Karimspencer
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For example when you make a laser , does heat come with it?
Heat is the flow of energy I thought. As in energy transfer. Temperature, as opposed to heat, is the way to quantitatively describe energy level increase in particles after heat has been transferred, so I don't think you would say light is converted to heat, but rather converted to temperature increase. Heat would be the process of light energy converted to thermal energy, or in other words heat is the amount of energy that has been transferred to thermal energy.Khashishi said:Your questions indicate that you are confused about what heat is. Heat is basically energy, but the exact definition depends on the physical context. If you get into the nitty gritty, heat is a pretty difficult subject.
Heat is energy that is more or less randomly distributed across all the degrees of freedom within a system. In typical terrestrial situations, that means most of the energy is in random kinetic motion of the molecules, as well as various vibrational and rotational modes of the molecules. For typical terrestrial situations, very little heat energy is in the form of light.
On the other hand, in a vacuum, most of the heat energy could be in the form of light, because without any other particles, photons are the main degrees of freedom of the system.
If you shine a light on something on Earth, then the light is not considered heat because it doesn't randomly occupy all the degrees of freedom of the air that it is traveling through. But, after the light is absorbed by various materials, it is converted to heat.
Not necessarily and even if it does, it wouldn't necessarily heat up in an amount equal to the light's energy. A solar panel, for example, converts some light directly into electrical energy.Karimspencer said:Okay let's say you concentrate any kind of light on an object would lt heat up russ