Is heat's velocity constant like light's?

[dirtyd33]

Since heat is a form of electromagnetic radiation, does it travel at the constant velocity of light?

 

[starthaus]

Since heat is a form of electromagnetic radiation, does it travel at the constant velocity of light?

Heat radiation in vacuum travels at c.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Since heat is a form of electromagnetic radiation

That's not what heat is.

 

[PaulS1950]

there is a difference between heat radiation and heat in an object. The object will radiate heat (in a vacuum) at c but it will disperse into its surroundings at varying speeds dependent on the thermal qualities of the substances involved.

 

[dirtyd33]

first of all vanadium you're wrong; heat is infrared, a type of electromagnetic radiation.. so emr travels constantly relative to any inertial reference body, according to special relativity. as pauls1950 stated heat travels at varying speeds depending on the bodies involved; but heat is emr, so is this not emr traveling not at c relative to reference bodies?

 

[Borek]

first of all vanadium you're wrong; heat is infrared, a type of electromagnetic radiation.

No. Radiation is one of the ways heat can be transferred, but it is not the heat itself. The sooner you realize that's correct, the better for this thread.

I have a cup of hot tea on my desk. It doesn't 'contain' infrared radiation, even if it emits it.

 

[dirtyd33]

I am operating on the premise that since emr travels constantly in vacuum and relative to any reference body, then vacuum's are present about and within every reference body. so on this ground any heat transfer is through vacuum, whether via conduction, convection, or radiation, and if it is indeed true that "it will disperse into its surroundings at varying speeds" (pauls1950), then that is emr traveling not at c relative to reference bodies. i can understand heat transferring at varied rates based on the qualities of the bodies involved, but for heat to move about bodies it must be moving through vacuum.

 

[russ_watters]

No, that's not correct. Conduction and convection really are conduction and convection. Conduction happens when molecules touch/hit each other. Convection happens when molecules move from one place to another. They are not radiation. Only radiation is infrared, so only that travels at C (as infrared radiation is a form of "light").

 

[ZapperZ]

I am operating on the premise that since emr travels constantly in vacuum and relative to any reference body, then vacuum's are present about and within every reference body. so on this ground any heat transfer is through vacuum, whether via conduction, convection, or radiation, and if it is indeed true that "it will disperse into its surroundings at varying speeds" (pauls1950), then that is emr traveling not at c relative to reference bodies. i can understand heat transferring at varied rates based on the qualities of the bodies involved, but for heat to move about bodies it must be moving through vacuum.

Your "operating premise" isn't universal, i.e. it is not the most general situation. You are focusing on ONE particular form of heat, which you should have clarified in the very beginning. Other forms of heat include the average kinetic energy of particles, which you would have come across in any lesson in thermodynamics. This isn't mediated as IR radiation but rather as the transfer of kinetic energy of particles.

If you dispute this, which is a standard definition in physics, then the impetus is on you to make exact references to support your claim.

Zz.

 

[starthaus]

Your "operating premise" isn't universal, i.e. it is not the most general situation. You are focusing on ONE particular form of heat, which you should have clarified in the very beginning. Other forms of heat include the average kinetic energy of particles, which you would have come across in any lesson in thermodynamics. This isn't mediated as IR radiation but rather as the transfer of kinetic energy of particles.

If you dispute this, which is a standard definition in physics, then the impetus is on you to make exact references to support your claim.

Zz.

Yes, I already told him this at post #2 (sigh)

 

[sophiecentaur]

To avoid this sort of confusion, Big Boys don't even use the word "Heat".
The Internal Energy of a substance is a better description - referring to the random KE of the particles in it. Hence, the Infra Red thing is not included in the oft-used term Heat. IR is just one form of energy transfer from one place to another.
Temperature is the average Energy of the particles.

 

[dirtyd33]

So you are saying that the temperature, or internal energy of a particle, is a different form of heat than infrared radiation right? You are certain that heat in one form is not equal to heat in another? You're absolutely sure it's not the very same energy of quantum particles exchanging through space between bodies? Ok.

 

[mate0]

heat is specifically the energy contained in matter because its molecules are moving internally. radiation is not a form of heat, though it is a form of energy.

 

[jrosen13]

This is one of the issues with thermodynamics specifically, where the language has to be carefully defined in terms of real things one can measure, such as the temperature of an object.

Heat that we can feel due to IR is a subjective definition, and it is not useful either. If I shine gamma rays on the object, it will definitely get hot, so for one let's debunk the IR = heat myth.

IR feels hot because it is readily absorbed by molecules and turned into vibrational energy that can be measured as an increase in temperature. But it is just light, so we can basically extend that to all other wavelengths, from radio waves to gamma rays, as long as we don't worry too much about the quantum processes that are involved to transfer energy from the electromagnetic field to the vibration of molecules. IR may be the most efficient at warming an object, but that's as far as it goes.

At the end of the day, heat takes a lot of different forms because it just describes transfer of energy from one body to another in a way that agrees with statistical probability.

 

[dirtyd33]

My knowledge grew throughout this discussion, thank you all. I still hold my reservations about certain things, but I am clearer on the difference of radiated energy and inertial energy.

"its all heat in this day and age, i rage your grave, anything it takes to save the day" - del the funkee

 

[russ_watters]

heat is specifically the energy contained in matter because its molecules are moving internally. radiation is not a form of heat, though it is a form of energy.

That's not true. From the dictionary:

Physics. a nonmechanical energy transfer with reference to a temperature difference between a system and its surroundings or between two parts of the same system.

That applies to radiated heat.

