values of any of those. I still have no feeling for temperatures between boiling water and the onset of glowing, though, so I don’t know whether cooking phenolic resin is hotter or colder than melting lead. Both of them are hotter than boiling water, but not hot enough to glow.