 

[sophiecentaur]

Dictionary definitions of technical terms are not necessarily to be relied on technically. They may reflect, accurately, the general usage of a term but that's another matter.

 

[russ_watters]

While that may well be true in some cases, in this case, they got it right.

 

[SpectraCat]

As others in this thread have pointed out, it is largely a question of carefully defining one's terms. However, overall I think I agree with Russ, in that one must account for radiative mechanisms when considering the processes that bring a system to thermal equilibrium. Consider a block of room temperature material ejected suddenly into space. There aren't enough molecules around for convective mechanisms in the surroundings to have any effect to cool it, yet we know it will cool. Assuming it is not a volatile material, the only mechanism for removing heat from the body that I can think of is radiation. In fact, in a cosmological sense, I guess virtually all of the "heating" and "cooling" that goes on in the universe happens radiatively.

 

[dirtyd33]

Thank you spectracat for acknowledging/ reaffirming the universal concept of energy, in the presence of vacuums, that i was getting at.

 

[ZapperZ]

Thank you spectracat for acknowledging/ reaffirming the universal concept of energy, in the presence of vacuums, that i was getting at.

But what he's saying isn't what YOU were asking. First of all, we ALL know about radiative transfer in vacuum. I know this first hand because I heat stuff in 10^-11 Torr environment. Secondly, within a solid itself, how do you say that an "atom" has "heat", if you're arguing that all the atoms in the solid are surrounded by vacuum? It doesn't? A heated material typically doesn't cause the atom any kind of energy excitation at all! What defines the collective conglomerate of atoms to have heat is how they vibrate or move about. And the ONLY means to transfer that energy from one atom to the other is via direct collision, NOT radiative transfer, even when such an atom could be argued to be surrounded by a "vacuum".

I do not see a one-size-fits-all explanation of heat transfer here. I certainly haven't seen radiative heat transfer being used in heat transport phenomenon in solids. You are welcome to examine the Boltzmann transport equation and point out to me how your assertion of such a thing can be reconciled here.

Zz.

 

[mate0]

would just like to clarify some terms, because it appears that I was not the only one mixing them up. here are some general definitions-

heat: the exchange of energy between an object and its surroundings.
temperature: the average amount of energy per unit an object has due to its atoms moving around inside it.

please feel free to correct either of these definitions if they are wrong, also could someone find a term for the total amount of thermal energy in an object?

 

[sophiecentaur]

This thread is just going nowhere.
Heat is a general, catch-all, term which, in most cases that I have come across, refers to the internal energy of an object. 'Heat'ing involves increasing the amount of internal energy - i.e. increasing in temperature.

To add confusion, I could refer readers to the three 'forms of heat' in steam engineering in the past - Sensible Heat, Latent Heat and Super Heat.

 

[russ_watters]

Yeah, you really are making this more confusing. Besides obfuscating the definition of heat itself, "superheat" is not a separate form of heat. Superheating (in steam) is adding sensible heat to saturated steam to make it hotter.

 

[sophiecentaur]

I know that. It's just that the three terms are used in Steam Engineering.

I think the term Sensible Heat smacks of a bygone age. Almost nostalgic but it was 'time for a change' as the big three were saying tonight (UK, reference) and the word Heat needed clarifying and replacing after its over and mis use.

 

[jrosen13]

I think that in this forum there is really only so much you can say before it is like writing a book on the subject. Here we can only answer specific questions, but at some point people will need to open a standard textbook on the subject and get the hard facts. If there is still questions afterward, it is certainly useful and instructive to ask them here. You will get nowhere by just thinking you can understand all of thermodynamics without measurements or calculations.

 

[dirtyd33]

...Back to the point I thought I was making. Does infrared, radiated from some source then absorbed by some body, not increase the internal energy of said body? Conduction is the collision of inertial bodies causing heat transfer. Is not absorbed infrared radiation, in adding to the internal energy of a given particle, a collision of the electromagnetic radio-wave-like particle, an inertial body in it's own right, with the larger "heat-containing" inertial body, thus increasing it's energy. Then in the presence of vacuum, the now even larger inertial body would radiate the very same heat it was using as internal energy only as emr. Making radiation absorption a "conduction" of small particle energy. Where as conduction between larger bodies is a direct transfer of the same "small particle" energy, just through direct contact of the large bodies instead of transferred across vacuum via emr. Feel free to continue stabbing at my words and picking them apart, I rather enjoy it.

dd

 

[jrosen13]

Conduction is not a microscopic idea, but a macroscopic one. These ideas were developed well before quantum mechanics ever existed, by observing large objects in contact with each other, or not in direct contact that still transfer heat.
This was understood as radiation, which was an important discovery.
One major difference between purely radiative heat transfer and conduction is that there does not need to be photons at all in the case of conduction.

 

[dirtyd33]

But this is what I am supposing, is that because absorbed infrared increases the same internal energy that is being increased via conduction that the two are roughly equivalent; that the increased internal energy of the particle is due to addition of photon masses, whether absorbed from radiation or conducted from direct contact of "macro" bodies. Zz, please don't get on my case about "overly speculative posts," I'm trying to conduct research and further my own understanding.

 

[jrosen13]

I would say that is a very crude model that doesn't explain many of the properties of conduction, for instance why does the rate of heat flow between two objects in contact depend on the pressure applied on the contact surface (and it definitely does). Why does a fairly good conductor transfer heat so much more quickly by conduction that pure radiation? It seems conduction is just fundamentally different than radiative heat transfer, and this is true at the microscopic level, since radiation should not care much about how the surfaces are pressed together at all.